Surgery for a stiff elbow restores the range in theatre; the six weeks afterwards decide how much you keep. The elbow scars faster than any joint in the arm, so a week of resting it because it hurts can undo the whole operation.
Cubital tunnel surgery relieves pressure; it doesn’t repair a nerve. Symptoms return in a fixed order: pain first, tingling next, numbness slowly, strength last and least reliably. Plus how decompression and transposition differ.
A repaired nerve regrows at about a millimeter a day, and there’s a sign you can track at home each month to watch it happening. Plus the sensory re-education that decides whether the hand ends up usable.
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.
Numb hands on the bike are nerve compression at the wrist, and which fingers go numb tells you which nerve. The fix is usually load, position and padding. The deadline is numbness that no longer clears after you get off.
Deep pain in the heel of the palm after a golf, bat or racquet impact, with a normal X-ray. Standard wrist films miss this fracture routinely, and the untreated version sits on a nerve and saws at a tendon.
The ulnar nerve gets squeezed at the elbow and at the wrist, with near-identical symptoms. Check the back of your hand: normal there means the wrist. And unlike carpal or cubital tunnel, Guyon’s canal usually has a specific findable cause, often a cyst or a missed hamate fracture.
CRPS is the body’s injury response failing to switch off: burning pain out of proportion to the injury, color and temperature changes, swelling, and fast-increasing stiffness. It’s real, most people improve, and the hand has to keep moving while it hurts.