Diagnostic Questionnaire

gwenrose
Offline

I have just completed the diagnostic questionnaire which says it is unlikely to be CT.
This surprises me as both my physiotherapist and doctor seem to think it is.

The problem started with a constant pins and needles in my little finger of my right hand, it drove me crazy, so I went to my gp, who referred me to a hand physiotherapist at K&C. At first she thought it was trigger finger and treated me accordingly, but the exercises actually made my hand worse. After a few visits, the pain spread to my ring finger on my right hand and after an examination of my wrist, she consulted with a senior member who felt the diagnosis was wrong and I had CT.

The pain can be pretty bad when I do things like trying to garden, hoover, undo jars and pretty sever when I'm using the keyboard, I'm a trained copy typist so use all my fingers to type, the pain is quite bad if I use the mouse on the computer, so I tend to try and just use two fingers on my laptop. I'm finding it difficult to hold a book to read and almost impossible to do my embroidery. Writing has become a bit of a challenge as my fingers seem to lock when I bend my hand and my right hand certainly feels weaker now.

When the physiotherapist put her hand round my wrist and put pressure with her thumb on the inside of my wrist, my fingers became free moving with no pain and soon as she released the pressure I had pain in my little and ring finger again and found it difficult to move my fingers. I've tried this myself, putting pressure on the inside of my wrist and this seems to give me more flexibility with my hand and fingers.

I have tried a wrist splint and it did help, but at the same time caused discomfort to the upper part of my hand, so by stopping pain in one area, it created problems in another.

The pain can be just as bad day or night, but worse after I've tried to do any of the above activities. Any pressure using the hand causes pain.

I hope someone can shed some light on my symptoms, having not long completed chemo for breast cancer, I could really do without this.

jeremydpbland
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I'm not surprised the questionnaire score is low for that because the distribution of your symptoms is exactly opposite to the one you would expect in CTS - your little finger should be normal in CTS! It's probably worth coming to get it tested as we can look for a couple of other things as well but from that description it does not sound like CTS to me. JB

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