Strength buys you years.

Anyone with existing neck pain who is treating a laptop stand as the fix. For symptomatic office workers, the intervention with actual meta-analytic support is neck and shoulder strengthening exercise, not workstation adjustment. Skip this too if you would be buying an expensive monitor arm on the promise of pain relief — the posture change is real, the pain relief is not established, and a stack of books plus a $25 keyboard delivers the same measured effect. Also not a substitute for addressing workload, task variation and time-on-screen, which is where the prospective evidence actually points.

• No trial has shown that raising the screen reduces neck pain. The evidence is that it reduces neck flexion angle and neck-extensor muscle activity — a mechanism, not an outcome. The Cochrane review's single workstation-adjustment trial found no effect on pain or discomfort at all.
• The strongest direct study of this exact setup (riser plus external keyboard) used 20 healthy young men doing two eight-minute sessions per condition. A quarter of an hour cannot tell you anything about a symptom that develops over months, and an all-male sample of healthy young volunteers does not represent the people who actually have neck pain.