Wrist fracture from falling
Dr. Perlmutter and Kelley, PA-C, discuss how they heal patients that have fractured their wrist after a fall with the latest medical techniques.
Transcript:
So, one of the things we see in our practice is a lot of followups related to ER or urgent care type practice. Somebody will have had a fall or something like that on an outside place and we're not available because it's after hours or such, and they'll go see urgent care or the emergency department, and then we get them in the aftermath. Can you talk to that?
Sure. Almost always a fall on an outstretched arm, particularly if you have a little osteoporosis or if it's a significant trauma may result in a fracture.
Sure.
And we see a lot of those uh whether it's a fracture, metacarpal bone in this part of your hand, a digit bone, and more frequently a bone in the distal forearm or the wrist. And we call it a wrist fracture.And if you fall with your arm out like this, if it was uh often the radius bone, which is this bone on the thumb side of your wrist that will fracture. And uh if you fall with your arm up like this, it'll fracture up in this position, and often we can get it to come back into a normal position without surgery, with splinting. But if you have really poor quality bone because of osteoporosis, we could talk about that in another session.
But if, that's the case, often you need surgery to fix that. And that typically involves a very modern design titanium plate, and screws that are placed on the bottom of the bone, after it's put back in its normal position. And the titanium plate stays in forever. And it's position and it's a usually a one hour surgery in the operating room.
So that's like an internal cast.
It's an internal splint for sure, it's a metal plate that crosses over the line of the fracture and holds onto both ends and keeps it in a perfect alignment and it holds it there until you heal, which takes about a month. If you smoke or you're diabetic, it's gonna take a lot longer. If you take calcium pills and vitamin D, it heals a lot faster.
Absolutely.
So if you've been out in the public and doing things that cause you to fall, we see them for all kinds of issues, and you're having problems that aren't being able to be resolved or you've been seen in an ER and they put you in a splint, come on in and see us and we'll give you some definitive care to make sure that gets done.
Right.
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