I’ve been treating hands since 2005.
Fingers, wrists, forearms, elbows.
The injuries, the arthritis, the nerve compressions, and the long months after surgery that nobody prepares people for.
Start with the good news, because it’s the bigger half. Most hand and wrist pain settles on its own inside a week. If yours is clearly improving by day 7, let it finish healing and stop reading at 2am.
The rest of this site is about the other kind.
Here’s what I learned somewhere in the first thousand patients: people decide when to come in based on how much it hurts. That instinct is wrong, and it’s the most expensive mistake in my field.
Pain is a volume dial.
Your condition is running a window, and the two are barely related. A mallet finger barely hurts and needs a splint held dead straight for six to eight weeks — bend it once at week four while washing and the window reopens from zero.
Carpal tunnel that tingles at night is a warning. Numbness that never leaves is a deadline, because a nerve compressed too long doesn’t fully come back even after surgery. A torn biceps tendon at the elbow leaves you an arm that works well enough to talk you out of going, and a repair window measured in weeks. The loudest problems are usually the least dangerous.
The quiet ones close doors.
So I work three questions, every patient, every time.
- Which window is this condition on — hours, days, weeks, months?
- Where are you in it right now?
- And what’s the one thing that keeps it open?
That’s the Closing Window Method.
It isn’t a treatment protocol. It’s what I wish someone had told every patient who walked in at month three with a problem that was fixable at week two.
Every article here answers those three questions for one condition. Find yours, read it, then get examined by someone who can put hands on you. A website can explain what’s happening in your hand.
It can’t examine you and that’s the most important way: a skilled hand (occupational) therapist palpating, measuring, assessing, holding your hand, feeling it, moving it, testing it…whilst we talk to you and understand what you’d experience and going through.
Nigel Chua, hand occupational therapist. My credentials are here.