Year One, Clear Wins For Pain Relief

Chapters

• 0:00 Year Milestone And Coaching News
• 0:36 Disclaimer And Care Principles
• 2:16 Ulnar Nerve And Funny Bone Facts
• 4:15 Carpal Tunnel And Scar Care
• 5:37 Guyon’s Canal And Mouse Setup
• 6:18 Arthritis: Heat In Morning, Cold Later
• 8:05 Practical Cold Techniques
• 8:25 Share, Subscribe, And Closing

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:04

Welcome back to the Hand to Shoulder Solution, giving pain the middle finger. I'm your host, Carl Petito. I'm an occupational therapist and a board certified hand therapist specializing in the rehabilitation of orthopedic conditions affecting the fingertips through the shoulder. Today we're filming a very special episode. It's our 52nd weekly episode marking one year of the hand-to-shoulder solution. How years go by. I'm excited to announce that coming up this January, I am starting coaching calls for guidance. We can meet online to discuss any problems that you might be having that might be causing pain from the fingertips through the shoulder. Not treatment or treatment advice, but information. I've been experiencing a lot of patients who have been writing in and contacting me about conditions that have been going on for years. And I occasionally see patients in the office who have been dealing with quote-unquote mystery orthopedic problems causing pain over the years. They've been to several different facilities and getting a lot of different answers. And I've been very good over the years at unraveling a lot of the mystery and getting down to what the most likely cause would be. So my goal is to point you in the right direction. Starting in January, you'll be able to go to carlpatito.com, that's carlpatito.com to access the calendar to schedule your meeting with me online. The only fee is a donation and the amount that you feel is appropriate based on the value of our coaching call. Now, what I'd like to do for this episode is review some basic principles that I presented over the past year. Remember, this is not treatment. Nothing should ever replace your in-person visit with your healthcare practitioner. That's very important. You need to be thoroughly evaluated and assessed. And there's a lot of things that can be causing one problem, and that needs to be figured out more often than not in person. Now, there's four four things I want to talk about right now. The first thing is the funny bone. The funny bone is actually not a bone. If you ever quote unquote hit your funny bone, you feel a zinger or a quick stabbing, shooting, almost electrical pain that goes down the small finger side of your forearm, wrist, and hand, it's actually the ulnar nerve. So nerves do not like pressure on them. For example, when you cross your leg and your foot goes to sleep, that's pressure on a nerve. So if you're having numbness or tingling on the pinky side of your hand, most likely it's coming from pressure on this nerve. And if you're having aching and numbness and tingling, for example, some neurological symptoms on the inside part of your elbow, do not rub that or put pressure on that. Occasionally I have patients come in and they're sitting telling me about this and they're rubbing the elbow. And I ask them, Do you rub that occasionally? Yes, all the time. And have your symptoms been getting worse? Yes. When something is sore, it's our natural tendency to want to rub it and make it feel better. For some things, that does that does work for some other conditions. However, anything that's dealing with nerve pressure, we cannot have pressure because it's actually an entrapment syndrome where the nerve is trapped in the tunnel that it travels through. And choking that off causes symptoms. Same as carpal tunnel syndrome. In the carpal tunnel, that nerve is compressed. It causes numbness and tingling over a different area of the body. So our wiring system, the nerves, they simply plug into various parts of our body. Now, a common exercise is planks, and I have patients come in who've been doing a lot of planks, and they're resting on their forearms on the floor, and they end up coming out and resting on the inside part of the elbows, smoking off that nerve and causing a lot of neurological symptoms. A quick little easy trick is to take a towel and put it on the floor and then rest your forearm on the towel so there's nothing but air on your elbow. And that will relieve the pressure and make the problem go away. Also, any armrest on your chair, resting on the armrest that that causes that syndrome. And also, back to the towel, when you're resting on the furniture at home, you can just put the towel underneath your forearm and they'll take the pressure off that. But never any rubbing. And also a great way to ice it because you don't want pressure on there. You wouldn't want to put an ice pack. You just stick under cold running water, have it run over the inside part of your elbow, and that gets it deeply cold without putting pressure on it. Cold shrinks, that will shrink down your inflammation. The next thing, let's go back to the carpal tunnel. So, carpal tunnel syndrome, same thing. You don't want to lean on the nerve. This is a different nerve, it's called the median M-E-D-I-A-N nerve. And you don't want to lean, rub, press on that. Again, I have patients come in and they're sitting in front of me, they're talking about how their wrist aches, they're sitting there rubbing it. What are they doing? They're putting pressure on the nerve. And I also have patients who are told after a carpal tunnel release surgery to rub that scar. But what are we doing? We're putting pressure on the nerve again. There's other really nice techniques that we do in the clinic to soften the scar, flatten the scar, do what's called the scar maturation techniques without rubbing it, without pressure on the nerve. One thing we do is ultrasound, and that's also explained on some of the previous videos. Number three is called Guy's canal, and that's lives right next to the door to the carpal tunnel. That's on the peaky side. So resting, for example, if you're using a mouse of your computer and you end up resting on the picky side of your wrist, that's on Guyon's canal. And that very often leads to numbness and tingling on the small finger side of the hand. And just bringing that mouse to the edge of the desk allows your wrist to be hanging off the edge with nothing but air on it. So when I'm at my desk at the office, I take great care to use my mouse here, then I have no pressure on my wrist. Arthritis. I want to end with arthritis. Use of heat, like a heating pad or red light therapy, which we discussed in other videos, is good to open the vessels, bring more blood. Why is more blood important? Blood carries oxygen and nutrients to the joints. We can use that in the morning. When is your inflammation going to be at its lowest point? That's going to be first thing in the morning because you've been resting all night. And you'll notice that when you get up in the morning, your joints will be very stiff and tight. Resist the urge to force them to get moving. They'll wake up on their own as the day goes on. The time to use heat is first thing in the morning. Then you will not have the risk of increasing inflammation because your inflammation is naturally at its lowest point already, first thing in the morning. During the day, use your hands, they're using them, aggravating them, increasing your inflammation. That's when you want to use cold. One of the most effective techniques is to use cold running water over the inflamed, irritated joints, only until deeply cold, which should be 10 to 20 seconds. Studies have proven that that is more effective than an ice pack for 10 minutes. It's rare in life that something easier and quicker and more effective is better. So, this is one of those instances. Also, sometimes I have folks just keep a Tupperware or some kind of container in their refrigerator full of water. They take it out, lay their wrist and hand in it, deeply cold. Done. It's that easy. Midday and at the end of the day. That's a good first aid technique to reduce inflammation and pain. Because remember, arthritis, let's look at the word itis, inflammation, arthral joint. So arthritis is inflammation of the joints. Cold shrinks that down. It just makes you feel a whole lot better. And that's a little bit of what we covered over the past year. Please take a moment to share this channel with your family and friends who might be experience experiencing any painful condition affecting the hand through the shoulder. Thank you for liking and subscribing. My team and I are looking forward to another great year. Thank you for watching. God bless you.