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What's the best treatment for tennis elbow? A trial in Brisbane compared physiotherapy with steroid injections and with waiting and seeing. Tennis elbow is pain on the outer side of your elbow - that's the same side as your thumb when you've your palm outstretched. While it does occur in tennis players, plenty other people develop the pain too. It's worse when you grip things, use your hand to pick up something and even shaking hands and can be quite disabling. The problem's in the tendon which anchors some of your forearm muscles and even though there's no inflammation in it, one of the commonest treatments is steroid injections. Physiotherapy can help and one treatment with reasonable evidence is elbow manipulation plus special exercises. But what's best, especially when tennis elbow eventually goes away by itself in most people? A trial in Brisbane compared physio with steroid injections and with waiting and seeing. While the steroids gave early relief, they were associated with recurrence and in fact after six weeks physio was better than both steroids and wait and see. But a year on, people were just as well off if they'd hung on. So early in the course, it depends on what you can put up with.
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