Golfer's elbow and tennis elbow are the same pathological process — tendon degeneration from repetitive overload — on opposite sides of the joint. The rehabilitation principles are identical, the exercises are mirror images of each other, and yet medial epicondylitis gets a fraction of the clinical attention its lateral counterpart does.

Most patients treated for lateral epicondylitis have never picked up a racquet. It's a repetitive-load tendon injury, not an inflammatory one — which is exactly why rest alone doesn't fix it, and why the real treatment looks different than most people expect.

The 'Bible bump' got its name from people striking these wrist cysts with a heavy book — a folk remedy that sometimes works and usually doesn't need to be attempted at all. Here's what actually determines whether one needs treatment.

Adhesive capsulitis has a strange, predictable arc — it often gets stiffer before it gets better, and the whole course can run over a year. Knowing that timeline up front is sometimes the most useful thing a patient can hear at diagnosis.

Numbness in the ring and pinky finger gets blamed on 'sleeping wrong' far longer than it should. The nerve involved doesn't distinguish between a bump on the funny bone and months of chronic compression — and by the time there's real weakness, recovery gets a lot less reliable.

Pain at the base of the thumb usually starts small — a jar lid, a car key, a firm handshake. For a lot of patients it's the most common form of hand arthritis, and it's also one of the most treatable if it's caught before it limits daily function.

A fall onto the thumb usually gets waved off as a sprain. Enough of the time it's actually a torn ligament — and the two look identical for the first 48 hours. Here's the exam that tells them apart, and why the window to fix it matters.

Eleven days in the Inside Passage tested the safety framework built across ten issues of this column. Here is the honest debrief — what performed as designed, what needed real-time adjustment, and what the field taught us that paper planning could not.

Persistent swelling around a finger joint can mean very little or quite a lot depending on the details. Some of those details are time-sensitive in ways that are not obvious from the outside — including one that constitutes a same-day surgical emergency.

Night splinting is the first thing most physicians prescribe for carpal tunnel. Nerve gliding exercises — which address a different component of the problem entirely — are the second thing, and they are far too often never mentioned at all.

This piece was written before departure and published while we were on the water. Eleven weeks of safety planning met the Alaska coast on May 28th. Here is what that looked like from the dock — and what I left behind while we were gone.

Carpal tunnel release is performed over 500,000 times per year in the United States. It is also one of the most poorly explained procedures in advance — which creates unnecessary anxiety and unrealistic expectations about recovery. Here is the honest version.

Morning hand stiffness is one of the most normalized symptoms in clinical medicine. It is also one of the most diagnostically important — and the single most useful question is one most physicians never ask: how long does it last?

Ten issues. Ten weeks of building a framework from first principles. Tomorrow it meets the actual conditions it was designed for. The gear is packed, the kit is built, the communication plan is set. Safety Officer Ben is ready. The Alaska after-action content begins when we return in early June.

Twenty-seven years of operating on people who trained through pain has given me a very specific opinion about sport's most durable myth. Productive discomfort and joint-localized pain are categorically different signals. Treating them the same way is how you end up on my operating table.

Dupuytren's contracture is progressive, genetic, and one of the most fascinating conditions in hand surgery. The Viking disease connection, the table-top test, and why treatment is most straightforward before the finger is completely bent down — not after.

Not all hand numbness is carpal tunnel. Thoracic outlet syndrome is one of the most frequently missed diagnoses in upper extremity medicine — overlapping with carpal tunnel, cervical disc disease, and rotator cuff pathology. The pectoralis minor connection and the self-test you can do right now.

Cold water immersion after resistance training consistently reduces soreness and consistently blunts the inflammatory response that drives muscle adaptation. You are trading gains for comfort — and that is a legitimate choice, as long as you know you are making it. What the 2026 evidence actually supports.

The house is quiet, the family is away, and the final pre-departure window belongs entirely to Safety Officer Ben. The communication plan, decision fatigue on multi-day expeditions, and the rule I'm setting for our group before we board.

One of the most common concerns from patients who need a brace but are reluctant to wear one. True disuse atrophy requires prolonged near-complete immobilization — not a wrist brace worn during symptomatic activities. The correct use case, and when the brace becomes the problem.