When I started my therapy consulting business, I wrote all my reports by hand. This put a lot of stress on my hands and actually caused tendonitis in my wrist. I felt excruciating pain at the base of my thumb and all the way through my forearm to my elbow. My doctor told me to stop working on the computer and to rest. He also said that he might need surgery to heal it properly. There was no way I was going to go under the knife. And there was no way I could stop writing for long; after all this was my livelihood at stake.
Not only did my pain interfere with my work, but it also caused me to stop lifting weights and stop doing yoga poses that required weight bearing on my hands. I just couldn’t accept all this disruption to my work and exercise life, so I set out to do something about it, without surgery!
First of all, I relaxed while typing and exercising to rest my hand (this also helped my back, but that’s another story). As any good therapist would do when the pain started, I applied ice to my wrist for about 5-10 minutes. twice daily. A nifty little trick is to take a piece of ice and rub it hard on the sore area; I learned this advice from a fellow therapist friend. It actually gets the ice into the tissues much more effectively than just using an ice pack. I also took an anti-inflammatory medication to reduce pain and swelling.
Second, I did some research and came up with some hand and wrist exercises to gently stretch the sore areas. This eased some of my pain and started me further down the road to recovery.
I found a simple, flexible rest splint that I could wear at night and could also wear when writing. This allowed me to work.
The next area to address was my exercise program. At first I couldn’t bear any weight on my wrist without a lot of pain. I adapted yoga poses where I could and this helped. Then I located some padded protective training gloves that I still use not only for yoga poses like Down Dog, but also for holding weights in my hands during weight training. These strategies helped me get back to exercising without pain and without further damage to my wrists.
With these simple strategies, my hands have healed steadily, allowing me to resume work and physical activities, all without surgery.
