Today was my last day working with the Hand to Shoulder Center and Cary Athlete’s Performance Center. Both were kind of slow days at these two locations, but there were a few things that I took out of each. Firstly, the coolest thing that I saw today at the Hand to Shoulder Center was a patient with trigger finger. This is like the opposite of Duputryen’s Disease, where you aren’t able to bend your fingers down, as they lock up. We saw a patient who didn’t have severe trigger finger, but it was bad enough to do treatment right there. Dr. Messer injected a cortisone shot into the patients hand and right away, you could see how the finger was loosening up. The patient was able to bend his finger further down to his palm. I did get to see what happens when the finger “triggers” and becomes locked in a bent position. Then, the coolest things that I saw at Cary Athlete’s Performance Center was that there were quite a few new patients who hadn’t been in yet and were getting everything checked. It was cool to see how they measure the angle of every joint to see what needs to be loosened and what is concerning. Another interesting thing that I saw today was two different types of dry-needling. There was the type that I saw on Friday where one needle is placed into the sore area and moved up and down and the other one was multiple needles in various spots of the sore area. I asked Mr. Meszler what the different purposes are and he told me that the one needle is for a specific muscle and is used to get deeper down in the muscle and the second with multiple needles is for a tendon where multiple spots of the tendon hurt. Overall, I was very grateful for this experience to shadow two new people and I learned a lot!
