Its come to a point for a friend that it looks like they are going to need surgery on both hands for carpal tunnel.
I know a few that have had it and it seems it has worked well. Just curious what others have gone through, what was your recovery time and result?

Has anyone ever had steroid injections for Carpal Tunnel?

Just curious

Has your friend tried ART? I'd guess that the surgery might be unnecessary and muscle adhesions could be causing the wrist problems.

My fiancee has been complaining of carpal tunnel a little bit so I was actually planning on starting a thread on this. Intuition told me the pain might be what Cha said though, forearm adhesions, so I'm trying to get her started on some things for that. Suggestions? Pretty much just feel around and push hard wherever it hurts until it doesn't hurt anymore? If anybody has any further info or advice to fix carpal tunnel that'd be great because my mom's had it for a while too.

http://startingstrength.wikia.com/wi..._Strength_Wiki

Hmmm I'm sure that would help but what abouts for people with less than a 0% chance of doing SS or SS related lifts.

Look at posts 27 to 31 in this thread: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/85...ardio-1105686/

Buy the book I suggest in that conversation.

If ART is feasible, do that too: http://www.activerelease.com/providerSearch.asp
Look for a provider who is certified at the Biomechanics level.

Most joint issues, even ones that result in surgeries, can be corrected by soft tissue work. Most MDs are not aware of the harm that muscle adhesions do to joints because they are not taught about them in medical school. Many probably wouldnt care anyways because they make their living by doing as many surgeries as they can - necessary or not.

Not sure what im supossed to be looking at here...seems to be all about strength training, didnt see any refrence to Carpal Tunnel.

She has learned about working trigger points( using a theracane) for a while, good friend is an NMT and has taught here alot about physiology. I think she may already have that book, or one similar, i will check and see.

The ART technique is something to look at, looks like a few practitioners around this area..mostly chiros. Have you guys had personal success wit that type of work?

yeah, see my title..... There are several of us here who get regular ART treatments. Pro sports teams are employing ART specialists nowadays. It works.

Have you or anyone had any issues and ART treatments specific to CT?
She had a nerve test that shows severe restriction, would really rather avoid surgery, but it seems this may be the last/only option.

I've had a number of nerve entrapment issues in several places cleared up by ART.

My right wrist was never diagnosed with CT, but if I had seen an MD about it, it probably would have been. I had to wear a wrist brace when I bowled from 20+ years ago up until this year. I took it off earlier this year and haven't needed it since. When it was really bad, I had to wear a wrist brace basically all the time. ART has also fixed major elbow, knee, hip and shoulder problems.

I could go on for a long time about other minor issues that it has helped/fixed.

wow, sounds like it did wonders for you, How many treatments did it take for you to see a significant improvement?
I will definitely look into this, how is it different from NMT ( Neuro Muscular Therapy) work?

I dont know what that is.

After my first ART treatment I had more mobility in my shoulders than I had for more than 15 years prior. That being said, I've probably had 100 treatment over the past two years, partially because I was so messed up all over, and partially because lifting heavy weights at my age can cause adhesions to come back. Right now, I'm 46 and my muscles & joints feel like they're in better shape than at any time in my adult life.

For your friend, I would imagine there might be complete, immediate relief, or it might take several treatments. Its definitely worth trying before getting cut open - there's a good chance that surgery wont be necessary. My chiropractor says he's done work on a lot of people who thought they needed surgery on various joints and all they needed was soft tissue work (ART & less often - Graston).

One thing you can do to see if he has muscle adhesions is to have him poke around on his forearms. If there are any sharp pains in the muscles, those are adhesions that are probably wreaking havoc in his wrist. Read the page from that book in the thread I linked earlier in this thread - just doing that work on himself will probably help.

I have no actual input to the thread, but I did search online about ART. The one thing I noticed it saying all over the place was that it is patented. How can you patent a way of touching someone else?

What they teach the providers is somewhat complicated. My chiro said it takes about $10,000 and a lot of work to get certified, plus additional certifications and continuing ed are a lot more. In order to be good at it, you have to practice it frequently.

Anyone can do crude forms of it on themselves or on someone else. I do stuff on my wife & daughter sometimes, but there's nothing like having a pro diagnose & treat you.

The patent is probably associated with the certifications and the details of the training & techniques. There are other forms of soft tissue work like Graston Technique and some others as well.

I was trying to search on google scholar, but are there any sort of longitudinal studies or placebo controlled trials related to this out there?

(Obviously can't do double blind because the provider would know if he were doing the real thing or just poking around on the patient aimlessly to make them think they were getting treatment, but curious to see some long term analysis out for this like there is for a lot of physical therapy stuff?)

I dont know where to find it, but there was an MD or medical student questioning something like that in this forum a while back and he found some evidence that seemed to satisfy him somewhat.

Regardless of that, what harm would there be in trying it? If money is an issue, try doing some soft tissue work on yourself and see for yourself what happens.

I don't know anything at all about this area and I don't know the basics of the physiology/biochemistry of what a muscle adhesion is (or if they even exist) so I was just looking to learn more about it. At first glance the question that came to mind is I wondered if repeatedly getting rid of these adhesions would actually accelerate their formation which would make you increasingly reliant on therapy to maintain the same functional status.

