Tennis or Golfer's Elbow Treatment

Tennis or Golfer's Elbow Treatment abroad

Tennis elbow can be defined as a type of tendinitis that leads to pain in the elbow and arm area. Tendinitis, which might be referred to as tendonitis, consists in an inflammation of a tendon, which consists in a thick inelastic cord made of white fibrous tissue that connects a bone to a muscle. Tendinitis can happen in every part of the body where a tendon is present, and the most common areas are the elbow, shoulder, base of the thumb, knee, hip, and achilles tendon. This disease can happen at every age, even though is more likely to appear after 40 years old and could interest everyone that does a continuative gripping activity, especially when using the first two fingers and thumb in a repetitive way.

The activities that help a tendon to get swollen are gardening, golf, tennis, skiing, pitching and throwing, painting etc. As a result, a person can get tennis or golfer's elbow even if he never played go Symptoms of a tendinitis include a pain that can be either mild or severe if there are calcium deposits in the area surrounding the tendon or loss of motion in one shoulder, which can be defined as frozen shoulder (adhesive capsulitis).

The specific tennis or golfer's elbow symptoms can be described as pain inside the elbow, especially in the bony knob where the tendon is attached to the bone, if the inflammation is getting worse, the patient might experience pain in the lower or upper arm, especially when gripping objects, opening doors, straighten the wrist or lifting something. In order to diagnose tennis or golfer's elbow, it is necessary to undergo some exams including wrist and arm flexion and some imaging tests like x ray, MRI.

Most of the times tennis elbow will heal on its own if associated with some rest to the painful area, icing the elbow area to reduce the swelling every 30 minutes every 4 hours for a couple of days until the pain is gone, use an elbow bandage to rest the tendon, anti matory drugs, and physiotherapy. However, if these treatments aren't working anymore after 4 months, surgery might be the best option. During the surgical procedure, the injured tendon is removed and the remaining part, repaired. The surgery success rate is around 85-90% and is needed in the half of tennis elbow cases.