Here are some tips to prevent the problem:
Stop the activity that’s aggravating things. Stay away from your device for a while or take frequent breaks. “It’s okay to put your phone down. We shouldn’t be slaves to the machine,” Dr. Meredith Osterman, a physician at the Philadelphia Hand Center, said at a conference in Kenya recently.
Use voice-to-text feature on your phone to give your fingers a break from typing.
Try typing with a stylus to cut down on the repetitive motion for your thumb.
Switch hands so that one hand isn’t doing all the work.
Place your phone on a table and type from there. “The worst position is where you’re holding it in one hand, palming it in your hand, and then using your thumb to do everything,” Osterman said. “Any position where the phone is at rest…is going to be less irritating.”
Try not to use the same muscles for other activities. For example, texting and then playing video games may not be a good idea.
If rest and ice don’t get rid of the pain, treatment options include putting the patient in a little splint that immobilises the area for a few weeks and rests the tendons, or injecting medicine around the tendons to break up some of the inflammation, Osterman noted. Some people need surgery but that’s “very few and far between,” she added.
If you feel a sharp shooting or burning pain, or numbness and tingling, it could mean a problem related to injuring a nerve, which can be harder to treat.
Bottom line: give your hands a break.
“The thumb is essential for many things, from being able to use a baseball to writing to picking up things. But I don’t know if nature intended the thumb to text as much as we do,” Osterman said
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