Hi, this is Dana Ranahan of Body Works Sports Physiotherapy in North Vancouver and I’m here today with a patient, Donna and she’s had a fracture to her wrist and we’re looking at how we get her wrist moving again and how we help to alleviate some pain. So today I just wanted to go through a brief little look at how we would assess her wrist and work on getting it moving again.
So Donna was in and we’ve done some work to get it working but, basically she had a facture and little bit of swelling through her wrist here and some restriction in mobility so what we want to look is how does Donna’s wrist move when we look at the palm coming up and down, so wrist extension we would call that and wrist flexion as it comes down and we look at it in different positions as well. Sometimes when we say well let’s look at it with the hands facing in towards the tummy; that’s a very function position for the wrist and also what about when the hands up. Now in Donna’s case she’s a little bit stiff in her forearm when we look at trying to turn the wrist up so that’s another thing we need to assess.
She does well with her palm down but gets stiff on the palm up and then the wrist can’t function very well because it’s a bit jammed up higher in through here so what we would do is usually lie down and do some assessment through her wrist to see well how are the bones moving in space, how is the joint moving, and if we want to look at mobility through here we can assess more specifically what’s happening with the joint mobility in Donna’s wrist. You can just relax Donna, you don’t have to help. Yeah that’s easier.
So we can say some of these are moving, she has a little bit of stiffness in through here, we may want to do some mobilizing to help her move but we know part of Donna’s restriction comes with this turning up position otherwise she likes to use her upper arm to help. We may want to encourage some mobility here so what Donna, some of the things we’ve worked on are trying to restore movement where she’s stiff and now we give her some exercises to help her maintain that at home and work on strength.
If you have any questions give us a call at 604-983-6616. Thanks