Your wrists are a crucial player in successfully completing regular activities you may do each day. They are also very complex joints with a large number of small bones, tendons, and other tissues that all have to work in unison. When you have tendonitis in one or both of your wrists you’ll probably notice just how much you rely on this joint to do just about anything with your hands.
There are numerous tendons that are responsible for connecting the muscles in your forearms and the muscles in your hand to the bones in your hand and your wrist. When one or more of these gets inflamed or irritated the result is often wrist tendonitis.
Common Causes
If you play a sport or have a job that requires you to engage in activities that use your hand and arm repeatedly then you could be at risk. For example, baseball pitchers and football quarterbacks have a higher risk for wrist tendonitis because of the way they repeatedly use their wrists and hands to throw balls. Lifting heavy objects over and over can also cause tendonitis in your wrists.
This injury doesn’t just target factory workers and athletes, however; with everything being done digitally now, people spend vast amounts of time typing at a computer can also develop wrist tendonitis because of the prolonged positioning of their hands.
Symptoms
The most common symptoms you will probably experience with wrist tendonitis are pain, tenderness, and stiffness. Since there are a large number of tendons within your wrist, the symptoms usually depend on the location of the tendon or tendons that have been damaged; for example, you will feel pain in your thumb if the inner side of your wrist (radial) is inflamed while pain in your little finger may reflect an inflamed a tendon on the outside of your wrist (ulnar).
Pain may also encompass the entire wrist joint and even radiate up to your elbow. Another possible symptom is pain that is only felt when your wrist is strained or has pressure applied to it – if left untreated this can develop into a chronic condition.
Pain Relief and Recovery
Wrist tendonitis can be a tricky injury to recover from due to how much you employ your wrist in day to day activities. Using a wrist brace can help immobilize the injured tissue giving it time to heal, but you may not want to restrict hand movement entirely. Finding a brace that allows hand flexibility while supporting recovery is often the optimal choice.
Wrist braces can be found in most pharmacies and sporting goods stores as well as online. Since you will likely be wearing your brace for several hours each day it is important to find one made out of a breathable material and that won’t itch or cause skin irritation.
Icing your wrist can help alleviate some of the pain you feel as well as some of the swelling. You can also try to sleep with your injured wrist elevated to help reduce some of the inflammation. Overall, resting your injured wrist will play the most important role in treating your tendonitis.
