If you’re suffering from psoriatic or rheumatoid arthritis, you may have painful, swollen hands. Soothe your hand pain with these easy exercises from Peggy Brill, PT. This simple, three-step routine will ease your aches and reduce your swelling.
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[MUSIC] Hi, My name is Peggy Drill/g. I'm a physical therapist and I have created simple three step routine, to help my patients with psoriatic or rheumatoid arthritis. To treat painful swollen hands, let's get started. I'm here with Christine, and the first exercise that we're going to do for her hands, is what's called the hands press, the palm press.
So you're going to put your fingers together and what you're going to do, is you're going to stretch in both directions and you're going to just bend the fingers backwards and then go the other way and the top hand is actually pushing the other one just within your comfort zone, back and forth.
Commonly when people do this palm press stretch you'll see them moving their whole wrist and arms, what you want to do is keep your wrist stationary and move your fingers on top of your hands. This exercise is great for stretching out the fingers underneath on the palm, and helps with lubricating the knuckles of the hand and you just take it up to where you feel the stretch, you don't want to create pain.
And the next exercise is called Spleng/g and closing, and what you're going to do, is you're just take your fingers, and you're going to open them as wide as you can and then bring them together again. Open stretching out the thumb and the pinkies, and then bring them together and this helps to open up the joints, and gives space in there and moves the hand deeper down into here.
And our final exercise is figurate/g. You just reach out your hands in front of you and you're going to drop your wrist down and you're going to bring them up and over, almost like you're orchestrating. This is both helpful for your wrist and for your hand there is all these little bones in your wrist that allow you to make all these sudden movements and it's great to get the motion gently there and to lubricate the joints without creating stress.
And again just moving in the range that feels comfortable for you. And then just like that, really. I'm like yeah, good.
Rheumatoid arthritis is an autoimmune disease that causes joint inflammation and triggers pain, swelling, fatigue and other symptoms. Find out how to treat and manage rheumatoid arthritis flare-ups.
