Hello, I’m Nigel. I’ve been a hand occupational therapist since 2005, and in those years I’ve seen, assessed and treated tens of thousands of painful fingers, hands, wrists, forearms and elbows. Sports injuries, overuse, fractures, recovery after surgery. Twenty years in, hands still surprise me. Nothing else in the body packs that much machinery into that little space.
Why this site exists
Most of my patients found their diagnosis the same way. Awake at 2am, hand aching, googling. What they found was either too vague to act on or scary enough to make everything feel worse. So they waited. Waiting felt reasonable. And by the time they reached a clinic, a problem a simple splint would have settled in two weeks now needed an injection. Sometimes an operation.
This part frustrates me, honestly. Not the patients, the gap. Nobody sat them down at the start and said: here is your condition, here is what week 2 and week 6 should look like, and here is the point where waiting stops being safe.
So this site is what I wish they’d found at 2am. Each article explains a condition the way I explain it in clinic, across the table from you. What the structure is. Why it hurts. What recovery genuinely looks like, week by week. Mild problems usually settle in 3 to 7 days on their own. Past that, most hand conditions degrade rather than resolve, and the articles here will tell you honestly which is which.
What this site is not
Reading about your hand is not the same as having it examined. I write so you understand your condition and can have a sharper conversation with whoever treats you, wherever in the world you are. When an article here says get assessed, that’s not me covering myself. That’s 20 years of watching what happens to the people who didn’t.
Credentials
My full professional profile, qualifications and clinical background are at phoenixrehabgroup.com/nigel-chua.
If something hurts right now, start with Conditions & Injuries. If you’d rather understand the machinery first, start with Anatomy.