Hand Posture & Arthritis

[flutefry]

There are two kinds of category mistakes being made here:

1) autoimmune diseases have a common origin but attack different loci. The puzzle is why some of those with autoimmune diseases experience effects in different tissues (ski, joint cartilage symovia. Bowel, nervous system etc
2) joint diseases formerly lumped into one category, but that arise from different origins, and with improvements in diagnosis, have each been further subdivided.

I thank the previous poster for returning to the question of the OP, and summarizing my point succinctly

Hugh

[Peter Duggan]

Mostly what climbers get are soft tissue injuries, and if you think about it, most rock climbing does not involve the sort of MOI (Mechanism Of Injury) that’s required to produce osteoarthritis: Boney and or cartilaginous surfaces slamming together, or constantly rubbing together under (relatively) high pressure. With climbing, mostly the stresses are pulling your hand, finger, arm and shoulder joints apart, not pushing them together. The main exception here would be hand/fist jamming in crack climbing.

Similarly, there’s no real MOI for osteoarthritis in playing the pipes whistling or flute, as there are not sufficient forces generated in playing that will cause the boney surfaces in your finger and wrist joints wear.

No question that I have arthritic fingers (because I do), so the real question is what (if anything) caused mine. And the answer seems to be nothing in particular; it was going to happen anyway and is still quite manageable with common sense.

That said, I wince at the sight of real finger crack climbing of the type where you're twisting and locking your fingers into cracks barely wide enough to admit them, and wouldn't care to make a career of climbing those!