Video Transcript: Why Do I Have Elbow Pain

Hi everyone! Dr. Orit Hickman here from Pain Science Physical Therapy.

I had a patient come in the other day with elbow pain. And, I thought I’d just put together a really short video to address this because that patient came in with a diagnosis that the doctor called “tennis elbow” or medial epicondylitis. A lot of times, that diagnosis is actually incorrect, and instead what patients are treating or dealing with is nerve symptoms/nerve pain. You have the ulnar nerve that travels just passed the inside of the elbow. And if that nerve gets irritated, it will present itself as that diagnosis of medial epicondylitis or “tennis elbow.”

So, in order to figure out if that’s what’s actually going on, I'm going to show you a series of three exercises. And if those exercises help, chances are that you actually have irritation of the ulnar nerve.

So, the first exercise that you’re going to do is a very simple nerve glide. And, what you’re going to do is if the right hand is the elbow that’s bothering you, you're going to bring your hand up to your ear. And, you’re going to bring the hand back down. And, you’re going to bring the hand up to the ear. And, you can see my fingertips are pointing up to the ceiling. And then, [move it] back down. You’re going to do five of these. These are gentle, gentle glides to the nerve. [It] helps to give the nerve a little bit of blood flow [and] a little bit of movement. Alright, and we’re going to do one more just like that. So, that’s a really basic exercise.

Now, over time that might feel like it’s really easy, and it may be helping but not helping enough. So, then we’d add in a second exercise. So instead of coming to here, what you would do is you would bring your fingertips, and you would point your fingertips back behind you. So, it’s almost the same movement. Right? So, the first movement [is] fingertips are up. The second movement [is] fingertips are back, and you want to make sure that your elbow is just gently out to the side. If it hurts to have the elbow too far back, you can bring the elbow a little bit forward. But, the idea here is to get a little bit of movement and blood flow into that ulnar nerve. Now, that by itself may start to feel better as well, but the nerve may still not be fully calmed down. [The] pain may still continue.

So, then we add in a third component which is you can add in head or neck movement. So, I can bring the hand over. And, I can tilt the head away. And, I can bring it back. And, I can tilt the head away. And, I can bring it back. So, this starts to give a little bit more movement to the nerve [and] a little bit more blood flow to the nerve. [Do the] same thing [for] five repetitions.

So, you would start with the first exercise which is fingertips pointing up to the ceiling. [Try] repeating five times. And, you maybe do that three to five times a day for a few days, and see if that helps the nerve symptoms. If you notice that it does [and the] symptoms aren't fully gone, you then make it a little bit more challenging to the nerve. You put a little bit more length through the nerve by pointing the fingertips back. And then, after a few days, you would add in a little bit of head titling. So, those are three exercises that I like to give for patients that come in with elbow pain that it turns out that it’s actually irritation of your ulnar nerve.

Let me know how it goes. I hope this helps. Feel free to give me a thumbs up, or a like, or any comments down below. Have a great day!