NOTE: neither the following post nor anything else on this web site should be construed as medical advice. I am only conveying my own experiences. As always in this life, you alone are responsible for the outcome of your own actions. If you want to listen to your doctor, listen to your doctor. If you don’t, don’t. Your decision has nothing to do with me and I am not responsible for anything that happens to you.
Back when I was a kid, maybe ten or so, I remember seeing a segment on one of those daytime TV shows, about how doctors are fallible people with fragile personalities like the rest of us. The point of the story was that many doctors feel pressured, both by their own egos and by patients who expect them to be magic answer factories, to come up with an instant diagnosis and a solution for every ailment. The result can be that patients are misdiagnosed and receive inappropriate treatment. The host of the TV show suggested that patients should use their brains when they’re seeking medical advice, and voice their suspicions if a doctor’s diagnosis doesn’t sit right with them.
As a ten-year-old girl this information floored me. A doctor can be wrong? I have to worry about this? At this early point it hadn’t yet occurred to me to question adults, never mind adults with authority. But that TV show stuck with me, and as I got older I fine-tuned my radar to the point where the very first hint of malarkey from a doctor would prompt me to bring him back down to earth in a most abrupt way (doctors hate me, but I am the queen of avoiding unnecessary treatment). In recent years the internet has made this even easier, by allowing a smart person to seek out information and have a good idea of what’s going on before ever setting foot in a doctor’s office. Again, I’m sure doctors hate this— there must be zillions of idiots every day who flock to emergency rooms convinced they’re dying of stomach cancer, only to learn that the mexican food they had last night simply didn’t agree with them. But for those who are level-headed and savvy of web nonsense, the internet can be a great source of knowledge.
Case in point: six months ago I slipped on a marble floor and put my hand out to break my fall. I landed on my thumb, which was violently yanked back under my wrist. Suspecting nothing worse than a sprain, I left the hand alone and avoided using it as much as possible. After two weeks, the soreness had not subsided, so I made an appointment at the hospital, who referred me to their head of orthopedics. I was x-rayed and examined, and within half an hour I was told that I’d torn my ulnar collateral ligament. I was then advised that the ligament would never repair itself, and I should immobilise the joint for two weeks and prepare for surgery, which would involve taking a piece of ligament from another joint and screwing it onto the relevant bones. Yikes.
Even as I sat in the doctor’s office with my hand throbbing, I was thinking this diagnosis couldn’t be right. I’m not sure where my doubts came from, because Turkey has an excellent health care system with state-of-the-art facilities and highly trained professionals, but I just couldn’t picture myself having surgery for this. I did, however, welcome the idea of immobilisation, and so I bought the recommended thumb support and started using that immediately. The doctor warned me not to be fooled by any apparent improvement that using the brace might indicate. I took his warning with a grain of salt and went home with a reminder card for my follow-up appointment.
When I got home with my brace I started trawling the internet for any information I could find about my diagnosis. As always with any topic, I found a spectrum of opinions ranging from one end of crazy (“leave the ligament alone and The Lord will heal it if it is His desire”) to the other (“forget it, it’s ruined, just cut the whole hand off and throw it away”), and everything in between. But what really spoke to me were the hundreds of people I found who had the same injury I had, and who, like me, didn’t think that surgery was the answer. Some of them had tried alternative therapies, others had relied on gels and creams, all with varying degrees of success. Very few reported complete recovery without surgery. Some had developed painful arthritis in the joint. It was all very scary to read.
But I firmly believe that regardless of general truths and blanket tenets, each person is a different case to be considered separately, and I knew that just because surgery was the right choice for many people, it didn’t necessarily mean it was the right choice for me. So I pressed on with my stubbornness. I researched alternative therapies. I also read up about doctors who are pressured by hospital administrators to recommend surgery automatically for certain listed conditions because surgery provides greater income for the hospital— someone has to pay for all those facilities and fancy machines, after all.
My greatest source of information, however, came from the mouths of people I actually spoke to in the flesh. Basically I asked every person I encountered whether they had any experience with torn ligaments. A surprising percentage had, and almost all of those rolled their eyes and gave me the knowing nod when I said that my doctor had recommended surgery. Surgery had been recommended to them, as well, and many of them had also declined. Perhaps they’d gone with physical therapy or with another treatment, but in just about every case the ligaments healed eventually despite what the doctor had said about surgery being necessary. Or, in a few cases, the person had caved under the doctor’s pressure and the surgery had actually rendered the joint more problematic than it had been in the first place.
I tore up the card for my follow-up appointment and made the decision to wait it out. I didn’t have a specific plan as such, but in general I thought I’d continue to wear my brace for six months and see how that went (I’d read about many people for whom simple immobilisation was the magic answer), and if that didn’t work then I’d cross the next bridge.
I don’t remember the exact date of the first time I forgot to put on my brace. I guess I’d been wearing it pretty faithfully for a couple of months, and then one day I got out of the shower and just forgot to put it on, which indicates to me that things were already healing— usually within a few minutes of removing the brace the pain and weakness would remind me to put it back on. I only wore it sporadically after that, until eventually it got lost somewhere (it’s probably under the sofa now). There were a few days here and there where things felt a bit delicate, but I was advised by a skier friend of mine (who has torn many ligaments in her career) that the road to recovery is never linear and I shouldn’t worry unless things seemed to be getting steadily worse.
Fast-forward to last night, sitting with my hands out in front of me, staring at them, wiggling the thumbs around and for a brief second trying to remember if it was the left one or the right one that was injured. I pointed out to my boyfriend that the range of motion is pretty much the same in both thumbs now. I gave him a demonstration wiggle, to which he responded with a warning to be careful and not overdo it. It’s so tempting to test the limits of the joint when you can’t quite believe it’s better.
And to think, if I had just blindly accepted what the doctor told me, I’d have screws in my thumb now, and scars, and possible nerve damage, and at least a year of physical therapy ahead of me. And I’d be several thousand dollars lighter in the pocket. It remains to be seen, of course, whether I develop arthritis in my thumb, but I think there comes a point where you have to weigh the maybes against the other maybes and make your choices. Those who have surgery often develop arthritis anyway, so even if it does happen in later years, it will impossible to say what exactly was the cause.
I’m not recommending that you should go out and tell your doctor where to stick his advice. There’s a reason medical schools exist, and in general doctors are competent professionals who know what they’re talking about. But one thing they don’t know, and indeed can’t know, is what it feels like to be you, and how your body feels from the inside. Learn to recognise red flags and trust your suspicions in a well-informed manner. Each of us is an intelligent, intuitive individual, and in this age of the ridiculously obvious safety advisory (warning: hot coffee is hot), it’s empowering to look out for yourself as well, because no one is better equipped to do so than you.
I’ll keep you updated on the thumb.
