Carpal Tunnel and Wrist tendinitis / decreased range of motion / continuing to get reinjured

by Dustin
(Wisconsin Rapids, WI)

Hello and thank god for a website like this. I have been digging for answers for too long....

I am a graphic designer and a sign maker so I use my hands quite a bit for work.

Close to a year ago, I was doing quite a bit of cutting with a utility knife as well as mouse work on my PC. A couple of times towards the end of the day, my fingers would start to feel tingly but I just chalked it up to my hand being wore out. In the mornings it would always be ok minus some expected muscle exhaustion. Until one day I was under the gun big time and was really pushing myself to complete projects and was clicking like a madman that day.

My hand was sore at the end of the day, but by morning all the tendons on the top of my hand were in horrible pain, my hand and wrist was swollen to the point I could barely bend it and the area at the base of my hand (where my finger bones meet the wrist bones) was very tender to the touch on the back side. From what diagrams I looked at, this is where the carpal tunnel is.

I took anti inflammatory meds, learned how to use my left hand for most daily work so my right could rest, used a wrist brace when I had to use my right hand or when I slept, iced it for 15-20 mins at a time with an ice pack, drank tons of water and took glucosomine pills.

As it started feeling better i kept trying to stretch the tendons. I was able to get it all under control but with still some major range of motion loss. I couldn't bend my wrist back more than about 15-20 degrees. It wasn't like there was too much pain to go back further, it was more like it just couldn't anymore.

Since then, my wrist has gotten re-injured time after time by seemingly menial actions. Wiping down a counter lightly for instance or sometimes from seemingly nothing at all. It has gotten to the point that I am almost afraid to use my right hand for anything for fear of re injuring it. Even then though, when it did get re injured, a few days of rest and the pain would go away. That is until this last month.

I started trying to tackle this range of motion issue stretching it lightly 3x a day by pulling back on my hand as I have seen in many examples, as well as the "prayer" stretch. I was always careful to never push it too far. Well that aggravated it big time but in a different way.

There is very minimal swelling around the carpal tunnel area, the pain feels like a dull ache directly in my tendons but this time it's on the palm side of my wrist. It also has moved into my thumb (I have little babies - I try to pick them up without using my thumb for support but that doesn't always help). When I feel the pain in my thumb, I feel it at the very base of my thumb bone as a tender ache and a little further up as a sharp pain in my arm, about a couple of inches past my wrist. Couple this with an all around feeling of tightness in my wrist.

With rest, nsaids and icing I can get the pain to a bearable level... a 2 on a scale of 1-10. But now if I try to use it, very quickly I can feel a burning sensation in my tendons and can feel inflammation starting to flare up which makes me back off from whatever I was doing for fear of re injury. Keep in mind I am still doing most things at work left handed so I am by no means abusing my right hand. Help... I can't seem to get anywhere towards a solution to this and being out of commission for a few months from surgery is not an option.


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Joshua Answers:

Hi Dustin.

Carpal Tunnel Syndrome has all the factors of Tendonitis with -sometimes- the extra factor of specific swelling there at the carpal tunnel area.

See: What Is Tendonitis

You problably also have some elements of Tenosynovitis, which just means that the tendon/tendon sheath is VERY irritated and irritible.

Still, the swelling at the carpal tunnel and the irritated tendons are SYMPTOMS.

The what sounds like acute Process of Inflammation is constantly pumping out pain enhancing chemical and is part of the swelling process. Inflammation is also a symptom.

So you need to go after the causes.

Rest isn't going to do it, though rest does reduce new irritation to an already irritated dynamic.

Stretching isn't going to do it. YOu need to target tight muscle/connective tissue, and stretching doesn't target well enough.

So. You need to counter the inflammation process. You need to counter the too-tight muscle and connective tissue structures putting constant tension on the tendons and attachments.

And what you've missed entirely so far, you need to counter the nutritional insufficiency that is playing a role.

If your body doesn't have the little building blocks it need to function/recover then at best it's going to have a VERY hard time recovering.

Currently you're stuck at the bad end of the Pain Causing Dynamic. Gotta break that dynamic.

Probably you're not actually injured, meaning rip/tear, but you definitely are RE-IRRITATING things.


I'd go with The Carpal Tunnel Treatment That Works program. The ebook portion of the program you can get started with immediately and thus you'll get more out of the work you do with the DVD when it arrives.


Let me know if you have any questions.






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Joshua Tucker, B.A., C.M.T.
The Tendonitis Expert
www.TendonitisExpert.com