Types and causes of your arm pain
Rotator cuff injury
Rotator cuff injury can be
- What causes a rotator cuff injury?
- Rotator cuff injuries can range from mild to severe. They tend to fall into one of three categories.
- Tendinitis is an injury caused by overuse of the rotator cuff. This causes it to become inflamed. Tennis players, who use an overhead serve and painters who have to reach upward to do their jobs commonly experience this injury.
- Bursitis is another common rotator cuff injury. It’s caused by inflammation of the bursa. These are fluid-filled sacs that sit between the rotator cuff tendons and the underlying bone.
- Rotator cuff strains or tears are caused by overuse or acute injury. The tendons that connect muscles to bones can overstretch (strain) or tear, partially or completely. The rotator cuff can also strain or tear after a fall, a car accident, or another sudden injury. These injuries typically cause intense and immediate pain.
What causes arthritis?
Cartilage is a firm but flexible connective tissue in your joints. It protects the joints by absorbing the pressure and shock created when you move and put stress on them. A reduction in the normal amount of this cartilage tissue cause some forms of arthritis.
Key points
- Numbness, tingling, and pain in your thumb and the first three fingers of your hand are common symptoms of carpal tunnel syndrome.
- The pain in your carpal tunnel is due to excess pressure in your wrist and on the median nerve.
- Carpal tunnel syndrome can be made worse if the wrist is overextended repeatedly.
What is tennis elbow?
Tennis elbow, or lateral epicondylitis, is a painful inflammation of the elbow joint caused by repetitive stress (overuse). The pain is located on the outside (lateral side) of the elbow, but may radiate down the back of your forearm. You’ll likely feel the pain when you straighten or fully extend your arm.
What Is a Dislocation?
A dislocation occurs when a bone slips out of a joint. For example, the top of your arm bone fits into a joint at your shoulder. When it slips or pops out of that joint, you have a dislocated shoulder. You can dislocate almost any joint in your body, including your knee, hip, ankle, or shoulder.
Since a dislocation means your bone is no longer where it should be, you should treat it as an emergency and seek medical attention as soon as possible. An untreated dislocation could cause damage to your ligaments, nerves, or blood vessels.
However, when tissues are injured, the degenerative process exceeds this regenerative process, resulting in structures that become weaker, painful and less functional. While there are several types of stem cells, those that are best at promoting musculoskeletal healing (tendon, ligament, cartilage and bone) are found in bone marrow. These mesenchymal stem cells, or MSCs, are essential to successful patient outcomes
- The human body keeps a supply of stem cells available to help repair injured and degenerated tissues at all times, making it fairly simple to retrieve them for therapeutic purposes.
- As stem cells remain in reserve, in the marrow cavity of your bones, we have found the easiest place to harvest these stem cells is from the back of the hip area (iliac bone).
- Procedure is done in the office, under ultrasound or x-ray precision and guidance.
- Patients lay face down as the doctor thoroughly cleans the area before numbing the skin and bone.
- A special needle is inserted into the bone to withdraw marrow blood, which contains the stem cells. Note: This procedure is not like a bone marrow biopsy nor is it at painful as one. This harvesting procedure is well tolerated by patients and not considered difficult as many patients claim it is not painful.
- After bone marrow blood is drawn, it is taken to our onsite Regenexx laboratory and centrifuged to concentrate and purify the stem cells while other cells that are not needed are removed, leaving a concentrated sample of stem cells used to help heal your injury.
- The entire process is done by hand to enable customized designing of the stem cell specimen for your particular injury.
- A preparation of your concentrated platelets are also gathered at this time for injection into the injury site to release growth factors that “turn on” the stem cells that will later be injected.
- These platelets are injected again 3-5 days later to