Why is this getting so drawn out you might ask. I’ve learned a lot during my 3-year struggle with elbow pain and believe that a full understanding is important for two main reasons. First, as you’ll see, understanding the function of each treatment will come back again to other treatments that I’ve tried and let you understand why those didn’t work either. So I hope you’ll see the connections and not try effectively the same thing masked as different treatments over and over like I did and waste valuable time, money and patience.

 

Secondly and probably most importantly, I’m a big believer in the power of the mind. I suffered from lower back pain years ago for many years. The list of things I tried and the money spent would easily be triple the amount I spent for my golfer’s elbow. And yet, it took a simple book on using the power of the mind to melt away the back pain in three days – after over five years of struggle. The back does flare up every couple of years but I now know how to control it from becoming chronic. And a big part of believing in that method was truly understanding everything about back pain,  so I want to explain the logic and theory behind each of these methods I’ve tried for elbow pain and why so much of it is a myth.

 

So back to swelling – what is it? Basically, swelling is your body’s natural defense to protect a body part when it is injured. To protect that body part, it creates and traps fluid at the source. That fluid does not flush easily and can often lead to the tissue, tendon or muscle irritating a nearby nerve. A nerve that is irritated is the pain showing up as a symptom. The cause is the fluid.

 

Ice has been shown to help flush the fluid out of the system, which must be done soon as the fluid can get trapped and become hard to flush if left alone for too long. By flushing the fluid out of the body part, essential blood, the only true healing agent, is able to flow into that area starting the healing process. Thus the recommendation to compress and elevate too – RICE remember?

 

But I have two problems with icing for golfer’s elbow and tennis elbow. First, if swelling is the natural defense system by the body, why is that bad? I never understood that…

 

Second, even if swelling is bad, why does everyone assume medial epicondylitis and lateral epicondylitis are caused by swelling? Where exactly is the swelling?

 

My orthopedic physician (another page on this) told me we need to address the swelling. Yet she said the swelling couldn’t be seen in the MRI. The doctor who performed PRP and Kaatsu also saw no swelling. Yet, almost everything I’ve tried in the list of 28 unsuccessful things were meant to eliminate swelling.

 

So what did ice do for me exactly?  It made the pain worse! Not immediately. In fact, immediately after icing the elbow felt better. But it was also numb. Once the numbness wore off, I would find that the pain returned. And the next morning after icing, the pain returned with a vengeance. On top of the searing pain right on the inside bone of the elbow and a pain best described as overstretched down the elbow on the inside of my arm about four inches toward the wrist, there would be a stiffness that was associated with icing. Like the icing almost froze the elbow and straightening out the arm felt excruciating. Yet, I was told to ice and thought at some point, while it felt bad every day, one day I would wake up magically healed.