Researching Carpal Tunnel
As I prepare my presentation for fieldwork I am finding some surprising results. I have never read the research on Carpal Tunnel I always assumed the OTR who was supervising me had read the research. As I go through it all the main conclusion I have is, we need more research. Very few treatment approaches had sufficient research to "prove" their effectiveness. I have seen through my fieldwork patients benefiting from traditional OT, splinting, ultrasound, exercise, cold laser, heat modalities in various combinations. Through my research I have only found splinting to have enough research to "prove" it is effective. There are positive studies for all the treatment protocols we use but few that demonstrate statistically relevant data. The only solution I can see to this problem is to conduct more research. Our patients are too varied to say there is one protocol to treat non or pre-surgical carpal tunnel but a so called "bag of tricks" that could work and need to be trialed to find the best protocol for the patient your currently treating. Have you researched the treatments you utilize and found sufficient results?