Home Treatment for Repetitive Stress Injury

Paraffin Wax therapy is a very old technique used to reduce inflammation and stiffness in the joints of your hands or feet. Coating your hands in warm wax helps to increase circulation, providing relief for the pain, swelling, and stiffness that can accompany arthritis, repetitive stress injuries, or other acute injuries like broken fingers.

Today, wax therapy is often applied in physical therapy clinics, but you can also perform it at home by either purchasing an electric wax bath that heats up the wax to the right temperature, or by carefully heating it yourself in a double boiler. I’ll post detailed directions in the next post.

First, let’s look at the history of this treatment. Wax therapy has been practiced at least as early as the 1940s, and probably much earlier. A nurse in New York in the early 1940s tells of her experience treating patients with paraffin wax therapy, in her blog memoir:

One regular [patient] that I treated once a week was a very wealthy woman who lived on Park Ave. She was suffering from a horrible case of imprisoning arthritis. She was sitting in a wheelchair. She could not straighten her legs and was doomed to spend the rest of her life in that chair. Her problem when I saw her was stiffening of wrist and fingers. Dr. Hansson had prescribed hot wax baths for her hands. The servants had turned on the wax, I had to check the temperature before immersing her hands, one at a time. They were then wrapped in woolen cloth. When the comforting heat was exhausted, she received a mild massage. Dr Hansson once told me that if she had been fortunate enough to have been born an Italian immigrant she might have been a washer woman whose hands might have cured themselves from the hot water and the exercise.

Today, clinics have special machines that heat the wax to the right temperature, to keep it warm and pliant, but not too hot. The patient immerses her hand in the wax, raises it again to let the wax cool, then dunks them again to apply another wax coating. After 2-4 coatings, the waxy hand is wrapped in foil and then a towel to keep the heat in.

The patient sits for about 10 minutes with the wax application, and then the wax is cooled enough to peel off. Peeling off the wax is something like peeling off Elmer’s glue when it’s stuck to your palm—you can see your palm print in the wax. The treatment relieves stiffness and provides relief to aching fingers, especially in the joints.

Read the second part of this post, to learn how to treat yourself with Paraffin Wax therapy.

Possibly Related Articles:

• Paraffin Wax Therapy –Directions for Relieving Pain and Stiffness — Part 2 of 2
• Contrast Baths — Relieve Stiffness, Swelling and Pain without Ice
• Why Rain Causes Joint Stiffness for Arthritis and RSI
• What Qualifications Do Hand Therapists Have?
• The Therapeutic Way to Wash Your Holiday Dishes