The bones in a normal hand line up precisely, letting you perform many specialized functions like grasping a pen or manipulating small objects in your palm. When you fracture a finger bone, it can put your whole hand out of alignment. Without treatment, your broken finger may stay stiff and painful.

Sometimes a bone can break without you realizing it. That’s usually what happens to the scaphoid bone in your wrist, a boat-shaped bone located on the outermost side of the thumb side of the hand. Many people with a fractured scaphoid think they have a sprained wrist instead of a broken bone because there is no obvious deformity and very little swelling.