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.

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.

Early in my career, cortisone was the answer to almost any musculoskeletal question. The evidence that accumulated over two decades complicated that reflex considerably. What changed in my practice — and the distinction between cortisone as treatment versus cortisone as bridge.

One of the best-selling supplements in the United States. The evidence for its effectiveness is considerably less impressive than its marketing. What the GAIT trial actually showed, why so many people feel it helps anyway, and what I tell my own patients.

De Quervain's is not bad luck — it is a predictable response to a predictable loading pattern. The mechanics behind Mommy Thumb, Gamer's Thumb, and Fly Fisher's Wrist are identical. Understanding them changes how you think about prevention and when to act.

Why new parents, gamers, and fly fishermen all develop the same condition — the anatomy behind Mommy Thumb, Gamer's Thumb, and Fly Fisher's Wrist. Why cortisone works here when it doesn't for tennis elbow, and the treatment hierarchy that actually resolves it.

Phalen's test — the classic prayer-hands maneuver — has a false negative rate of roughly 25%. Durkan's compression test cuts that number significantly. Here's the technique, what a positive test means, and why this is the test I rely on in the clinic.

Tennis elbow has forty different treatments because none of them truly works — except one. Eccentric loading of the wrist extensors has genuine evidence behind it. Here's the protocol, why it works, and why your instincts about rest are wrong.

Why cortisone produces excellent short-term relief for tennis elbow and significantly worse one-year outcomes — and the conditions where injection is genuinely the right call. The inject vs. load distinction every patient deserves to understand.