I pretty much gave myself tendinitis this past month or so. Tendinitis on the outside of your elbow is usually called tennis elbow (on the inside is golf elbow) but I am renaming it blogger’s elbow because mine is from typing a lot.
Tendinitis is a tricky injury to have, mostly due to overuse of the body part that is hurting. The muscle, after repeated contractions, causes its tendon (how the muscle connects to the bone) to be inflamed. The inflammation of the tendon and the tightness of the muscle cause pain. Many people with tendinitis aren’t totally sure how they got it. They say that the area just began to get irritated and then started to hurt, and then they couldn’t use it without pain. When tendinitis gets bad you begin to have difficulty lifting and carrying objects, turning door knobs, and even begin to have pain at rest. Don’t let your symptoms get this bad people! If you have had soreness for a few days that doesn’t seem to be going away by itself, go get treated and nip it in the bud.
In my last post “Where It Hurts Is Not The Problem” I explained how just because it hurts somewhere doesn’t mean that that area is the root of the problem. And so it goes for these tendinitis issues. In the case of the elbow it is smart to look to the neck, shoulder and spine for restrictions that may have caused the muscles of the elbow to work harder than they were meant to work.
For tendinitis you can ice, massage, and gently stretch the muscles that are sore. You can use an anti inflammatory cream such as Traumeel (see my older post) to help with the inflammation. But rest is the order of the day for tendinitis. If you keep using and aggravating the area, it will take longer for it to heal. And begin to look to the other areas of your body that need attention, the neck, upper back and shoulder to be specific, but sometimes even the lower body needs to be loosened up. Treating the whole body will help get rid of the injury and also help prevent new ones.
