My father had Dupuytren surgery (he would not have gone through with it had we read about your site beforehand) and he has lost a significant amount of strength in his hand and his pinky finger is already starting to bend again only three months after his surgery in November!   Is there anything you can recommend to help him regain strength and slow down progression of it happening again?     Thank you!

Greetings,

Open-hand surgery for palm lumps and cords has a fairly fast rate of Dupuytren recurrence, so I will assume this is the type of surgery he had.  With his three month reappearance of finger flexion he must must be terribly discouraged.   Many people at this point are advised by the same surgeon that another operation should be done to improve the results of the first surgery.

I advise that your father thinks long and hard about the wisdom of multiple surgeries to accomplish the elusive “surgical correction” for DC.   From my experience while collecting reports from people around the world, people who have rapid Dupuytrens recurrence (fingers flexing toward the palm again, return of palm nodules and cords) or otherwise poor results (pain, finger and hand numbness, coldness and weakness) after hand surgery will find that additional surgeries will usually only lead to an even worse outcome, not a better outcome.   If he is at all considering additional hand surgery he should get a second opinion from the best hand surgeon he can find, preferably from someone who is located far outside the area where he lives.  This is a good idea because if you get a second opinion from someone local it will tend to be less honest and objective.

By following a good upper body and hand exercise program, and using a varied Alternative Medicine treatment plan such as you see on the DCI website, it might be possible for your father to support and enhance his ability to reverse some of contracted tissue.  There is no way to know for sure if this will work for him, especially since he has had one hand surgery.  But I do hear from DCI readers who report variable improvement with these conservative methods.  It is my opinion it is worth the time and effort to see if it can slow down the progression and perhaps even reverse some of the tissue changes.  TRH