Can Chiropractic Care Help Tennis Elbow?

Aside from spinal misalignments and injuries, the most common complaint chiropractors hear from patients is pain around the elbow, commonly diagnosed as ‘tennis elbow’. Symptoms of this condition can include elbow and forearm pain, numbness in the hands or neck, and difficulty gripping or lifting ordinary objects such as a toothbrush or a cup of coffee. A chiropractor can help alleviate all the symptoms you are experiencing from tennis elbow allowing you to have full strength in your arms once again so you can get back to hitting those powerful groundstrokes down the line to beat your opponent.

Causes for tennis elbow

Tennis elbow is a repetitive stress injury resulting from forceful movements of the elbow, wrist, and hands. While this could indeed afflict a regular tennis player, more than 95% of people bothered by tennis elbow don’t play the game at all. It’s possible to sustain tennis elbow when gardening, weed-whacking, or even typing.

When you suffer from tennis elbow you suffer from swollen and inflamed microscopically torn muscles and tendons. This swelling causes a reduced range of motion in your elbow, sometimes including the wrist. If this condition becomes pronounced, it will cause pressure on sensory and motor nerves causing the sensations of tingling or numbness in your extremities.

Chiropractic care for tennis elbow

Tennis elbow is usually treated with a two-pronged approach, including care administered at the chiropractic center, and exercises you can perform at home to accelerate the healing process. Chiropractors use diagnostic equipment to accurately identify your problem and focus chiropractic treatment on a specific area. The activities you will be asked to do at home will follow the RICE protocol:

• Rest – you’ll have to discontinue the activity which caused the tennis elbow condition in the first place unless that’s not possible because of job requirements. In that case, you can use a strap or brace.
• Ice – ice is effective for reducing the inflammation and swelling in an area. Most likely, you will need to apply ice every three hours for 20 to 30 minutes at a time.
• Compression – your chiropractor may recommend that you wear a strap or a brace to support the affected area of your body. Inflammatory fluids might also need to be moved out and prevented from accumulating by wearing a compression sleeve.
• Elevation – You should elevate the affected elbow above the level of your heart to prevent inflammatory fluids from accumulating there and causing you pain.

Follow the chiropractor’s advice faithfully and your symptoms should subside within a few weeks. After that time, you may want to consider some alternative activity that doesn’t expose your elbows, wrists, and hands to the possibility of tennis elbow. Part of chiropractic care for tennis elbow involves using preventive techniques that discourage a recurrence of the injury. So these should be adopted and carried out to prevent the same thing from happening again.

If you think you may have tennis elbow or need chiropractic help. Give us a call @ (608) 402-6005 or fill out our online form for a FREE initial consultation.