Customer Reviews

Doctor Answ/Tennis Elbow

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The book is organized well and does a good job explaining what causes tennis elbow, and how to prevent it. It's a bit weak on treatment. It does emphasize rest, ice and anti-inflammatory medications early on. It advocates steroid injections which may actually, at least temporarily cause weakness in the tendon. what I really did not like is the time frame for treatment, and the frequency of the exercises. I think from my own reading and from my personal experience with this condition that you should wait about 21 days to start doing any kind of strengthening of the tendon. He advocates these gripping exercise as his primary rehab exercise, which is fine, but he starts them about a week after the injury. That's way too early. the point of the exercises is to strengthen the new tissue that grows in to the damaged tendon. That healing process isn't advanced enough until 3-4 weeks for strengthening exercises to be useful. Actually, they may be counterproductive by interefering with healing. The author believes that you won't heal if you don't do the exercises. Also, there's no need to do the exercises six times a day. How can the tendon and muscles recover from that frequency. I'd recommend every other day, once during the day. That should be fine. There are others who believe the same, but in my experience, and from a lot of other things I've read that is not the case. He also says anti-inflammatory drugs should be stopped at two weeks, while I think 4 weeks makes more sense, since there can be persistent inflammation for that period of time, and doing the rehab exercise could potentially stir up some more inflammation as well. I'd like to see the book updated with discussions of other treatment modalities and whether they work or not, like ultrasound, iontophoresis, cross friction etc.