Costs to treat CTS annually
18 April 2013 - 11:47am
I am hoping someone can tell me whether or not is worth my while pushing for CTS release surgery or continuing down the route of non-surgical therapy. I am cautious as to the positive results of invasive surgery as I am not overwhelmed with confidence of the success rate of invasive surgery? Can anyone advise on whether it would be cost effective to chance the treatment or to continue with therapy
The best figures I can find for the outcomes of treatment for CTS are in the prognosis pages of this site. What is much harder is to work out the costs - which fall into two categories, financial and personal/health costs.
Financial costs are obvious - some treatments are more expensive than others but prices vary enormously depending on where you are. For treatments that impinge on your time you also have to consider the time you invest in them as financial cost if you could be earning in that time.
Personal/health costs are much more subjective and ultimately only you know what the 'cost' to you is of, for example 3 days of post-operative pain of moderate severity - if the potential benefit is an 80% chance of 40 years freedom from the original symptoms, a 10% chance of being no different and a 10% chance of being worse for the rest of your life - these are complex mixes of different potential outcomes, each of which will have their own subjective value to you.
The bottom line is that there is no simple cost benefit analysis at present which gives a clear answer as to how best to treat CTS in every case - sorry! JB