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Dr. Steinmann describes how a woman can prevent pain caused by thumb arthritis.
Dr. Steinmann:
People have used splinting to try and calm it down, which I think is a reasonable technique, but as far as exercises, there’s no real exercise that you can use at that part of the body to prevent the pain of the arthritis.
Mainly people will modify their activities if they get a lot of pain when they are playing say tennis or racket sports or golf, they will alter the size of the club or the racket to try and prevent the pain.
Some of the preventive things that we do are injections of the thumb, putting a little bit of steroid into the joint itself. That can be helpful, and then of course taking over-the-counter pain medicines to try and decrease the inflammation of the joint itself and that combination, splinting, injection and oral pain medicine tends to get people passed the bad couple of days or a week that they might have.
About Dr. Steinmann, M.D.:
Dr. Scott P. Steinmann, M.D., is on orthopedic surgery at the Mayo Clinic Sports Medicine Center in Minnesota. Dr. Steinmann received his medical training from Cornell University Medical College in New York, completed his residency in orthopedics at New York Orthopedic Hospital and completed a fellowships focusing on the shoulder and hand surgery from Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center and Mayo Graduate School of Medicine respectively.