Description
Video Player
Transcript
I’m Theresa Wyrick and I’m an orthopaedic surgeon and I specialize in hand and upper extremity surgery at UAMS Health. I knew from a very young age that I wanted to go to medical school and I wanted to be a doctor. Really my passion was working with my hands and providing musculoskeletal care. I think it comes from a background of growing up on a farm and I was the
oldest daughter and so often times that meant that I was my dad’s first helper. I also grew up playing a lot of sports. I played basketball. I ran and so restoring musculoskeletal health to people was something that really made sense from that standpoint as well and has really become a passion of mine. I grew up in Arkansas. Um, my family still lives in Little Rock and um,
so it’s been really a great experience to be able to treat people who are my neighbors and friends. The most common things I see would be um, arthritis conditions that affect the hand and wrist. We also see nerve compression issues, most commonly being carpal tunnel syndrome. We’ll see many overuse tendinitis type issues including, trigger finger or uh, De Quervain’s tenosynovitis, tennis elbow, things of that nature. We also see a lot of traumatic injuries and those would include fractures of the hand and wrist and fingers. Also tendon injuries. The tendons are those structures that move the fingers. And so when a tendon is cut, then we would repair that. And then nerve injuries as well. So in the unfortunate incident where a nerve is cut,
then we would repair those through microscopic techniques to restore sensation and function to the hand. I think that the biggest thing that I like to offer my patients is really a listening ear. It’s my job to use my knowledge and training and my experience from doing this for 15 years in the practice of hand surgery to give them the options to give them what I would
recommend as far as treatment, but then also to say what do you want to do? Um what’s your goal?
