The Importance of Physical Therapyin Hand Surgery

Hand surgery is an important subspecialty of surgery. Although we think that the most important difference separating humans from the other animals on earth is the mental ability created by our brain, we must not forget that we largely use our hands when putting what we think into practice. For this reason, in situations where we lose our hand functions due to accidents, congenital anomalies or diseases, our life as a whole is greatly affected and changes for the worse.

After hand surgery, in which problems of the hand are addressed, patients must be enrolled in a physical therapy and rehabilitation programme so that the functions of the hand are regained. There are many small bones between the bones of the wrist, palm and fingers. Between the bones there are a large number of small joints, a separate joint capsule for each joint, ligaments that provide joint stabilisation by preventing unwanted movements of the joints, muscles and tendons that give movement to the joints, and pulley systems that help the tendons work correctly. In addition, the vascular structures that provide circulation in the hand and the nerves that distribute its sensation run between all these complex and delicate anatomical structures.

The ultimate goal in hand surgery is not only to ensure the integrity of all these complex anatomical structures, but to maintain or restore the function of the hand. In other words, any surgical procedure that you cannot conclude with a mechanically mobile hand is in fact a suboptimal result.

To achieve absolute success in hand surgery, that is, for a hand whose movement has been restricted after surgery, sometimes for the healing of bones or tendons and sometimes to relieve the patient's pain, to regain its former functions, hand rehabilitation is needed. In patients whose hand movement is restricted, if movement is achieved by applying more force than necessary, the repaired anatomical structures may be damaged. It also affects patient comfort adversely because it will cause pain. If appropriate force is not used, there may be joint stiffness (freezing), shortening of tendons and sometimes irreversible loss of hand function.

Before all hand surgery procedures, I try to inform my own patients, as best I can, not only about my own surgical process but also about the postoperative physical therapy and rehabilitation process. For some of my patients, I also arrange for them to be evaluated by the physical therapy team in the preoperative period and informed about the process. I believe that only surgical applications performed in this way will help the hand, a person's most important limb, perform its function in the best way.