@popolopo I understand not wanting surgery. I can tell you, as surgeries go, carpal tunnel release was not a bad recovery. I have also had cervical spine surgery and just recently 2 surgeries for an ankle fracture that were much more involved with longer recovery time. By far the ankle is the worst and I am still working on it and in a cast now 2 months after the injury. There are times that surgery improves a patient's quality of life when nothing else works. If wearing braces and reducing use of your hands helps, that 's good. Turmeric is a natural anti-inflammatory. Some people have talked about hand therapist stretches that can help carpal tunnel. In my case, I had carpal tunnel already and had picked up a small box in one hand when I was shopping and spread my fingers to hold it. My entire arm suddenly went completely numb for a few minutes, and after that, I had pains in my hand and wrist. What happened according to my surgeon, was that due to the pressure I was exerting, a nerve position was moved in my hand. If I touched the area between my thumb and forefinger, I got an electric shock because the nerve was compressed. That could only be resolved with surgery. My other hand has not had surgery, but when I overuse it, I do get some wrist pain. Topical arnica gel helps to relieve pain and that's over the counter. Also consider that muscles up and down your arm act like levers and pullies, and when something is overly tight, it affects everything because it has to compensate. It's common to have tight shoulders and neck muscles and through improper postures, the same nerves that pass through the wrist can be affected higher up in the shoulder or elbow. When you have multiple points of compression, they refer to this as a "double crush." That is why it is so important for doctors to figure out where the compression is because if they don't find all of it, and do surgery to fix something, the patient still has pain. That happened to me because thoracic outlet syndrome was missed, and the surgeon accused me of malingering, took my pulse and told me I was fine. I was telling him that my hand was turning blue and getting cold and he should have known that was a symptom of TOS, but it was easier to blame me for his mistake of not catching it. It was a few years later that I got a proper diagnosis form a neurologist. The job of a neurologist is to pinpoint the source of nerve pain and assess nerve function. The hand surgeon had only done a test where I put my hands together in a praying position, and then back of hands together... if that produced pain after a minute or 2, it was carpal tunnel and needed surgery, but that didn't address any other issues that contributed to that pain. I have been doing physical therapy with myofascial release which helps the TOS and it works by stretching the overly tight fascia and muscle which rehydrates it and gets it moving properly again. That would also be something you could try or a hand therapy specialist. We have a discussion on MFR. Here is the link. There is a provider search on the MFR website. According to my physical therapist, there is a point where physical therapy doesn't help when a condition has gone too far. That becomes a question for a surgeon at that point. You have to balance that against what your expectations are for your quality of life and do what you think is best. Any systemic cause of inflammation in your body can also make the inflammation of carpal tunnel worse. Sometimes, it is a dietary cause, and changing the diet to avoid inflammatory foods will help. It can also be related to something like thyroid issues, and these causes need to be ruled out or addressed if you have them for optimal health.
https://connect.mayoclinic.org/discussion/myofascial-release-therapy-mfr-for-treating-compression-and-pain/