carpal tunnel surgey next wednesday
i have had carpal tunnel for 10 years now .numbness tingling in the fingers .burning thumb and palm pain at night.now pain has gone to elbow and bicep,tingling away constant pain.went to hand specialist got the test . the one were they put an electirc shock into your hand and triggers your thumb or index finger to twitch. my results on that test was almost 11. the doctor said i got carpal tunnel severe. so im off to surgery next week. is this the right thing or should i try cortizone injections????
thanks jeremy i have a constant pain around the forearm and elbow area creeping towards the bicep area, is this part of the carpal tunnel. also got some neck pain along with it. thanks!
There do seem to be some CTS patients who have pain in the upper arm, shoulder or neck and in whom these pains disappear when the CTS is treated, so one assumes that the pain was somehow linked to the problem at the wrist, though the mechanism for this is not clear at all. On the other hand there is no law saying that you cannot have a shoulder or neck problem as well as CTS and often the only way to resolve this is to treat the CTS and see if it all goes away I'm afraid. JB
I can't really be certain of enough information about you to make a personal recommendation for treatment via the web but there is lots of general advice on the site here. Your symptoms certainly sound consistent with CTS in that short description but you could get a much more complete assessment of just how typical of CTS your story is by running through the symptom questionnaire - anyone can use it.
The test result is harder to assess. In the test which makes your hand twitch one usually records two numbers.
1) the time taken for the signal to travel from the wrist to the thumb - in this measurement, which is usually in milliseconds, a longer time indicates more nerve damage, so a higher number is worse. In most laboratories the upper limit of normal is between 3.8 and 4.7 msec)
2) the size of the electrical signal generated by the thumb muscle - for this one a larger signal means more functioning muscle and therefore a smaller figure means more nerve damage. This one is usually measured in millivolts and a value of 11mV would be normal in any laboratory. In very severe CTS this value may reach zero - ie there may be no twitch.
I can't be sure which number you have there, though if it was described as severe CTS it seems most likely to be 1) - the distal motor latency. IF that is the case then surgery would not be an unreasonable choice of treatment on the basis of the NCS, but that is a big IF, and there are lots of other factors which should be taken into account - not just one neurophysiological measurement.
Please let us know how the operation goes JB