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Surgery Beats Splints For Carpal Tunnel
Rio writes: "A local6.com article tells us about a study that suggests surgery may be more effective than splints for treating carpal tunnel syndrome. In the study, 87 patients underwent open carpal tunnel release surgery, in which ligaments surrounding the median nerve are cut to relieve pressure on the nerve, compared to 89 patients who wore a splint for their wrists, which reduced movement. The researchers found that the surgery left 80 percent of patients significantly improved after three months. Splints left only 54 percent significantly improved."
Funny this article should appear today, last night I couldn't get to sleep because of a really sharp, throbbing pain in my wrist.
Does anybody use ergonomic keyboards at home or work? Which ones are the most recommended? I had a Microsoft ergonomic keyboard at work and thought it worked fairly well. In particular, I was hoping to get some feedback on the Kinesis Contour keyboard. It's way more expensive ($239 to start) than the Microsoft keyboards so I wanted to see if anybody had success with it (or even liked typing with it since it is so different) before I purchased one.
Oh, and does anybody use the Dvorak layout?
According to the JAMA article that this data comes from, and my own searches of Pubmed, there's only been one randomized trial with surgery, and that was also comparing vs splinting. There have been few rigorous studies of the effectiveness of 'conservative' treatments like splinting. I'm pretty surprised by this! My understanding is the surgery actually fixes the problem (at least for strictly defined carpal tunnel syndrome, where the pinched nerve is in the wrist) since the ligament that is pressing into the nerve is actually cut back. To cite a personal example, my mom had carpal tunnel way back in the late 70s when no one had heard of it and has been fine since she got the surgery in about 1980. I think it's very very rare to have repeated surgical treatment.
It also occurs to me that if one was drowning, yelling "Help! I'm drowning and I lost my bikini top" would probably be m
From my own experience (and everyone else that I've shared this with) taking Manganese works better than anything else out there. The medical logic behind it is that it will strengthen the ligaments, which will then hold the tunnel in a more open and rounded position, relieving the pressure that causes the problem. You know, solve the problem not the symptoms and all that. My personal (and definitely non-medical-professional, after all I don't even play a doctor on television) suggestion is that you go out and get a bottle of Manganese (NOT Magnesium, Manganese is a little harder to find but any health food/vitamin store should have it) and take twice whatever they say is the suggested dosage for the first week or so and than just take the regular dose every day after that. It'll probably cost you less than $10 to give this a shot.