Physical hand therapy is an excellent way to improve the strength, speed, and agility of the hand, wrist and fingers. Learn more about this practice, the methods used and the cost.
What is Physical hand therapy ?
Physical hand therapy, or physical therapy for the hand, is a therapy that helps to help manage pain and restore function. Physical hand therapy involves the use of manual therapy to help alleviate pain and restore function of the hand.
This type of therapy is a part of the rehabilitative care field, which is specially made for hand and complete upper extremities. Hand therapy offers great treatment for the whole upper extremity like shoulder, arm, elbow, wrist and hand.
Do you know how important our upper extremity is?
It evolves range of motion, dexterity, grasping abilities, and a lot more. So maintaining good hand health is important. However, we ‘re not blessed with strong hands.
So, what to do?
Hand therapy is a great option to improve your hand health. Our upper extremity consists of nerves, vein, tendons, bones, ligaments, and many more connective tissues which can be damaged due to injury, disease and conditions and much more.
When our upper body gets hurt or damaged, therapists use multiple treatments to balance the anomalies and dislocation. They also provide post treatment recovery to bring them a good quality life.
Hand therapy is the combination of multiple subjects like physiology, kinesiology, knowledge of anatomy, biology, knowledge of physical and emotional energy conservation, and the practical clinical experience boosts their knowledge and helps them to offer the best treatment.
Hand therapists offer treatments without doing any surgeries and operations. They also educate patients with pain management and alleviate sensitivities of nerves. They make splints to reduce muscle stiffness, and make everyday activities super simple. They offer therapeutic interventions and exercise programs to strengthen hands, boost grasping abilities, and recuperate a range of motions.
Hand therapy is famous for giving treatments without surgeries, educate patient for pain management, help patients to manage and reduce the sense of pain after upper extremity nerve damage, provide at-home exercise program to accelerate movements and capacity, they bring about custom-made splints to save guard and cover injured bone, surgical repair, and ligament. They also offer splints to recover existing stiffness.
They offer tools like putty, squeeze ball, finger exerciser, therapeutic cone to do finger and hand exercises at home. Physical Hand therapy is a great rehab treatment after carpal tunnel syndrome surgeries. Therapists include adequate assistance along with support of wound healing, preventing infection, reducing swelling and scar treatment.
How Physical hand therapy is done ?
A certified and clinically experienced hand therapist first diagnoses your deformity, checks the swelling, numbness, and other sensitivity by touching and checking the color of the skin. Then document the recovery scope, severity, along with the pre-existing limitation. Main objective of the hand therapist is to save your hand functions without prescribing the surgery.
Physical Hand therapy can reduce the adverse effect of infection and cure upper limb dysfunction through proper rehabilitation. Hand therapy offers non-surgical, preventive measurements of treatment. Therapists directly work with orthopedic surgeons to offer best treatment with optimum medical assistance.
Difference in color to identify the recovery scope, limitation, and seriousness of the trauma or injury. Their main objective is to restore your arm function, limit the adverse effect of infection, and prevent upper limb dysfunction through rehabilitation. They usually offer non-operative, preventive, and conservative treatment. Therapists work with patients and orthopedic surgeons to give optimum medical care and assistance.
Hand therapists must have proper education along with minimum 5 years of experience, or 4000 hours of in-clinic experience on upper extremity ailments. He/she must be aware of upgraded tools and techniques used in rehabilitative care field
Their treatment areas consist of wound care, range of motion, joint-mobilization, scar management , splint fabrication and so on.
A hand therapist provides a great solution to relieve pain, decrease muscle soreness and weakness, nerve sensitivity, and improve adequate grasping ability. They offer a series of hand exercises to strengthen hand muscles, finger and wrist strength. Finally, they are loved by patients because they offer solutions to painful treatment.
The therapist works through exercise, strength training, wound management, edema control, and pain care.
Exercise protocol includes hand and finger exercises , here patient has to use his own hand strength and exert force against wall or squeezing exercise with all of your potential
Strength training include putty training, weight lifting, firmness training and much more
Scar management comes with sheets, silicone putty, friction massage, and kinesio taping
Pain control includes therapeutic ultrasound, desensitization, heat and cold therapy, mirror therapy.
Side effects of hand therapy
Ideally, there are no such side effects after having hand therapy. But treatment should be done from the experienced therapist. Don’t hire unprofessional therapists who’ve no experience or degree, because wrong techniques cause pain, and show reverse effects.
If you feel pain after treatment, don’t leave it untreated. Take the help of orthopedic surgeon immediately
Cost of hand therapy?
It completely depends on the type of treatment, and severity of the disease.
However, hand therapy typically costs around $140 to $300 per session or $50-$350 per hour. It is variable, and depends on which kind of services you are taking, and what is the experience of the therapist. If therapists have many years of experience in this relevant field, then he might charge more.
But it has been familiar that multi-specialty hospitals charge more than a normal rehabilitative care clinic.
Conclusion
Physical hand therapy, also known as physical therapy, is a type of physical therapy that may be used in the treatment of a wide range of musculoskeletal conditions of the upper limbs.