Conditions & Injuries

Sleep with the elbow straighter: no more than a right angle, ideally around 30 to 45 degrees of bend, arm by your side or resting on a pillow, never tucked under your head. A towel wrap or night splint keeps it there, and mild cases often settle over 6 weeks to 3 months.

A small droop after 6 to 8 weeks of splinting is common and often improves with a few more weeks of night splinting. A tip that drops most of the way back, straight after the splint comes off, usually means the tendon didn’t heal, and the usual answer is more full-time splinting.

Left untreated, a mallet finger usually heals with the fingertip permanently drooping, and in some fingers the middle joint slowly bends backward into a swan neck. Splinting is still worth trying up to about 3 months late, and after that the goal changes.

Yes, but true recurrence is uncommon and usually happens years later. More often, symptoms that seem to come back are a nerve still recovering, a release that never fully worked, or a different problem altogether. The timing tells you which.

Sometimes. A finger that only clicks or catches can settle on its own over weeks to months, especially if you cut back hard gripping. A finger that locks every day rarely goes away by itself, and one left stuck bent for months can stiffen for good.

There’s no good evidence that a vitamin or mineral deficiency causes ganglion cysts, and no supplement has been shown to shrink one. About half go away on their own, which is why so many remedies seem to work.

A crooked or twisted broken finger is easiest to fix in the first 1 to 2 weeks. By about 3 weeks the bone starts to set, and by 6 weeks it has healed in whatever position it’s in. It’s rarely truly too late, but after that the fix is an operation, not a splint.

How to clean a hand or wrist splint without ruining it, what to do when it rubs, slips or feels too tight, showering and sleeping in it, and the warning signs that mean call your hand therapist today.