Carpal Tunnel is among the most painful and debilitating nerve disorders known to man, causing horrible crippling and agonizing pain. The symptoms of this ailment are distinctive and progressive. Carpal Tunnel Syndrome is usually caused by repetitive motion, sometimes being found in people with office jobs who spend all day at a computer keyboard, and is quite predominant in those with factory assembly line jobs.
The symptoms typically begin with a tingling sensation in the fingertips, followed quickly by numbness of the same region. This particular numbness has no effect on the person’s ability to move the fingers. Soon enough the numbness and tingling are joined by a deep ache that starts at the fingertips and moves upward, sometimes all the way to the shoulder. These sensations continue and worsen progressively over a period of minutes.
Now the person feels hot and cold sensations in the affected hand or hands, which by themselves don’t present as intolerable but combined with all the other symptoms that never cease to worsen with the passage of time, they are unbearable. Sharply piercing pains also present at this point, which often feel like an electrical shock.
The worst part of all this is the fact that the worst of the symptoms only present when the person is lying down attempting to sleep. Apparently the sleep posture, (irregardless of position in the bed) puts added pressure on the compressed nerves of the hands, making the symptoms become gradually more imposing. This makes sleep impossible because the longer you ignore it the worse it becomes.
Carpal Tunnel sufferers get up frequently in the night, usually at least once per hour, and the only tolerable position is standing up, so they have to get right up out of bed, and perform exercises to work out the pains, the most common one being the arm swing, where the body is turned rapidly from side to side (like doing the Twist) while letting the arms flail limply.
This of course, is not a cure, only a way to relieve the symptoms. The only way to permanently remove the worst of the symptoms without surgery is to stop doing whatever it was that caused the problem in the first place. Since a change of jobs is not always a luxury people can afford, the symptoms usually worsen to the point where surgery is required to repair the damage.
There are exercises designed to avoid getting Carpal Tunnel but the most effective method of avoiding this condition is moderation of activity. In today’s work environments, moderation is not acceptable. Everything must be bigger, better, faster, more. This always takes a toll somewhere, and usually that place is within the human body, which is not designed to move that fast.
