Experience with the 'Carpel Tunnel Solution', 'Carpel RX' or alternative medicine for CTS

We have to be a little careful with that. This site advocates evidence based medicine and there are all sorts of problems with anecdotal reports of treatment outcomes in individual patients. Not only are genuine patient stories often misleading (note how popular they are in 19th century patent medicine adverts) but they are often deliberately placed by vendors attempting surreptitious advertising or, in the worst cases, simply made up. I do therefore moderate this quite tightly. I welcome stories from individuals of their experiences of 'alternative' treatments where I can be at least moderately sure of their provenance but one has to read all such reports against the background knowledge that almost none of these treatments have been subjected to proper scientific scrutiny. The best way to demonstrate provenance of an anecdote is to announce the intention to try something before starting and then religiously document the outcome - we can then see what proportion of the people who started out with an intervention found it helped - that's an 'observational study' - by no means the best kind of evidence but much better than anecdote.

While on the topic I might suggest a simple test for anyone considering spending money on an unproven treatment for CTS. Is the person/company selling you this treatment prepared to let you try it for free and only ask for payment if your problem is cured? (It is rumoured that practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine used to work on this basis but I have no idea if that is really true!) Treatments which can be tried on that basis and which do not look objectively dangerous can probably be experimented with in relative safety, as long as they do not delay you too much from using one of the treatments which ARE known to be effective.

Applying this test does not, incidentally, stop companies making a comfortable profit from a treatment which has no actual effect. If I give you a 'carpal tunnel ointment' consisting of aqueous cream which costs 30 cents to produce and charge you $100 if your symptoms resolve within 3 months then I'm going to make a tidy living from the 20% of patients whose episode of CTS resolves spontaneously. I'm unlikely to hear much from the 80% of people whose symptoms did not resolve and who I have given a free jar of ointment to and I'm certainly not going to put their stories on my sales website.

Final note just in case anyone mis-reads that last paragraph - I am in the fortunate position of not selling anything for CTS - I am salaried and my personal income is wholly uanaffected by what I write here - just to make things clear. JB

Yeah these ones seem to be scams, if I bought any for those amounts of money I'd like to be cured, not hurting the second I stop using it, as alot of people have mentioned. I almost bought the ctrac though. Isn't carpel RX just crap mini neader massager, for people who are to lazy to massage the area themselves? I use a jack knobbler with better results as I can apply more pressure.

Along with the rbt/quadraclicks mouse the Carpalrx seems to be working for me. Would be interested in what kind of jack knobbler/regimen you are using, though.