Sore and swollen four to eight centimeters 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.
A small wrist bone losing its blood supply and collapsing, usually in a younger manual worker with no injury to explain it. Early X-rays are normal, which is exactly the problem.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A soft, fluid swelling on the tip of the elbow that often barely hurts. Usually harmless and self-limiting. The one thing that has to be ruled out first is infection, and four signs separate them.
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.