How Bad is My Carpal Tunnel?
Table of Contents
- Overview
- Severity stages of carpal tunnel syndrome
- A note about treating carpal tunnel with surgery
- Mild Stage carpal tunnel syndrome
- Moderate Stage carpal tunnel syndrome
- Severe Stage carpal tunnel syndrome
- How to treat ANY stage of carpal tunnel syndrome
- Summary
- FAQs
- About
Overview
Simply saying,
"My carpal tunnel is bad!"
doesn't describe the stage of your disorder. Are you in the
Mild,
Moderate
or
Severe stage?
This article outlines the various stages (or grades) of carpal tunnel syndrome. It also describes the most common ways to treat each grade.
Before getting into it, you should know that carpal tunnel syndrome is a disorder that originates from inside your wrist joint. It causes discomfort in your fingers and hand. These
carpal tunnel signs and symptoms include:
- Pain
- Numbness
- Tingling
- Shooting electric shocks
- Burning
- Clumsiness
- Hand & finger weakness
Severity stages of carpal tunnel syndrome
The severity of your condition can be categorized ("staged" or "graded") in several ways. The most common way that most doctors still use is the
Disease Classification Scale. This classifies carpal tunnel into "Mild", "Moderate", or "Severe" stages. This scale is easy for patients to understand. Unfortunately, the boundary between each stage is not well defined.
Another way to classify carpal tunnel is using
neurophysiological severity. That means the disorder is graded according to sensory and motor nerve conduction abnormalities. It ranges from 0 to 6, which means normal (0) to virtually unrecordable signals (6) coming from your nerves. (No signals are not good!) This grading scale is more accurate, but more cumbersome when it comes to prescribing treatment.
Pain management clinicians prefer a hybrid classification scale. It's based on symptoms as well as neurophysiological severity. There is always some variation between symptoms and neurophysiology. But the overall correlations coincide well enough to form a multi-point sliding scale.
Alternate forms of this scale are called the
Levine Scale ,
CTS-6 Scale , and the
Padua Severity Scale. Values range from normal to extremely severe carpal tunnel syndrome.
In this article, we will use the most common grading system of "Mild", "Moderate", or "Severe" stages. And we will discuss the most common and effective ways to treat each individual stage.
A note about treating carpal tunnel with surgery
There are a number of ways to treat carpal tunnel syndrome without surgery. This article focuses on those treatment options. But if you choose surgery, there are 2 basic forms of surgery to relieve carpal tunnel syndrome:
The main problems with surgery are multi-fold:
- Overall, surgery is
about 50% effective for symptoms relief (as measured 2 years later).
- Depending on the patient's health,
recovery time can last many months.
- There is significant down-time from work.
- The
post-surgical pain can be great.
- There is a risk of
complications like bleeding, infection, loss of strength, and persistent pain.
For the above reasons, carpal tunnel surgery should be the LAST option for patients. In contrast, many nonsurgical options are available and most are very effective in providing symptoms relief.
Mild Stage carpal tunnel syndrome
Moderate Stage carpal tunnel syndrome
Severe Stage carpal tunnel syndrome
"End Stage" Carpal Tunnel Syndrome
While not technically a "Stage", many doctors describe some patients reaching the "End Stage" of carpal tunnel syndrome. This is when patients have lost most of their flexor tendon abilities (gripping and pinching). Thumb apposition is lost. The muscles at the base of your thumb (thenar muscles) have degenerated, and look flat or hollow. There might be constant numbness but pain generally subsides due to irreversible nerve degeneration. Electrically nerves are not recordable.
How to treat ANY stage of carpal tunnel syndrome
Myofascial release massage is the most trusted method to relieve any stage of carpal tunnel syndrome. Doctors and therapists use this non-surgical remedy for mold, moderate, and severe stages. After daily treatments for about one month, symptoms usually disappear in mild and moderate stage patients. Severe stage patients may require 2 months of treatment.
The patented
CarpalRx is designed to give you myofascial release massage automatically, without the need to see a specialist. This FDA cleared medical device eliminates carpal tunnel symptoms at home, without surgery, steroid shots, or hassle.
Summary
The severity of carpal tunnel syndrome can be categorized in a number of ways. The most common way divides the disorder into Mild, Moderate, and Severe stages. The Mild stage is thought of as an annoyance. But as symptoms advance and become present during the daytime, you are in the Moderate stage. The Severe stage is when every aspect of your life is affected by symptoms. The most effective nonsurgical treatments include night bracing, stretching exercises, and myofascial release massage. These can be used at any stage of the disorder. But if you have severe symptoms, all of these treatments must be used simultaneously.
FAQs
Does carpal tunnel always advance to the severe stage?
Not all the time. Many patients see symptoms plateau, usually in the Moderate stage. Whether or not they plateau because the patient is more cautious about using their hands, or the disorder hits a physiological limit (or barrier) is unknown.
Who gets carpal tunnel?
Anybody can get it. But it is usually associated with occupations where stressful and repetitive hand activity is performed for 6-8 hours per day.
Can I get steroid shots to stop carpal tunnel from progressing?
You can try. But steroid shots only work about 45% of the time. And even if they do work, symptoms almost always return after 3-4 months.
About
