Carpal Tunnel Syndrome ("CTS") is a condition characterized by pain, weakness, tingling, or numbness of parts of the hand, associated with the entrapment of the Median nerve between the carpal bones and ligaments of the wrist.
CTS is generally associated with overuse, misuse, or repetitive stress, and can occur in musicians, packagers, typists, or anyone else who tends to use their hands repetitively.
In an example of a very common perspective on CTS and related matters, one source states that the human body simply was simply not designed to perform the same movements for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. While that may have some validity in general and there are certainly a great many reasons to have more variety in our lives, it is not clinicallly useful, does not address the root cause of CTS, and leaves us with no options other than to avoid certain movements.
In general, we have seen that most CTS and other repetitive stress injuries are not caused by repetition or overuse, so much as by misuse and lack of relaxed and efficient musculo-skeletal patterns.
Most clients who present with CTS have extremely restricted movement of the shoulder girdle, and especially tend towards internal rotation of the shoulders,and other similarly related muscular imbalances. If the shoulders, arms, or torso are not moving freely and efficiently, the wrists will be overused, abused and will develop muscle tension and misalignment of bones and connective tissue that will cause the nerve impingement of CTS.
The surgical cure of scraping away bone in order to limit nerve impingement is a symptomatic approach that never addresses the functional breakdown that led to the problem to begin with. Even if the surgery is succesful, there are many more problems that can arise out of the original misfunction.
Clinical Somatics gets right to the root of the problem, addressing the larger musculo-skeletal problems that led to the wrist overuse, and creating more fluid movement and space in the wrist for the nerve to function, and teaching the client effective integration of the movement of the wrist and the whole body.
