@JCooper, have the surgeon refer you to a hand/physical therapist.
That is what I used to be (physical therapist).
RSI is generally a problem of multiple problems and that most people are mis/underdiagnosed initially-- which is the reason most people are unhappy with surgeries that address only a single problem.
Resounding agreement here.
my chiropractor discovered the numbness in my left hand was actually coming from my neck. Carpal tunnel surgery therefore would not have helped in my case.
It seems that people understand that a surgeon may be all too ready to operate. In a similar vein, if you're a chiropractor, every problem looks like it's originating from a spinal nerve root impingement caused by spinal misalignment. Quite ironically, chiropractors (in the US) are especially prone to overvalue the opinion of their own specialty because they practice in isolation from the rest of the healthcare universe and aren't confronted with opposing expertise on a day in and day out basis.
Who's right? Possibly everyone.
In fact, if you are getting numbness equally in your right/left hand, that's a sign that something maybe wrong with your neck since a problem there would affect both sides equally...
It's quite possible that this was true in your case, but the fact that someone has numbness in both hands is no certain indicator of the source of the problem. As you said very correctly up above, RSI is complex and there are often multiple sources of RSI.
and this would not be caught by hand surgeon who only looks from the shoulder down.
Don't be so quick to dismiss the hand surgeons. Like all other specialists, they certainly have a tendency to see the world through the lens of their own speciality, but hand surgery ranks as one of the more difficult surgeries that can be performed and hand surgeons are a subset of orthopedic surgeons and orthopedic surgeons are amongst the group of surgeons most likely to be working in close contact with physical therapists on a day in and day out basis.
The moral of the story isn't that hand surgeons are right or that they suck and just want to hack up your digits. The moral is that every person needs to be very very invovlved in his or her own healthcare decisions because the human body is so complex of an instrument that no one person can possibly see the entire field of evidence and that includes the patient himself. It's possible that everyone here who managed to recover from RSI without surgery could have been arm wrestling champions by now had they chosen surgery as their course of treatment. We just don't know what the alternative may have brought.
In general, it's better to seek conservative treatments like physical therapy, occupational therapy, or chriopractic care first because they're not as likely to cause permanent damage if the treatments don't work as expected. You can't "un-surgery" someone. On the other hand, sometimes the opposite is true. If someone has a problem that needs to be fixed by surgery, delaying that surgery could cause further trauma to the nerves and reduce a person's chances of a good recovery with or without surgery.
