Thumb pain: described as any pain from the base of your thumb (knuckle) to the tip of your thumb. To establish where exactly your thumb pain is coming from it can be very helpful identifying what structure is causing your pain. Thumb pain is our field of speciality, we are the experts.

Any pain or problem in your thumb will have a ripple effect on the rest of your hand, wrist and elbow. So if you are uncertain what the cause may be, rather let us have a look at it before you create even more problems. Thumb pain can be caused by any of the muscles, joints, tendons or nerves in your thumb. Let’s look at each of these structures:

Does this sound like you?

If any of these have happened to you – we would love to help you. The fact that you’ve tried any or all of these things already is actually a good thing, because when you know what doesn’t work – you are closer to finding the thing that does!

We invite you to come and see us. Why? Because we do things differently. We’ll do a thorough assessment and test all the possible causes. After we’ve diagnosed your problem, and explained what it’s going to need to heal, we’ll make sure you understand why this is happening.

If you’re looking for solid advice on how to start solving your problem, you might not know if our treatment is the right thing for you, we encourage you to give us a call. This is an opportunity to get an expert’s advice about your situation. Our goal is to help you make the right decision about what to do next.

Get rid of your thumb pain in the next few days!

To understand where your thumb pain is coming from, you’d have to determine how you injured it, or if you can remember when it started. Some are outright obvious like when you slam the door onto your thumb, meanwhile others are subtle and creeps up on you – getting worse day by day. So, it’s easier to establish how your pain started and changed until now. Changes in your thumb pain gives us many clues to understand where your pain is coming from.

Our body consists of various types of tissue, some elastic like tendons, or strong like cables (ligaments), some tissue can generate movement & force like muscles. We rely on your thumb ligaments to keep joints stable, tendons to coordinate movements, and muscles to generate power to grip. The structures in your thumb are quite vulnerable to injury, especially trauma. There are more than 38 structures in your thumb that can get injured, some problems are more common than others, but just to be safe – we test them all.

Here’s a breakdown of a few structures that can get injured that gives you different types of thumb pain:

Different structures, cause different types of thumb pain, although these are not concrete it’s a good guideline to which structure produces what type of pain

Muscle — Dull ache or stiffness, sharp pain with contraction
Nerve — Numbness, tingling, weakness, electrical stabbing feeling
Tendon — Burning pain with certain specific movements, pain comes & goes
Ligament — Pain at the end of range, unstable, clicking
Bone — Constant pain, sharp pain with certain movements
Joints — Cramp, constant stiff feeling, worse after rest, better with movement
Cartilage — Sharp pain when at certain point, painful arch of movement
Arteries — Pins & Needles, dead leg feeling, heavy feeling
Fat pad — Pinching pain, pressure increases or decreases pain immediately
Bursa — Pain only comes on after being active, better with rest
Referral from other joints — Difficult to pinpoint pain, vague painful area

Changes over time

Intensity – When you grade your pain from 0 – 10. You may think it’s not that bad because it’s not that painful. On the contrary, pain intensity is not a sign of how severe your tissue injury is for example, complete ruptures of ligaments are less painful than partial tears. When fibers are stressed while it’s anchors are completely loose, there’s not much pain, but fibers that are partially torn will produce severe thumb pain. People have different pain thresholds, so be careful not to ignore your thumb injury.

Frequency – Pain that’s fleeting or intermittent, short burst of pain must not become more frequent and constant. This shows that the tissue damage is not getting any better. Pain that only lasts for a few seconds tend to heal faster, so the longer your pain lasts the faster you should get to us.

Latency – If your pain lags to come on and builds up over the day you must be very cautious. This is a sign of a relapse of your tissue pathology. It’s difficult to judge what makes it worse, because the pain only comes on a few hours after your activity, and not during. Your pain tends to be worse in the afternoons rather than in the morning.

Loading – Pushing through your thumb pain while you work is not a good idea. Putting compromised tissue under strain is dangerous. Would you tow a car with a partially torn cable? No! Because it just needs that final pull or jerk that could cause catastrophic tissue damage. Loading soft tissue without knowing what it’s able to handle is dangerous & reckless.

Our experts know and understand the intricate anatomy of your thumb. There are many structures to test, and we even consider the complex biomechanics of each knuckle. We’ll accurately diagnose which structures are involved, and to what degree. This gives you a good idea what exactly is happening inside your thumb in order to establish the extent of the tissue damage.

During your evaluation, we’ll be stretching & stressing the soft tissue structures like muscles, ligaments, nerves and tendons. This way we can diagnose muscle tears, ligament sprains, tendinitis’s and nerve irritations. We’ll test different aspects like muscle strength, range of motion, flexibility and stability in order to confirm how severe your tissue damage is, which will lead us to tailor a treatment plan. Then we’ll customize the treatment to your specific needs. Therefore our specialists are the best at diagnosing thumb pain & thumb injuries.

The Process of Diagnosis

Diagnosis is a process of exclusion, not inclusion. Medical professionals are taught a process of elimination and deduction to identify the most possible diagnoses for your thumb pain. The better you can describe & elaborate on your pain, the better picture you’ll give us to understand what’s happened & what you’re feeling.

The practitioner uses their skills to eliminate diagnosis’s it’s not and zoom in on your problem. This elimination brings us to only a few possibilities to what could be causing your thumb pain. Then we test & assess all our possibilities to get to the root cause of your pain. We encourage you to be honest and open about what you’re feeling – to clarify, carry on or change our approach.

We have seen many patients with thumb pain and provide the best possible treatment for a faster recovery. Pain and stiffness after a thumb injury prevent you to grip or hold things. You might feel afraid to move, or scared you’ll damage it even more. We know that you’re anxious about the unknown, so that is why we are here to guide you and give you all the answers.

Your thumb pain treatment will be tailored according to various factors, but just to give you a broad idea, our focus of our treatments are:

1. Determine what structures are injured in your thumb
2. How bad is it injured?
3. Protect it from further injury
4. Help accelerate healing
5. Re-evaluate to monitor progress
6. Change and adapt as you get better

Hand therapy expert

Our experts can diagnose, test and treat any kind of thumb pain. We guide you to get rid of your pain as fast as possible. Our world class techniques & machines make sure you get the best value for your money. We will test a lot of different possibilities why you’re feeling this thumb pain in order to explain what’s going on in your body. It all depends on the results of our tests to determine what needs to be done. All our experts are hand specialists that can determine the slightest problem coming from your thumb, hand or wrist, so if you’re uncertain – we can help you.

Our experts determine multiple problems that can be involved, this means that we test everything to ensure we’re treating it the right way. This is our expertise & what we’re best at. We take on many roles to achieve your goals: Teacher, counselor, trainer, coach and engineer. As a teacher we explain the extent of tissue damage & the intricate details of your thumb pain & how it may affect other problems. As a counselor & pain expert, we’ll guide you every step of the way. As engineer we check the structural integrity of the tendons, ligaments & joints in your thumb.