How to heal finger tendons faster?

The finger's contradiction: the tendons that heal faster when moved and the one that heals only when never moved

How to heal finger tendons faster is a question whose honest answer contradicts itself, and the contradiction is the whole of the answer, because the finger holds tendons that heal faster when they are moved and one tendon that heals only when it is never moved, and a reader who does not know which tendon they have injured will apply the right rule to the wrong tendon and lose the finger's function for good. The flexor tendons run along the palm side of the finger, two to each finger, the superficial one bending the middle joint and the deep one bending the fingertip, and they run through a tight fibrous sheath held against the bones by a series of pulleys, a tunnel barely wider than the tendons themselves. When a flexor tendon is cut, by a knife or glass across the palm or finger, or ruptured, and is repaired with sutures, it heals inside that tunnel, and if it is held still while it heals the repair site sticks to the sheath around it with adhesions, so that the healed tendon cannot glide and the finger cannot bend or straighten fully. For decades after repair the hand was immobilised for six weeks and the fingers came out stiff, and hand surgeons then found that moving the repaired tendon gently from the first days, within a protective splint that holds the wrist and knuckles in a position that keeps the repair slack, limits the adhesions, keeps the sheath's nutrition flowing to a tendon with few blood vessels, and gives mobile fingers with fewer re-operations; the early controlled motion protocols that followed, passive at first and then active with the repair protected, are now standard, and for a repaired flexor tendon faster means moved, by a hand therapist who knows the protocol and the suture strength, since too much motion too early ruptures the repair and too little gives the stiff finger the protocol exists to prevent. The extensor tendon at the fingertip is the mirror image. In a mallet finger, the commonest closed tendon injury in the hand, a ball or a tucked sheet strikes the straight fingertip and pulls the thin extensor tendon off its attachment to the end bone, sometimes with a flake of bone, and the fingertip droops and cannot be straightened. That tendon heals only if its torn end is held against the bone continuously, which means the end joint splinted straight for six to eight weeks without a single bend, since the ends lie apart whenever the joint flexes and one bend in the early weeks lets the forming repair tear and the healing restart or fail, leaving a permanent droop. The splint is changed and the skin checked with the joint held straight by the other hand, and the reader who removes the splint to wash and lets the finger bend has undone the week; for that tendon faster means never moved, and the hand therapist's instruction is the opposite of the flexor's.

Jersey finger, the climber's pulley, the diagnosis as the first move, the floor, and where collagen does and does not sit

Two more finger tendon injuries complete the sorting, and each has a different rule again. A jersey finger is the deep flexor tendon pulled off the bone at the fingertip, classically when a rugby or football player grabs a shirt and the flexed finger is forced straight, and the reader cannot bend the fingertip while the rest of the finger moves normally, an injury easily missed as a sprain. It is surgical, and surgical soon: the detached tendon retracts into the palm, its blood supply tears as it goes, and after a few weeks it has shortened and scarred beyond reattachment, so the rule for a jersey finger is days to weeks, a specialist within the first week, and nothing a reader does at home shortens it. A climber's pulley injury is the fibrous rings that hold the flexor tendons against the bone giving way under a crimp grip, with a pop and pain at the base of the finger and, in complete ruptures, the tendon bowstringing away from the bone when the finger flexes; it is graded, and for most grades the rule is protective taping across the pulley with progressive loading over weeks to months and climbing resumed by grade, with surgery kept for complete ruptures of several pulleys. The first and fastest move for any finger tendon injury is therefore the diagnosis of which tendon, from a hand therapist or a hand clinic, within days, because the jersey finger's window closes, the mallet finger splinted late heals less well, and the flexor repair's early motion protocol starts in the first days; the hand's tendonitis, which is a different problem, is on the hand tendonitis page and the hand's ligaments, which have their own sorting, on the hand ligaments page. The floor under every finger tendon is the same as for every tendon: protein at the intakes an injured person needs, vitamin C as the cofactor for collagen stabilisation, not smoking, since nicotine constricts the already poor blood supply of a finger tendon and the complication rate after hand surgery roughly doubles in smokers, and sleep. Scar massage and the hand therapist's exercises matter more in the finger than anywhere, because adhesions in a tunnel that tight cost function directly. Collagen's protocol has no finger evidence at all. Its marker trial gave 15g gelatin with vitamin C an hour before jump rope loading and measured a blood marker in healthy men, and its one outcome trial gave 2.5g beside six months of calf strengthening for Achilles tendinopathy; no trial has given collagen after a flexor repair, for a mallet finger, after a jersey finger reattachment or for a pulley injury, and a repaired finger tendon's early weeks are not a loading stimulus of the kind the protocol was timed to. The adjunct therefore sits beside the eventual loading phase, the grip strengthening of a pulley rehabilitation or the resistance work late in a flexor protocol, if anywhere, and the stages that frame it are on the tendon healing stages page. The worked example is that adjunct at habit scale, stated on its true terms: two capsules, 1200mg hydrolysed type 1 marine collagen with 12mg vitamin C at 15% of its reference value plus zinc, 120 for £16.99 at 28p a day, lab tested and UK made, below the 15g protocol dose, carrying vitamin C's collagen formation sentence for cartilage and bones and no tendon claim. How to heal finger tendons faster: find out which tendon within days, move a repaired flexor under a therapist's protocol, never move a mallet finger's end joint for six to eight weeks, get a jersey finger to a surgeon in the first week, tape and load a pulley by grade.

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