wrist supports
9 April 2014 - 5:39am
hi guys,i have the wrist supports which I wear at night as suggested and the pins n needles feeling I used to get has pretty much gone.
Does this mean they are curing the problem or just temporarily relieving the symptoms?
I would love to know the answer to that. There are no adequate long term studies (by which I mean years) of what happens to patients who are treated with splinting alone. We know that some patients have temporary CTS anyway and recover without any treatment at all so the effectiveness of splinting is a slightly more complex question than it at first appears. We really want to know if there are more patients symptom free without wearing the splint after say 6 weeks use than there are with no treatment, and then of that group who are symptom free at 6 weeks we would like to know how many of them get further symptoms in the next 5-10 years. No-one is ever going to do that study - too many ethics barriers to a trial with a no-treatment arm and too much expense in following up a cohort of patients for that long. At some point, if ethics and research governance will let us, we will try to identify a cohort of patients who, according to our records, were only treated with splints about 10 years ago and have not been heard from since and try to contact them to see what has happened but even that will be quite difficult. JB