If you’re reading this, you either have tennis elbow or you know someone who has it. Once you have it, your daily life is adversely affected. You’ve searched the Web for answers and products that promise to help. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of misinformation out there that not only won’t lead to recovery, but it can also make the condition worse. If you are serious about healing, please consider the unique 60-Day Plan outlined below. It is guaranteed to work.
For starters, there is no “itis” in epicondylitis. “Itis” implies that inflammation is a cause or result of the condition and there is no medical basis for that conclusion. Elbow tendon damage from overuse or misuse has a non-inflammatory pathology. It is tendinosis, not tendonitis, and is treated as such in this Plan.
“Itis” means inflammation and it has now been proven that tendonitis is not an inflammatory pathology – it is in fact tendinosis. Reducing inflammation robs your body of its ability to heal itself and it has no effect on mending a stretched or torn extensor tendon. Anti-inflammatories can delay healing and increase the likelihood that you’ll continue aggravating your elbow.
Tennis elbow is typically a stretch or tear in the extensor tendon. This painful ailment commonly occurs in people who make repetitive hand and arm movements at work or at play, but there are literally dozens of daily activities that can cause or exacerbate the condition. If you have tennis elbow, it usually bothers you every waking hour, not just when you’re out playing tennis or pickleball.
The thing is, tendon tissue is mainly collagen and tendons have very little blood supply, so despite the entrenched dogma, reducing inflammation or increasing blood flow lacks the biological rationale and clinical evidence to be functional factors in a recovery program. This doesn’t mean that an armband, compression sleeve, topical cream, TENS treatment or an NSAID won’t ease some of your muscular pain in the short term. But they are not solutions to the problem. And, with a little less pain, you can talk yourself into playing or working when you should be resting and rehabbing, making the condition worse and more difficult to heal.