Do you ski? Do you like to carve the mountain at high speeds? We hope you avoid injury and have fun! If you do get injured, you should know about skiers’ thumb – a ligament sprain or tear that can occur to your thumb while skiing. Listen in for details. Ski safely!

Hi this is Dana Ranahan from Body Works Sports Physiotherapy and today I want to talk to you about a really common skiing injury that we see sometimes in the clinic. So if you love to ski and get out there in all this powder, sometimes what happens is you can actually get an injury to your thumb. So usually we think of hip, knee or ankle injuries with skiing sometimes back pain, but you can get a tear of a ligament in your thumb that’s called skiers thumb.

What it is, there’s a ligament on the inside of the finger or thumb here that can get torn from when you’re holding onto the pole and basically it gets pulled apart. And so usually it will show up with pretty severe pain here and when we stress that joint, it’ll feel like the edge of the finger kind of pulls away. So it means that this ligament can be torn either partially or fully.

So if you’re finding that you’ve had a painful injury like this from skiing, definitely get it checked out because we need to splint this or it could need surgery if it’s a severe tear. So for any other questions, check out our website at www.body-works.ca