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For such a seemingly small area, it’s amazing to realize just how much you rely on pain-free function of your wrists. Whether you work at a computer, you want to spoon soup into your mouth, or you need to carry a bag of groceries, healthy wrists play no small role in your life.
So, when you’re struggling with wrist pain, you want the fastest road to relief, which is our goal, too. The experienced and skilled team here at Western Orthopaedics has extensive experience with wrist and hand problems, and we understand the importance of regaining function as quickly as possible.
In some cases, this goal is best met through arthroscopic wrist surgery.
When it comes to orthopaedic surgical procedures, no technique has made more of an impact than arthroscopy. With arthroscopy, we only need to make very small incisions, through which we thread a special tube (an arthroscope) that features a light and a camera.
This instrument provides us with high definition, 3D views of the inner structures of your wrist.
Going a step further, we can also thread specialized instruments through the small incisions to perform any necessary repairs, using the camera to guide our work.
Ultimately, arthroscopy is both an excellent diagnostic and treatment tool.
Advanced imaging, such as X-rays, CT scans, and MRIs, has radically changed the way we treat patients. While these technologies are excellent at providing us a glimpse of the soft and hard tissues inside your body, they do have limitations.
Your wrist may be small, but it’s a complex area where problems can hide from view. With arthroscopy, we can gain better visual access to the inner structures in your wrist so we can locate a problem that advanced imaging was unable to find.
The other advantage of arthroscopy is that we can correct many issues in your wrist after identifying them. For example, we often turn to wrist arthroscopy to remedy:
From repairing a torn ligament to removing a cyst, there’s much that we can accomplish with wrist arthroscopy.
We typically perform wrist arthroscopy on an outpatient basis using only local anesthesia. Once we finish up your arthroscopy, we provide you with complete aftercare instructions, which include when you can use your wrist again.
Since we only make small incisions, your recovery time is greatly reduced over open surgery, but your exact timeline depends on the extent of the work we perform.
If you’d like to learn more about wrist arthroscopy, please contact one of our offices in Arvada or Denver, Colorado, to schedule a consultation with one of our wrist and hand specialists.
