1. Strengthen and stretch your hands
An exercise programme to improve strength in muscles of the fingers and hands is recommended by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence after a large clinical trial last year showed that it reduced suffering and improved function in people with arthritis hand pain.
Researchers from the universities of Oxford, Birmingham and Southampton who developed the Strengthening and Stretching for Rheumatoid Arthritis of the Hand programme, a tailored 12-week hand-and-arm exercise regimen, say that exercises such as finger-pinching therapeutic putty or Play-Doh, squeezing putty between two fingers, and gripping a stress ball are all helpful.
Radial finger walking is also recommended: place your hand and forearm on a flat surface with your palm flat and facing down and your thumb stretched out away from your palm. Slowly walk each finger one by one, in the direction of your thumb. Once all of your fingers have moved, stretch your thumb away from your palm and begin the finger walking back again. Repeat four or five times on each hand.
2. Rub in hand cream
Victoria Jansen, a hand physiotherapist at the Royal Derby Hospital’s Pulvertaft Hand Centre, says that warming up the joints of the hand can help to relieve chronic aching, particularly before you perform gripping or strengthening moves.
“Just rubbing in some hand cream for five minutes is a great way to warm the joints,” she says. “Or you can fill a sink with bath-temperature warm water and gently move and swirl your hands in there for five minutes, which is very soothing.”
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If you knock or injure your hands or fingers, the NHS advice is to remove jewellery and apply a bag of frozen peas wrapped in a towel on the painful part of your hand for up to 20 minutes every two to three hours. Strapping a painful finger to the next finger with tape and a small piece of cotton wool between the two can provide relief. If pain is severe or you experience tingling or loss of feeling in the hands or fingers you should seek medical attention.
3. Cross your fingers
Some relief from finger injury and pain can come from crossing your fingers, according to researchers at University College London, who showed that the action confuses the way the brain processes feelings of hot, cold and pain.
For the trial, Patrick Haggard, professor of neuroscience at UCL, applied a warm thermal pad to the index and ring fingers of participants and a cold pad to the middle finger, a trick known as the thermal grill illusion, which triggers a phantom burning pain. Haggard reported that pain disappeared when his participants were asked to cross the middle finger over the index or ring finger so that it was no longer in the middle.
It works by affecting the “brain pathways that underlie pain perception” and “raises the interesting possibility that pain levels could be manipulated by applying additional stimuli, and by moving one part of the body relative to others”, he says.
Failing that you could try swearing. A study at Keele University showed that people allowed to use conventional swear words after holding their hand in an ice bath had a 33 per cent better pain tolerance than those asked to respond with made-up words such as “fouch” and “twizpipe’’.
