Wrist pain how to best fix it?

I have pain in both of my wrists with certain activities. My left has been hurting for well over a year now after I kept falling on it while snowboarding and my right wrist has been hurting on and off for a few months for no reason that I know of.

I had X-Rays and an MRI on my left wrist and the doctor can't see what the problem is. He said he can do an arthroscope to try to find the problem, but I am worried doing that might somehow make things worse.

Is it a good idea to let a surgeon poke around your wrist to try to find out what's wrong with it, or is that just begging to make things worse. I'm 22 years old and I can still use my wrists but I have pain when I do push-ups or play volleyball and other fun things and it would be great to be pain-free, but I am worried that a diagnostic arthroscopy might permanently make things worse for me.

I also want to get an arthroscopy on my shoulder to fix an impingement, and I was wondering if it might be a good idea to ask the doctor to put hard-casts around both my wrists to see if that would allow the wrists to fully heal since I won't be working for at least a month?

Thanks!!

I'm no Dr so I can't comment on that side but I had some pretty dull pain in my wrist for a few months that would get worse then better then worse... I finally narrowed it down to cycling that was causing the problem since I ride a road bike to and from work. I cut that out and started to wear a wrist support for carpal tunnel while I slave away at my keyboard and about a month and a half later it is pretty much all better and I'm starting to cycle a little. Oh, and I cut gym bouldering out too because of the impact it has. Hope that helps.

As someone who has dealt with wrist injuries and who has had wrist surgery in the past, all I can tell you from your post is that you offer so little information on what is wrong, where it is located, and what possible diagnosis your doctor gave you that no one can really answer any of your questions in any meaningful way.

A diagnostic arthroscopy will mean you will have to recover from the incisions made (a relatively short period of time). Unless the doctor finds something and then tries to take care of it right then and there and fucks it up, an athroscopy itself should not further harm whatever existing problem you have because all they are doing is sticking a camera into your joint to look around. As for your MRIs, they are often false negative, so I am not surprised nothing showed up.

What leads you to believe that putting hard casts on your wrists would allow them to "heal"? Splinting injuries sometimes is beneficial and sometimes not, but it depends on the injury and the individual's response to immobilization as well.

Perhaps at this point you need to find another doctor for a second opinion.

Thanks for the responses; my wrist hurts at the location of where it bends. I was hoping that not moving my wrists would allow them to heal properly with rest.

My wrists hurt when I climb sloper boulder problems.

The wrist is a very complicated joint. One of, if not THE, most complicated in the body (there is a reason surgeons specialize in ONLY hand and wrist!). This is also why it is difficult for doctors to diagnose accurately, not to mention that X rays and MRIs have a hard time illuminating problems within such a tiny, tiny joint space that is packed with so much stuff. Hence why wrist arthroscopy exists to help diagnose.

If the doctor did not already suggest splinting your injury, then perhaps it was because your history did not reveal improvement of your pain with immobilization. Does your pain get better when you don't move your wrist? Or is it about the same no matter what? If motion isn't making things worse, then casting probably won't help you very much.

Some things in the wrist joint never "heal"--not in the typical sense. For instance, I have a hole in a fibrocartilage disc in my wrist that will never heal because there is no blood flow to it. Surgery helped my pain go away by cleaning up the frayed parts of the disc, but nothing will ever make this hole actually heal up and disappear.

I highly recommend a second opinion from another hand surgeon.

Chris treggE wrote:If nothing is evident on MRI it's unlikely any surgery would help you

I noticed whenever I try to wear a wrist guard thing overnight I wake-up to a sore wrist in the morning. But I have a job that involves my wrist moving back and forth all day so I thought it was possible that I just haven't given it enough time to heal on its own.

Any updates on the recovery of these sore wrists? I recently sprained a tendon in mine (I think?) and was curious about the recovery time. Mine really only hurts when pulling down open handed (like on slopers, or open handed crimps). The pain is in the dead center of the top of my wrist. Sounds similar to some of the folks in this thread.

Viktor wrote:I have a job that involves my wrist moving back and forth all day so I thought it was possible that I just haven't given it enough time to heal on its own.

Less fapping