Wrist arthroscopy leaves two tiny scars and hides two very different recoveries. A debridement takes weeks; a TFCC repair takes months, and the movement that has to be locked down is forearm rotation rather than wrist bending.
Sore and swollen four to eight centimetres above the wrist on the back of the forearm, sometimes with a squeak you can feel. Routinely mistaken for De Quervain’s, and separated from it by location alone.
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.
Adult forearm fractures are plated because the forearm is a rotating joint, and a bone healing slightly the wrong shape costs you rotation permanently. Plus the two single-bone fractures that hide a dislocation at the other end.
Forearms that pump up and stop working. The timing separates the causes: pain that arrives at a predictable point and clears minutes after stopping is a compartment pattern, and it has a real diagnosis behind it.