If you are suffering with trigger finger and are looking for a way to stop it without surgery, well you have came to the right place. I was in your shoes 5 short months ago, but today, my trigger finger is gone. So today, I want to tell you exactly how I was able to avoid surgery, and heal my trigger finger.
Before I tell you what I did, I want to be as thorough as possible and give you as much information about this process as I can. You may be thinking, well I am sure my trigger finger is a lot worse than what yours was. I doubt mine will be able to be healed without surgery. And if you thought that, I wouldn’t blame you, I thought the same thing about mine. Now I have had trigger finger twice in my life now, the first time I was 20, and I had surgery to correct it. When I turned 31 though, I got it in my other hand. This time I just told myself I would tough it out and deal with it. And I did for a good while. But then things started to get more difficult and painful. Every morning my finger would be stuck in the bent position and I would have to use my other hand to manually straighten in out. Sometimes it would take 20 minutes or so of bending and unbending it with my other hand before I could get it to function properly. Then, it would ache throughout the day. I was unable to use that hand to tie my shoes. Playing with my kids became difficult because I couldn’t hold things. On a scale from 1 to 10 on how much pain it was causing me, especially in the mornings, it was a 10. It would bring tears to my eye when I had to straighten my finger and that nodule went through that tendon sheath. The bad thing is I have a family history of trigger finger. How many more times in my life would I have to deal with it?
So I decided it was time to have surgery after letting it go on for well over a year and letting it get to the point it was almost unbearable. I hated the idea of getting the surgery because I knew from before it would take a good while before my hand was back to normal and you have to stretch your finger every hour which was quite painful, similar to what I had to do in the morning, though now it was every hour. I called to schedule an appointment and I asked about the cost of the procedure, it was $5000! It was only $2000 when I had it done 10 years ago so I was a bit shocked. And now with insurance the way it is and high deductibles I knew I was going to have to pay most of that out of pocket. So at this point, I started searching for ways to deal with it myself.
Now I had tried the stretches I had seen from Youtube videos to help with trigger finger and they never worked for me. Actually my trigger finger seem to get worse after trying them. So I knew that those would not work. I began doing some research, and I happened to come across an article that featured an excerpt from the book, The Doctor Who Looked At Hands, by John Ellis MD.
Dr. Ellis said that the condition could be treated with vitamin B6, specifically in the form P5P, not only could trigger finger be healed with P5P, so could carpal tunnel and arthritis. Dr. Ellis said that in his 30 years of working with hands, of all the patients he saw with trigger finger, every one of them had been healed after taking P5P for 6 months. So I decided to find out if it was true and I purchased this bottle of Now Foods P5P 50 mg vitamins from my local health foods store and began taking them.
So now it’s been nearly 5 months since I began taking them, and the verdict is in, it worked! As you can see I no longer have trigger finger, when I wake up in the morning, it is no longer locked and it doesn’t ache during the day.
I took 3 of these pills a day, in fact I am still taking them because I want to finish out the 6 months. My schedule for taking them looked like this:
I took one 50mg pill in the morning, around 6:30am,
I took one 50 mg pill in the evening, around 4 pm,
And I took one 50 mg pill right before bed, about 11pm.
I have done this every day. I started seeing improvements pretty quick too. Within 2 weeks, it was noticeably better and just continued to improve. Also I experienced no bad side effects from taking these vitamins. The only thing I have noticed was my urine is brighter yellow shortly after taking a pill, but after researching it’s just because of the extra riboflavin in your body from the bills, but it’s completely harmless.
Now I started this in September, and saw continuous improvements, but I wanted to mention this just for reference for the others who do this, when November or December came around I started having a bit of soreness in my trigger finger, I had a week or so that my finger actually seemed to start hurting more, not as much as before I started taking the vitamins, just a little bit more than I was used to, because I had really not had much pain from it at all any more except for the minor stiffness when I first took off the splint first thing in the morning. I think it may have been because it got pretty cold outside at this time and I was outside a good deal and the weather bothered it, but it seemed to get better within a week or so and no longer was an issue after that like it had been before.
Now there are a couple of other things I can recommend that will help even further. After all you want to get rid of it for good, but you also don’t want to live with the pain until 6 months is up. The first is to wear a finger splint when you sleep. This is the type that I wear. I actually have worn this one until about 2 weeks ago. Now your finger may lock in the straight position when you wear this at night, but it was so much less painful bending it in the morning. Without it, before when I started this program the pain was a 10/10, but once I started taking the pills and wearing the splint at night the pain was maybe 4/10 in the morning by the 3rd day. It continued to get less and less. It was only slightly stiff after removing the splint in the morning at 4 months. Now I just stopped wearing this splint while I slept a couple week ago. Now my finger was still a bit sore when I took it off in the morning, not a lot just a little, and I think it was due to my finger being immobile all night. I probably could have taken it off a lot sooner, I was just hesitant my finger would be locked in the bent position in the morning, and I would much rather have the slight stiffness than the terrible pain I had before it. So if you do decide to wear a finger splint, you probably won’t need to wear it as long as I did, but you will find it's not really that much of an inconvenience to wear it at night so your tendon rest. I just happened to fall asleep without it one night and woke up the next day without any pain and not locked, that's why I ceased using it and it’s been fine ever since.
Another thing that I did for about a week at the beginning, just to give my trigger finger some more rest, I wanted to keep it from bending during the day as much as possible, but I obviously didn’t want to wear this big thing, so I taped my knuckle with band-aids like this to keep it from bending. This did help quite a bit in reducing my pain. Again I only wore it like this for a week or so. If it doesn’t bother you much to do this, I would try wearing it longer. The longer you let the tendon rest, the better off you will be.
Finally, if you feel like your finger is getting stiff, get a large bowl of hot water and soak your hand in it. At first just place your hand in there and don’t bend your fingers for about 5 minutes, but after about 5 minutes slowly open and close your hand for another 5 minutes, maybe even ten. Just slowly though. I did this each night for about the first month, and occasionally during the day time depending on if I had any aches in there. Some days I would use my hand a lot like after I shoveled or raked and put some stress on my trigger finger, and this really helped.
So now I no longer need surgery, my trigger finger has been healed. I know this was a little lengthy, but I really wanted to try and give you all of the information I could. I am sure there may have been some minor things I may have missed, but please feel free to drop me a comment, I would be glad to answer any questions you have. These steps worked great for me, and I think they will work for you too. I know how painful trigger finger can be, that's why I really wanted to share this information because I hope that it helps others too. And if it’s not too much to ask, would you mind liking the video and even subscribing? It helps the video rank better in the search results by doing so and makes it easier for others to find this information. I hope you find relief for your trigger finger friend, God Bless!
Here are the P5P Vitamins I purchased: http://amzn.to/2l5u7Gx
The finger splint I used was similar to this one: http://amzn.to/2kHiTqG