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There are a variety of treatments for tennis elbow from non-steroidal painkillers to steroid injections to physiotherapy with ultrasound, massage, and graded exercises. Which works best? Tennis elbow is a real pain in the, well, elbow. And it's common — probably three in every hundred adults gets an attack in a 12-month period. The fancy name for this is lateral epicondylitis, which means a pain on the outer side of the elbow. Some tennis players get it from counting wads of money which are simply too large for any single individual to contemplate. But for about half the people who get it, it's nothing to do with tennis. The elbow pain is usually the result of doing too much with that arm, especially if it involves twisting movements. If tennis is the problem, sometimes fixing your swing to stop your wrists rolling, two-handed actions, or changing the equipment can help, but there's still the issue of treatment because tennis elbow can last for months. There are a variety of things available, from non-steroidal painkillers to steroid injections to physiotherapy with ultrasound, massage, and graded exercises. And as I've said many times before, whenever there's a big choice of treatments, you can bet nothing works well. A trial in the Netherlands has compared physiotherapy, steroid injections, and just waiting and seeing, to decide on the best advice for someone with tennis elbow. The results were fascinating. In the first six weeks, the steroid injections were best. But over a year, those who'd had injections tended to relapse. The physiotherapy group had more sustained benefits, such that nine out of ten were deemed a success at one year compared to seven out of ten for injections. Waiting and seeing was better than injections and not far off the results for physio. Nature wins again, it seems.
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