Playing sports should always be encouraged for the physical health benefits offered. As with any sport, accidents may happen. Injuries may happen during the game, or build up over time through the use of extended play. Knowing the 3 most common sports hand injuries could help you increase your chances of preventing injury.
Wrist Sprains
Depending on the sport, your wrist could seriously take a beating. A few examples of games that heavily involve the wrists are bowling and golf, but other sports such as basketball contain a fair amount of wrist usage as well.
The wrist is made up of many small ligaments, tendons, nerves, and bones. A common injury is a wrist sprain, in which there is damage to ligaments in your wrist. These typically happen spur of the moment when your wrist endures sudden trauma, such as bending your wrist backwards.
Scaphoid Fractures
Fractures may happen anywhere on your hand, but the most common type of fracture is one that is located at the bottom of your hand towards your wrist. It is a small bone that is fractured more often than others.
A scaphoid fracture is one that usually happens when you fall onto your hand, a natural instinct to prevent yourself from a nasty fall. This means that your hand, specifically your wrist, has to bear the weight of the fall. A weakened hand/wrist increases your chances of fracture, but the sheer trauma puts anyone who plays sports at risk.
Thumb Sprains
As with wrist sprains, thumb sprains involve the ligaments specifically located in your thumb. Oftentimes you will sprain your thumb when you jam it, or bend it in a peculiar way. When your thumb faces sudden trauma from an object or is jammed into someone or something accidentally, it will most likely result in a thumb sprain.
A term known as “skier’s thumb” has been dubbed because of the numerous amount of times skiers sprain their thumbs. Other occurrences are common in basketball where a player tries to catch a ball that lands awkwardly onto their thumbs.
Sprains are different from fractures in the sense that fractures involve bones. Bone fractures usually will heal to full potential, whereas ligament injuries may sometimes cause unwanted bouts of pain even after the healing process has finished.
Sports related hand injuries might occur from weakened wrists from overuse, such as computer usage. Talk to a Los Angeles hand surgeon today to find out how you successfully treat your hand injuries.