Conditions and injuries of the finger, hand, wrist, forearm and elbow: what they are, how they behave, and when they stop being minor.
Most wrist arthritis under 60 is the ending of an old injury: a missed scapholunate tear or a scaphoid that never healed. The wear follows a predictable route, and every surgical option trades movement for pain relief.
Back-of-wrist pain in a young gymnast is a growth plate injury from weight-bearing on the hands. Ridden out, the radius can stop growing while the ulna keeps going, and that mismatch causes wrist pain for decades.
In a child’s arm the growth plate is weaker than the ligament, so throwing damages it first. Inner elbow pain usually means rest. Outer elbow pain, catching or lost straightening means imaging, and it’s the one that causes permanent damage.
Inner elbow pain in a thrower is a ligament problem, not a tendon one. The first sign is usually lost velocity rather than pain, and Tommy John surgery does not make anyone throw harder.
A fall onto the point of the elbow. Whether you can straighten your arm against gravity decides whether this is a splint or an operation, and the metalwork sits under skin with nothing to pad it.
A pop at the front of the elbow under load, then an arm that still bends fine, so people wait. The hook test takes seconds, and the repair window closes at around two to three weeks.
The commonest adult elbow fracture, often hiding behind a normal-looking X-ray. What decides treatment is whether the fragment blocks rotation, and what decides your outcome is how early you start moving it.
Deep aching in the upper outer forearm that has been treated as tennis elbow for months without improving. The tenderness sits below the bony point rather than on it, and the trapped nerve causes pain without numbness.
The median nerve can be squeezed in the forearm as well as at the wrist, producing tingling in the same three fingers. One difference separates them: whether the palm is numb too.
Two forearm nerves carry movement but almost no sensation, so when they fail nothing feels wrong and something simply stops working. The OK sign test finds one, lifting the fingers off a table finds the other.