Wondering why you’re experiencing elbow joint pain, stiffness, or a limited range of motion. Dr. J. Michael Bennett talks about the likely causes of elbow joint pain in this interview.
Dr. Bennett is an Elbow Specialist and a Board Certified Orthopedic Surgeon and a Fellowship Trained Sports Medicine Physician. He serves patients from all over Metro Houston from offices in Sugar Land, near First Colony Mall, and in Houston, near the Houston Galleria.
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Elbows are a hinge joint with four planes of motion — flexion, extension, supination, and pronation. Injuries generally have to do with the cartilage or the ligaments that stabilize the elbow. You can have chronic problems that result from repetitive use like playing as a baseball pitcher or you can have acute problems resulting from something like a fall.
The acute problems are those traumatic injuries that occur; for example, if you fall and land on your outstretched hand or elbow. That fall might result in an elbow fracture. The fracture is basically broken bone, and it can happen anywhere in the elbow. It can happen in the radial head, or it can happen in the olecranon or it can happen at the distal humerus.
How much displacement that fracture shows or where that fracture is located determines your method of treatment. Sometimes it can be treated with a cast or a splint and sometimes it needs surgical intervention. It all depends on the fracture itself — the amount of bone displacement at the site of the fracture and the activity of the patient.
Another acute injury is tendon or ligament injury. Sometimes you can fall on your outstretched hand and you can dislocate your elbow where the elbow pops out of the joint and that tears the majority of the ligaments that stabilize the elbow as well as the surrounding capsule of the elbow.
The immediate method of treatment for a dislocated elbow is reducing the elbow and popping it back into place. If you don’t reduce the elbow it can become a chronic problem and you can have some vascular issues or blood vessel injuries. So you want to make sure you get the elbow immediately reduced and lots of times these dislocations, if they’re just dislocations, can be treated with bracing and by letting the elbow heal. Many times the ligaments will actually scar back into place and the elbow joint will tighten and stabilize again over time. That’s an elbow dislocation.
Now in addition to that, you can have acute traumatic tears in any of the ligaments surrounding the elbow. Dislocation is when all the ligaments are torn, but you can also have a traumatic tear of the lateral, outside of the elbow, or medial, inside of the elbow, or anterior which is the front of the elbow or posterior, which is the back of the elbow.
If you have a tear of the tendon in the front of the elbow, that’s the biceps tendon. That allows you to flex the elbow and gives you the big muscles that people like to show off at the beach. The biceps tendon contributes a lot of strength to elbow flexion as well as elbow rotation.
If you’re an active young person and you have a tear in the biceps, we usually recommend fixing those early because they get harder to fix, the longer you wait. And if you don’t fix your biceps tendon, you have to understand that you could lose up to 80% of your rotation strength.
Remember, it you’re experiencing pain, stiffness or a restriction in the normal range of elbow motion, please call us for an evaluation. The longer you wait to be treated, the more lengthy and invasive the treatment will likely be. Our office number in Sugar Land is 281-633-8600 and in Houston, the number is 713-234-3152.
Wondering what an orthopedic elbow examination is like? Dr. Bennett describes the elbow examination procedure in this video. In this video, Dr. Bennett talks about the causes of elbow joint pain and stiffness in more detail.
