My father had surgery on his right hand approx 12 yrs ago and got RSD after the surgery during PT. It was a long and frustrating strugle but his right had improved and did quietly well but it took a long time with PT and a medication called Elavil. He never had a nerve block but I have worked with patients that had them and sometimes they work and sometimes they don't. Last Friday my dad had his left hand operated on and we pray that he does not get RSD again.

Hi Carol,

unfortunately it seems to be a not too rare side effect that surgery triggers new Dupuytren nodules. In my case sympathy even extended to the not operated hand, and after surgery of the single cord that I had on the left hand I got 3 new nodules on the left and three on the right hand. They grew much, much faster than the original cord and I could only stop them with radiation therapy. After that therapy I still have two cords that keep growing very slowly and I developed another nodule in the not radiated area. I don't want to advocate radiation therapy, everyone should decide on her/himself and it anyway seems hard to get in the US, but at least surgery should really be the last resort. In my case it even made things worse.

Wolfgang

My partner had surgery on her r hand almost 3 years ago and following the surgery she was in significant pain for months. For air to even pass over her hand felt like glass. The surgery initially improved her hand maybe 50%, but over time she lost some of that improvement. Also, this is purely conjecture, but following the surgery her left hand involvement seemed to speed up and in fact is now worse than her right hand ever was. The other thing that we have noticed is that many joints in her body are painful. She had right shoulder surgery almost five years ago (rotator cuff), however, it was interesting because when the surgeon went in he remarked afterwards that it wasn't quite what he expected. We never really got clarification. Well now that her left hand is so painful, her left shoulder is also having problems. The doctor says rotator cuff. I started researching and came across this article in The Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery, 1995, 5:677-683 called "The Pathology of Frozen Shoulder: A Dupuytren-like Disease".

My question is has anyone else out there experienced shoulder problems on their affected duputren's side?

If you're new to this site its confusing because it's not actively organized into precise topics.

However, Frozen Shoulder has come up quite a number of times and there is definitely a strong correlation with Dupuytrens. I believe it has to do with the body's inability to handle collegan normally.

Try going down the date column on this forum to 9/29/05. The topic "www.frozenshoulder.com" has a number of threads relating to this.

Also there's a technique oft mentioned on this site to treat Duypuytrens referred to as N.A. It's much less invasive (and appaarently more successful in many cases) than traditional surgery, but not yet accepted by the mainstream medical community. A good place to find lots of info is:

http://www.handcenter.org/newfile16.htm

Also if you skim through various topics on this forum you'll find lots of first hand accounts.

You might also want to start a new topic with Frozen Shoulder in the title and might get more response to your question that way.

(A tip: if the title has already been used somewhere long ago, your topic will be rejected and entry will disapper . A good idea to copy before submitting. Then, if topic vanishes, change its title slightly, and try again!)

Best of luck to you and your partner in dealing with this.

Susan