The Canterbury CTS Clinic
The clinic to which you have been referred is an unusual one. Most patients with CTS are seen in general orthopaedic, rheumatology or hand surgery clinics which treat a wide range of different hand (and other) problems. The CTS clinic in Canterbury deals with the treatment of only this one specific disorder and exists purely because the local consultant neurophysiologist has a research interest in CTS.
This remains a research based clinic. It is set up in such a way as to allow us to learn from every patient we see. Even if we do not involve you in any particular treatment trial we are still interested in your symptoms, examination findings and test results and we want to know what happens to you after you leave our doors even if we do not arrange any immediate treatment, and even if you turn out to have no evidence of CTS when we see you. You will notice that both the paper questionnaires we use to collect some information in the clinic and the version of those questionnaires on this website ask for your permission for the use of this data for further research. The clinic only exists because over 40,000 earlier patients have allowed us to study their data in order to better understand what individual symptoms, signs and results mean for a patient with CTS. Most of the important information which we give you in clinic to help your decision making comes from this collection of patient data.
There remain many unanswered questions and we hope that you will help us to continue this work by allowing us to use your information, and also that you will keep us informed of how you are treated and how your symptoms change subsequently. We are also involved in some more focussed clinical trials and you can find details of these on the research page but our main resource for studying CTS remains the core patient database. You can find more details of the main CTS database and how we use its contents here To date, only one person has explicitly refused permission for the use of their anonymised data and we hope that this will remain very much the exception.
Revision date - 8th August 2015
