Transcript
The first thing people usually experience when they start having carpal tunnel symptoms is numbness. The numbness is often first noticed when people are sound asleep at night. It’s not uncommon for people to wake up once or twice a night with their fingers asleep. The fingers that are affected by carpal tunnel syndrome are the thumb index, middle and ring finger. Initially the symptoms can be mild and short lived, but as the condition progresses, those symptoms become more continuous so that people can start waking up several times a night. This is obviously distressing and is usually the first thing that leads people to seek medical attention for their problem. As carpal tunnel symptoms progress, they often then start to affect people with activities during the day. Repetitive and forceful activities or the things that are usually the most concerning for people as they can elicit increasing symptoms with use. As carpal tunnel symptoms progress from mild into more moderate compression, the numbness can then be associated with pain and even weakness as the symptoms of the nerve compression begin to be manifested in other ways. Eventually patients do seek medical care because the symptoms are typically not tolerated for very long before people become worried about it, and that’s natural.