In reply to Bjartur i Sumarhus:
I developed de Quervain's early last year and it took about 10 months to get better. It's recently flared up again, which is a bit disappointing after I thought it was gone, but in my experience that's not unusual with tendon trouble.
Anyway, first you have my sympathies. Really makes you realise how much you need your thumbs for bl**dy everything. I've had various injuries of a similar nature and found this to be one of the worst and hardest to get rid of. Obviously, this is a bit anectodal but the things that worked for me were eccentric exercises (a *lot* of them) and wearing a specially designed wrist brace for computer work and at night. I also did some exercises to improve the movement in my shoulder as the physio thought that might be linked (and it needed fixing anyway). I also worked on the trigger points in my forearm a lot and I did very slow wrist rotations quite a lot (with the forearm held still so you know that you're moving the wrist and not other bits of the arm).
The way I did my eccentric exercises was with a theraband and I used various colours so that I could progressively increase the resistance. If you've done the Finkelstein test then the simplest way to describe how I did my exercises was that I basically repeated that movement while holding a theraband that I held up and back with the other hand. Eventually I progressed to using a very large hammer as you can move your hand position to increase the load and it is more advanced because you have to hold it level as well as moving your hand. Also as it got better I used a metolius gripsaver to try and strengthen my thumb and regain the movement in it. By the time I started that stage I couldn't do a 'thumbs up' on that hand at all, so I had a lot of work to do.
They also recommend that you work out what's causing it and stop doing that. But I found that very hard, partly because I wasn't entirely sure what caused it (although I think it was moving house and all the associated packing and cleaning that finally tipped my thumbs over the edge). Also, it's hard to avoid a lot of the things that hurt it (which was pretty much everything at one stage).
I didn't really use ice much because I think mine was a chronic over-use problem and the physio didn't seem to think it would help. I did sometimes use freeze gel when it was particularly sore (which was most of the time for several months).
I'd second the suggestion that you read up on what Dave MacLeod has to say about tendons. I have his book on injuries, which has lots of info in that will be relevant. He only briefly mentions de quervains but the general stuff on tendon health and healing is useful.
Good luck.
