Mayo Clinic Health Manager
Get free personalized health guidance for you and your family.
Get Started
About our e-newsletters
- Free e-newsletters
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- We do not share your e-mail address
Housecall, our weekly general-interest e-newsletter, keeps you up to date on a wide variety of health topics with timely, reliable, practical information, recipes, blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts and more. Our biweekly topic-specific e-newsletters also include blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts, and other useful information that will help you manage your health.
Housecall Archives
Mayo Clinic Housecall
Stay up to date on the latest health information.
What you get
- Free weekly e-newsletter
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- Recipes, tools and other helpful information
- We do not share your e-mail address
Treatments and drugs
By Mayo Clinic staffIf the pain isn't interfering with your ability to function, you can take a wait-and-see approach to tennis elbow treatment. Tennis elbow often gets better on its own in six months to two years.
If you're in too much pain or if the pain is affecting your function, initial treatment of tennis elbow usually involves self-care steps including rest, icing the area and use of acetaminophen (Tylenol, others) or over-the-counter anti-inflammatory medications, such as ibuprofen (Advil, Motrin, others) or naproxen (Aleve, others). These medications aren't recommended for long-term use because they can cause serious gastrointestinal problems.
If those steps don't help and you still have pain and limited motion, your doctor may suggest other steps. These may include:
- Analyzing the way you use your arm. Your doctor may suggest that experts evaluate your tennis technique or job tasks to determine the best steps to reduce stress on your injured tissue. This may mean going to a two-handed backhand in tennis or taking ergonomic steps at work to ensure that your wrist and forearm movements don't continue to contribute to your symptoms. By keeping your wrist rigid during tennis strokes, lifting or weight training, you use the larger muscles in the upper arm, which are better able to handle loading stress.
- Exercises. Your doctor or a physical therapist may suggest exercises to gradually stretch and strengthen your muscles, especially the muscles of your forearm. Once you've learned these exercises, you can do them at home or at work.
- Orthotics. Your doctor may also suggest you wear straps or braces to reduce stress on the injured tissue.
- Corticosteroids. If your pain is severe and persistent, your doctor may suggest an injection of a corticosteroid medication. Corticosteroids are drugs that help to reduce pain, swelling and inflammation. Injectable corticosteroids rarely cause serious side effects. However, these medications don't provide a clear long-term benefit over physical therapy exercises or taking a wait-and-see approach and simply resting your arm. Your doctor may also suggest use of topical corticosteroids for pain relief. These corticosteroids are absorbed through your skin during treatments called phonophoresis or iontophoresis.
- Surgery. If other approaches haven't relieved your pain and you've been faithful to your rehabilitation program, your doctor may suggest surgery. Your doctor will generally recommend surgery only if you have persistent pain and you've tried other treatments for longer than six months. Only about one in 10 people with tennis elbow needs surgery.
You'll be able to have the surgery done on an outpatient basis, meaning you can go home the same day. Surgery involves either trimming the inflamed tendon, or surgically releasing and then reattaching the tendon to relieve pain.
Other treatments for tennis elbow are under investigation. Some treatments being studied include buffered platelet-rich plasma injections, acupuncture, botulinum toxin and topical nitric oxide.
- Jayanthi N. Epicondylitis. http://www.uptodate.com/home/index.html. Accessed Aug. 4, 2008.
- Sheon RP. Patient information: Elbow tendonitis (tennis and golf elbow). http://www.uptodate.com/home/index.html. Accessed Aug. 4, 2008.
- Tennis elbow (lateral epicondylitis). American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons. http://orthoinfo.aaos.org/topic.cfm?topic=A00068&return_link=0. Accessed Aug. 4, 2008.
- Calfee RP, et al. Management of lateral epicondylitis: Current concepts. Journal of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons. 2008;16(1):19-29.
- Assendelft W, Clinical review: Tennis elbow. BMJ. 2003;327(7410):329-330.
