Know More About Hand Surgery

Hello Friends, I am Dr Anubhav Gupta and I am consultant Plastic surgeon working at Sir Ganga Ram Hospital, today I am going to talk about hand surgery. Now hand surgery is a very vast felid which involves a lot of conditions like if you look at congenital since birth there are many kids who have absence of finger, absence of thumb, then there are many times the fingers are joined that condition called Syndactyly, then there are many time extra digits which is polydactyly. So these are the common conditions which are present in our hands at the time of birth. Then there are many conditions which are acquired like for example, there are injuries, common cuts in kitchen then finger getting into the washing machine simple cut by knife then road traffic accident wherein the part of the hand is cut from the body it is amputation and abrasions, avulsions, crushes, bruises. All these kind of injuries, loss of tissue, fracture all these comes into under the preview of hand surgery, then injury to nerve tendence. Then the third group is the burns, burns related when there are burns of the hand they cause contracture they cause the abnormal position of the joints with the inability of the person to do his works. These all category comes under the gament of hand surgery. Now, who is qualify to do hand surgery, with the basic training of at least and a person should be a qualified orthopaedic surgeon or a plastic surgeon which special interest and having worked in the field of hand surgery, such people are more qualified to do hand surgeries. I always tell that we should never take any injury to the hand lightly because there are very important vital structures which are moving under the skin. There are tendons and nerves lot of things which make this hand work. So even if thus a small it should always be super wise examined by an expert because even a small cut can cause injury to a vital structure leading to loss of function.

You can compare our hand to a crane, for example, the crane has a metallic part then there it has a lot of wires which act as pully, picking up the weight and it has a wires circuitry which is electricity which provides it. Similarly, if you look at our hand the bones soft tissues provide the framework of metal just like a crane and the pullies the tendons and the ligaments they are the pullies for lifting the weight and electric circuitry are the nerves. So, if we look at this analogue hand, works like a crane so any part of this complex system if it is injured then it is not working properly. Again another thing which we should understand it many times even after surgery the return to function depend a lot of things like Physiotherapy exercise what your surgeon tells you. It is like a machine if we don’t lose it, it will rust and it will not work. So we have to understand the complexity of the injury, the outcomes which are dependent or not only on the surgery but lot of other factors for example, the education of the person, if he is well educated there is always a chance the person will understand the mechanism how his hand works he will be able to get a better result as compare to the person, who doesn’t understand the importance of these systems.