Top 5 Tips to Protect Your Hands

What would we do without our hands? We use them all day, every day. You might be using one hand to scroll through this article and the other to hold your cup of coffee. We text, eat, email, drive, and cook food with our hands. If we don’t take the right steps to make sure our hands stay healthy and pain-free, these everyday tasks could become a lot more difficult – or even impossible.

Jessica Tumbleson, MOTR/L CHT, an occupational therapist and certified hand therapist, offers these five tips for protecting our hands from strain and injury:

1. Limit time spent texting. It is important to balance work and rest.
2. Write with a larger pen, so you don’t have to pinch as hard.
3. Wear gloves while doing yard work to protect from cuts and support joints.
4. Cut open packages using scissors instead of tearing to avoid pressure.
5. Carry coffee cup, pots/pans, etc. using both hands to balance the weight.

But, even if we do take all the right steps to protect our hands from injury, injury can still take place. Arthritis, for example, can set in as we get older or run in the family.

Queu: hand therapists. A hand therapist specializes in treating individuals with conditions affecting the hands and upper extremity such as arthritis, tendonitis, fractures, etc. A hand therapist provides fabrication of custom orthotics and therapeutic treatments to reduce pain, increase movement, strengthen, and restore function when the hand is injured.

If you have a hand injury or pain that’s been bothering you for a while, don’t hesitate to reach out and make an appointment with your doctor and get a referral to one our hand therapists.