Principal Hand Occupational Therapist
BHSc (Occupational Therapy), University of Sydney · Diploma in Occupational Therapy, Nanyang Polytechnic · Registered with the Allied Health Professions Council, Singapore
Nigel is one of the two clinicians who review every article on this site. Here’s his background, so you can judge for yourself what that review is worth.
Training
Nigel graduated with a Diploma in Occupational Therapy from Nanyang Polytechnic in 2005, supported through the three years by a bursary scholarship from Changi General Hospital. He started work almost immediately after graduating.
In 2007 he began night classes towards a Bachelor of Health Science in Occupational Therapy at the University of Sydney, studying while working full time in the hospital.
Hospital years, and how hands happened
His early work at Changi General Hospital was inpatient occupational therapy in orthopaedics and musculoskeletal care: people recovering from fractures, surgery and injury, relearning how to manage daily life.
Then came years in outpatient hand therapy, treating fingers, hands, wrists, forearms and elbows. That’s where the interest stuck. Hand injuries are unusually measurable: you can see a patient go from barely using the hand to close to full function, and you can watch the difference week by week.
Wanting more time with those patients than a hospital outpatient schedule allows is what took him into private practice.
What he treated
Over thousands of treatments across the fingers, hand, wrist, forearm and elbow:
- Hard tissue: bony fractures
- Soft tissue: tendons, ligaments, cartilage, muscle
- Joint stiffness following injury, surgery or infection
Alongside the tissue, the psychological side of recovery: what the injury has stopped someone doing, and what they’re hoping to get back to. That’s usually the part that determines whether a person sticks with their exercises.
Nigel speaks English, Mandarin, Hokkien, Cantonese and Bahasa Melayu.
Articles from his side of the practice
The hand, wrist and elbow guides on this site come out of those outpatient years. If you want a sense of how he thinks about these problems, start here:
- Carpal tunnel: does a heat pad help? — why the answer is mostly no, from a site that sells heat pads
- Trigger finger and that morning catch
- Stiff hands in the morning
- Getting a stiff wrist moving after a cast
- Tennis elbow and golfer’s elbow
- Thumb and wrist pain from phone use
- Tight scar tissue, and where heat fits in scar massage
- After surgery: when is heat allowed?
- Heat pads with metal implants, plates and a pacemaker
For clinicians, he also wrote the one-page handout for prescribing home heat and what the evidence says about heat before manual therapy.
Where he is now
Nigel no longer treats patients. He is a director of a multi-site physiotherapy and hand therapy group in Singapore, and his work is now leadership, systems, culture and quality control: hiring the clinicians, setting the standards, and checking the standards hold.
We say that plainly because it matters to how you read this site. The clinical judgement behind these articles comes from years of treating these injuries, not from a caseload this week.
Writing
He also writes at handpainnomore.com, a reference library on finger, hand, wrist, forearm and elbow conditions: what each one is doing to the tissue, how long recovery actually takes, and the point at which waiting starts costing you function.
Outside work
Time with his wife and children. Reading and writing. Working out, with a six-pack still filed under “aspirational”. Cooking for the family and eating together, which he rates as one of the better things available to a person. And long conversations about faith, Stoicism and how to become a better version of yourself.
Why heat pads
Heat is one of the most used and least explained things in a rehab clinic. We’ve supplied the same electric heat pad since 2010, first to our own treatment rooms, then to other clinics, then to their patients for home use.
The questions patients ask about it are always the same, and the answers online are written for other countries or by people selling something without saying so. This site exists to answer them properly. We sell the pad, and we say so on every page. Sixteen years of supplying it, including how they fail: our long-term review.
