A Cure for Golfer's Elbow & Tennis Elbow
COMPLETE IMMOBILIZATION
Not CC0
Of course when you see a surgeon, you expect to be told that surgery would fix your woes. I had read about the complexity, intricacy and complications of working inside the elbow and was deathly afraid of surgery as an option for my golfer’s and now tennis elbow pains.
To my great surprise and delight though, I met a very direct, clinical and convincing orthopedic surgeon at Stanford Medical Center who carefully explained what golfer’s elbow and tennis elbow are and what it takes to cure elbow pain altogether. Now we’re getting somewhere.
Her thesis begins with inflammation, which is a fancy way of saying swelling in the elbow, which is a less fancy way of saying there was fluid in the muscles and ligaments and tendons and tissues of my elbow. That inflammation was causing nerves to be irritated and scar tissue to form. She painted this wonderful image of a healthy elbow where the ligaments that stretch from the wrist to the elbow and attached by tendons are beautifully silvery, with perfect lines all going in the same direction like grains on a perfect piece of wood. Except that my ligaments aren’t silvery or have perfect lines – they’re full of fluid and pocked with scar tissue. The image made me sad. I had never visibly seen swelling anywhere on my arm or elbow and yet, I so wanted to believe this inflammation theory because it’s all over the Internet and everyone says this is the root cause of elbow pain.
Then she gave me the good news. Sure, surgery always is an option and she would be glad to perform that and fix my golfer’s elbow and tennis elbow suffering instantly. However, she suggested that would be overkill – typical golfer’s elbow and tennis elbow require no such thing and that simple, non-invasive methods should be followed. Let me save you a few hundred dollars right now and tell you exactly what those methods are.
Rest. Don’t use the elbow and wrist (this is coming next) for 8 weeks. If there’s still elbow pain after 8 weeks, keep going.
Next, and this was what was interesting and hopeful because having suffered my elbow pain for well over a year, the idea of taking 8 weeks completely off seemed depressing. I needed to hang onto something. Her thesis is that the elbow is not the source of the problem. WHAT?!!!
The problem is in the wrist. We use our wrist for everything. Holding a grocery bag or a bike handle bar, grabbing a door knob and turning, twisting a jar top, pushing, swinging, pulling, everything. And since everything is connected, motions that irritate the connectors from the wrist to the elbow cause swelling and the swelling then causes my silvery connectors to be all messed up and that causes my nerves to be irritated and finally golfer’s elbow and tennis elbow. Wow. There you have it. Makes perfect sense!
And the solution? A simple drugstore wrist guard – the kind that you put your thumb into a small hole and secure with 3 velcro straps on your forearm to keep the wrist from essentially bending. Eight weeks without use and wrist immobilization and voilà, I would be cured.
The 8 weeks sounded absolutely miserable but I needed to try. I couldn’t face the thought of surgery, and having tried
everything I could get my hands on, I was afraid there were no options left. So I strapped in to what was very inconvenient since my elbow pain was on my dominant, right arm. I could barely type, eat, hold onto anything. Yet I followed the doctor’s instructions to a tee for 8 weeks. I gave up playing the occasional tennis I did against my better judgment, stopped all calisthenics I did to try to keep in shape and more or less lived liked a one-armed person for a couple of months. I took the brace off only when I slept – doctor’s advice.
There were moments when I would remove the wrist brace and feel some elbow relief, which kept me going. But I could tell that the minute I started using my wrist, pain would return. And after 2 months? Nothing different. I could feel some relief when my elbow was completely immobilized, but as soon as I tried to the lightest of activity, it’s like time had stood still for my elbow pain – nothing was different.
I felt like I had wasted 2 months and wasn’t ready to keep going. Something told me this wasn’t the path to pain free elbows and that inactivity just couldn’t be the answer. Perhaps having your cake and eating it is impossible when it comes to golfer’s elbow and tennis elbow, but I wanted to be pain free AND be able to enjoy my activities and live life the way I did before elbow pain. So the hunt for a cure continued.
