The term “country club elbow” evokes pleasant images of green lawns, polo shirts and tall glasses of iced tea. Unfortunately, this moniker refers to a far less pleasant condition: the combination of tennis elbowand golfer’s elbow—a chronic, painful syndrome associated with the two sports. The condition can cause a shooting pain down the forearm andContinue Reading »
Your physician has diagnosed you with shoulder impingement, but what does that mean? The classic symptom of the condition is pain when you raise your arm to shoulder height. The motion causes a narrowing of the space between the acromion (the bone at the top of the shoulder), the tendons of the rotator cuff thatContinue Reading »
Surgery can take a major toll on your body, not just for the obvious reasons. Even a minor surgical procedure requires your body to heal, expending energy and invoking immune responses that can tax your musculoskeletal and cardiopulmonary systems. The more intensive the procedure, the more difficult your recovery may be. Spending time in the hospitalContinue Reading »
A distal radius fracture—a break near the wrist in the largest forearm bone—is one of the most common injuries of the forearm. The fracture often occurs when a person falls onto an outstretched hand. Other causes include direct impact or axial forces. Treatment depends on such factors as the exact nature of the fracture, yourContinue Reading »
A scaphoid fracture refers to a fracture of the wrist—specifically the bone shaped like a boat, which is why it is often called a “ship” fracture. A fracture of this bone can result from falling on an outstretched arm, sustaining a direct blow to the wrist or receiving a severe twist of the wrist. ForContinue Reading »
Why You Need Crutches After Meniscus Surgery If only surgical treatment worked so perfectly that the patient would hop off the operating table, cured, with no painful recovery required. For knee surgery, that is not the case. Today, most surgical procedures on the crescent-shaped, fibrous knee joint cartilage called the meniscus are performed with tinyContinue Reading »
If you are scheduled to undergo knee replacement surgery, your surgeon has three procedures from which to choose. An artificial knee can be held in place, or fixed, using a cemented, noncemented or hybrid procedure. Your surgeon will decide which procedure is best for you. The cemented procedure In this procedure, a grout-like material isContinue Reading »
More than 580,000 knee replacement surgeries—the vast majority of them successful—are performed in the United States each year. In this procedure, special acrylic bone cement is often employed to adhere the new artificial knee parts to your leg bones. Its technical name is polymethylmethacrylate, or PMMA. What is PMMA? In some situations, the surgeon canContinue Reading »
Retearing a Repaired Rotator Cuff No one enters into surgery lightly. Before you underwent surgery to repair your rotator cuff, you probably weighed all the pros and cons with your doctor, so it is understandably disconcerting to discover you have retorn your rotator cuff. A recent study by the American Orthopedic Society for Sports MedicineContinue Reading »
Regaining Full Range of Motion After Knee Surgery In order for you to walk, run, sit or kick comfortably, your knee—the largest joint in the body—must be able to move through an arc of about 130 degrees, from completely straight, or fully extended, to completely bent, or fully flexed. Two muscle groups control this motion:Continue Reading »