POST-FRACTURE REHAB AND PAIN
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If you break your wrist, you get a cast for six weeks. When your cast comes off, your wrist feels awful. Then you get sent for two months of wrist therapy. At the end of the therapy, the doctor says your x-rays look good, but your wrist is still stiff, painful, and the range of motion is not what it should be. The doctor discharges you and says in a few months it will be fine. Well a few months pass and your wrist is not fine.
What the doctor or physical therapist typically won't tell you is that if you had a force hit your wrist strong enough to fracture it, you can be sure that your wrist ligaments were damaged. What is the worst treatment for ligament repair? Immobility! So your wrist ligaments were damaged and then you were immobilized in a cast for six weeks, you can bet they still aren't healed.
In my opinion to heal the wrist ligaments the best bet is Prolotherapy. This is why someone who has a fracture of a bone should consider getting Prolotherapy shortly after the cast is removed. This way the post-fracture rehabilitation can be taking place at the same time as the post-Prolotherapy wrist ligament repair. So at the end of two months the person has a strong wrist with full range of motion. Negating the ligament part of wrist fracture care is why a lot of patients have post fracture wrist pain. This also explains why other parts of the body, notably the foot/ankle (the lower extremity equivalent to the hand/wrist), also is notorious for having post-fracture symptoms including pain, stiffness, swelling, and reduced range of motion.
Prolotherapy to the ligaments in an area after a fracture is a good idea if the ligaments are very sore to palpation. Perhaps some day in the future this will be the standard of care, but until then remember if you or a loved one has had a recent fracture, consider getting Prolotherapy to the ligaments in the fracture site so post fracture symptoms don't develop.
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