Carpal tunnel surgery: Will you go back to work after?
Hello!
The main reason why people come to us to treat their carpal tunnel syndrome is they cannot use their hands, Which means they either cannot work properly, cannot do anything for themselves or look after important people in their lives.
As you know, I am not a fan of people going for surgery to fix pain as it usually ends up worse off than it was before.
So I wondered, how many people go back to work after Carpal tunnel surgery?
Let us look at what the research says.
I found a study that looked at how many workers had returned to work after 6 months and then after 12 months.
They found that of the 181 people that underwent the surgery “Six months following surgery of 181 subjects, 29 (19%) were out of work.”
“Twelve months postoperatively 33 subjects (22%) were out of work.”
So more people were out of work after a year than 6 months? That doesn’t sound good.
They found that “the factors associated with work absence at 6 months, at P ≤ 0.01, included preoperative physical functional status, change in self-efficacy between preoperative assessment.”
So this tells me that the main reason why people do not go to work after surgery is that their problem was so bad before the operation that there is not a great enough improvement after surgery to allow them to return.
In addition to that, the finds suggest that before the surgery some peoples’ ability to do things for themselves drop so much that they cannot return to work anyway.
This tells me two things, Not everyone who has the surgery will go back to how they were before.
The worse you are before the operation, the less likely it is that you will have a huge benefit.
Does that sound like good odds to you?
OR do you want to try something different before surgery won’t help anyway?
Jason
