Diagnosing Wrist Pain for New Nurse Practitioners

clinical topics orthopedics Apr 27, 2021

An image of a woman pointing on her wrist with a text Wrist in white font color and the text Pain in black font color all in a yellow background.

Wrist pain is a SUPER common chief complaint in primary care. Most of the time, luckily, it’s chronic wrist pain that’s from overuse (versus the more acute, dangerous differential diagnoses with injuries), but it’s still a lot to work through as a new nurse practitioner.

Diagnosing Wrist Pain in Primary Care

In this week’s video, I’m covering the overview approach to diagnosing wrist pain in primary care for new nurse practitioners:

✅ What first triage questions to ask

✅ Red flags to watch out for

✅ History questions, physical exams and special tests to perform

✅ When to refer and when to consider getting imaging

NOTE ABOUT IMAGING - there's no specific link, I didn't have my notes in front of me so I didn't want to misspeak-- but what I said was correct in the video-- initial imaging for wrist pain includes posteroanterior (PA), lateral, and oblique views of the wrist!

Resources mentioned in this episode:

For further imaging guidance, this is a popular resource, but please note it's from a private company. You can verify further imaging on the American College of Radiology (ACR) website as well.