Hands Strategies For Strong Pain Free Hands: Chronic Pain

Content provided by the Faculty of the Harvard Medical School

Hands: Strategies for strong, pain-free hands

It's a familiar scene: You're chopping vegetables for dinner when the knife slips and nicks your finger. The sharp pain, followed by a few days of wearing a bandage, is a potent reminder of how sensitive your hands are — and how much you rely on them throughout the day. But for millions of Americans, hand pain cuts far deeper than the skin.

Beneath the skin, your hands are an intricate architecture of tendons, joints, ligaments, nerves, and bones. Each of these structures is vulnerable to damage from illness or injury. Unnoticed and unsung, healthy hands perform countless small tasks, from stirring your morning coffee to tucking in your child at night. But aching hands transform even a simple task into a painful ordeal. Arthritis can make it difficult to carry a shopping bag. Carpal tunnel syndrome can interfere with your work and hobbies. Hand or finger deformities can make basic self-care routines such as getting dressed and brushing teeth difficult.

Besides helping you with work and play, hands are also a tool of communication, expression, and emotion. Hand pain or deformity can cause embarrassment and inhibition, triggering feelings of poor self-esteem or a lower self-image.

Hands are a fundamental tool for sensing, communicating, working, and creating.

Why do your hands hurt? Hand problems range from the mechanical to the neurological. Two leading causes of hand pain and disability are arthritis and carpal tunnel syndrome.

Today, nearly one in three adults has arthritis or other chronic joint problems. The incidence has risen dramatically since the mid-1980s, increasing from 35 million Americans in 1985 to 66 million in 2005. Partly, this increase stems from newer, broader definitions of arthritis. Too, Americans are living longer, and arthritis incidence increases with age.

Carpal tunnel syndrome is more prevalent among women, affecting nearly twice as many women as men. An estimated 2%–3% of Americans have carpal tunnel syndrome. A procedure to ease this nerve disorder is one of the most common surgeries done in the United States, with more than 200,000 procedures performed each year.

This report describes the most common reasons for aching hands and what you can do about them. You'll learn about different types of arthritis and ways to relieve arthritis-related hand pain. This report also includes treatments for common tendon injuries that affect the hands and clarifies the confusion between work-related musculoskeletal disorders (also known as repetitive stress injuries) and carpal tunnel syndrome. Finally, you'll learn how to avoid the most common hand injuries, including sprains, fractures, and amputations, and how to keep your hands healthy and strong so you can enjoy the pleasures of work, play, communication, and expression for years to come.

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Last updated:	January 23, 2007