Re: Tennis Elbow
All these kinds of soft tissue injuries....tendonitis, carpal tunnel, tennis elbow, golfer's elbow etc can be, as you would all be aware, the result of repetitive and sometimes incorrectly postioned hand and arm actions. Of course, one contributing factor can be simply this....do you ever warm up on a practice pad for 10-15mins or so before you get on a kit? Same with your legs, feet and ankles, do any of you guys have a regular warm up routine? Or do you just jump into it?
Here's another contributing factor....computer keyboards. One of my past jobs was being an OH&S assistant in an office and I would often see the following: ergonomic desks not being utilised properly, poor posture at desks when typing, constant use of a mouse only on the right side of a keyboard, people not angling their monitors correctly and so on. God knows how many times I'd be correcting them, advising people to also rest their hands every 15-20 mins, walk around a bit, stretch hands, etc. The explosion of technology....mobile phones, iPods, Blackberrys, Wii games, xBox's and so forth has also meant that a lot of people my age and a little younger or older are often texting, pushing buttons, swivelling joysticks and as a result are increasing chances of any "overuse injury" by a tenfold amount. Or add to that, those who are in repetitive manual labour, as some of you have described earlier. We have to understand that the human body does have it's limit...any sort of pain is an indication of perhaps a bad habit that has been overlooked, and it's your body just saying "Enough for the time being".
The problem for a lot of medical experts and pain management professionals is this: identifying which accumulative trauma (overuse injury) which is causing a particular pain problem (symptom). But to give some examples...sometimes that 'pinching feeling' you might feel travelling along your forearm may in fact not be carpal tunnel syndrome (CTS: where the two large forearm bones have only slightly misaligned themselves, but even a millimetre or less is enough to cause 'entrapment' of the carpal sheath, pressing on the tendon passing through the forearm and wrist bones) but may be in fact tenosynovitis (not tendonitis, that's a different thing)....tenosynovitis is the actual inflammation of the synovial sheath that is covering the tendon...what happens is that the tendon, if it has any growth or knot on it passes through the synovial sheath, irritating it. As a result, the synovium produces excessive fluid to lubricate the knotted tendon and tries to reduse the irritation...this then produces a swelling. Or, a very different example is De Quervain's Tenosynovitis, usually associated with pain when the thumb is folded across the palm and the fingers are flexed over the thumb as the hand is pulled away from the involved wrist area. (This is referred to as the Finkelstein maneuver.) This, by the way wasn't something that sprung up in the 20th century. Ever wondered about the association between medieval monks and all those wines and brews monastaries used to concoct? Think about it....in the times before Gutenberg's printing press, monks were laboriously copying texts with ink and parchment. Their hands and thumbs were cramped into the same position for hours on end in order to get the work done, so for pain relief, quite often they would allowed alcohol to deaden the pain in their hands and wrists....I mean, anti-inflammatory drugs would not surface until centuries later. And I highly doubt tennis wouldn't have been though of, let alone golf, yet these same people suffered exactly the same way!
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