Are you a doctor?

Here's the book written by the two doctors who basically discovered muscle adhesions and their effects: http://www.amazon.com/Travell-Simons.../dp/0683307711 - I haven't read that book, but I'm aware of its general content.

That book is what the Trigger Point Therapy Workbook is based on. The Travell & Simons book was written for medical professionals, while the workbook was written for anyone and is more readable.

That stuff should be taught to medical students, but as far as I know, it isn't. I've talked to a couple doctors who seem sort of aware of adhesions, but they have little knowledge of them.

See this page for some reviews on the Workbook by doctors: http://www.triggerpointbook.com/doctors.htm

* - myofascial trigger points = muscle adhesions

I'm not a doctor, I just started medschool and we have done muscle/skeletal anatomy, but we don't actually talk about pathology until next year so I wouldn't expect that I should have heard about this yet and was curious to read a paper about it. (Although in anatomy lab you definitely see how adhered EVERYTHING in the body is to each other, like everything is completely wrapped up in fascia/fat/connective tissue and nothing is "clean" if you will).

I didn't realize this was the the same thing as trigger points, I know that definitely is taught to certain specialties because you hear about people doing trigger point injections all the time.

I think one thing the general public (and even other healthcare providers) might not fully understand is how extremely broad medicine is, and for the most part the majority of medschool is devoted to processes that are going to cause serious morbidity or mortality. Its not until specializing or even sub-specializing that your going to become up to date with the cutting edge understanding of the specific disease processes inherent to your specialty. So unless your primary care doc happens to have done a sports medicine fellowship, his muscle/skeletal approach is going to be focused on identifying major pathology with significant associated morbidity (ie. back pain from prostate cancer) and probably should refer to physical therapists for more "run of the mill" muscular issues that aren't responding to conservative treatment.

I've read a little bit about trigger point injections - those sound like a bad, invasive way to treat them imo, especially when there are a lot of things that can be done to treat them.

I like to see your interest in this. I wish more medical professionals would show this type of interest. I also wish I had more/better responses. I'm just a guy who's suffered from trigger points and overcome most of the problems I had. I learned a lot about them along the way, but I don't have the depth of knowledge of a medical professional.

I think there is quite a bit of controversy about trigger point injections in the medical community, so you certainly wouldn't be the only one.

As for the bolded, unfortunately I think a lot of the reason parts of the medical community aren't taking it seriously would be because chiropractors seem to be one of the groups talking about it a lot. For better or worse, chiropractors have never been particularly strong in producing good research studies to allow "evidence based" treatment and in recent history their reputation among MD's has really dropped because so many chiros jumped onto the anti-vaccine bandwagon or are trying to treat diseases way outside their scope of practice.

(I personally am neutral towards chiropractors for MSK complaints as I am not educated enough to have an opinion, but I think a lot of chiros are attempting to play medical doctor with other non MSK conditions which is really dangerous)

But assuming those endorsements for the book weren't fraudulent, it seems obvious that several specialists with more specific expertise in the area seem to be taking it seriously and eventually it would spread throughout the community if the evidence backs it.

I think what you said probably contributes to a prejudice from MDs about DCs. That, plus there are some pretty bad DCs. The DC I see is excellent and actually referred me to an excellent neurosurgeon, who referred me back to my chiro. My guy also works for two profession sports teams under the authority of some orthopedic surgeons. I'm lucky to have found someone as good as him.

The other thing is there are surgery happy doctors who are looking to profit by doing as many surgeries as they can.

I've been to several MDs who wouldn't refer me to a chiropractor (seemingly if their life depended on it).

I've been to two orthopedic surgeons who had absolutely no clue about what myofascial release could do. The first (surgery happy) one talked me into what I now know was an unnecessary major shoulder surgery. That guy told me at the time I would probably need knee surgery within 5 years. That was about 15 years ago - now, after having had lots of ART and done SMR on my own, my knees have never felt better in my adult life.

The second orthopedic surgeon I saw did not believe in doing unnecessary surgeries - he just told me never to bench press or overhead press again. His solution for my inability to squat my body weight was to send me to a physical therapist who told me to do leg curls on a ball and squat with a medicine ball between my knees (totally ******ed & useless). At the time, pushing 10 lbs on a Hammer press machine hurt my shoulders. I've since benched over 300 lbs & squatted 420 lbs to below parallel after lots of ART & SMR work.

Probably true, but when something like 25% of DC's surveyed said they advise patients against vaccination you can see why the prejudice exists.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science...64410X04004384

I have no problem with DC's doing MSK, thats whats they train in and for the most part the worst case scenario would be wasted money. DC's reputation starts dropping as they start trying to become primary healthcare providers or getting into the vaccine controversy, doing "detox" stuff, trying to treat GI problems, psychiatric diseases, etc.

http://ds1.downloadtech.net/cn1086/a...974912-001.mp3

^ Mike Robertson interview. About 85% of the way in he addresses carpel tunnel.

He recommends ART for several things, including CT.

After the CT talk he talks about the Travel & Simmons book.

The whole interview is really good.

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