Call us at 281-633-8600. Dr. J. Michael Bennett talks about elbow olecranon bursitis in this article. Doctor Bennett is a Board Certified Orthopedic Surgeon and a Fellowship Trained Sports Medicine Doctor serving Houston-area patients from offices in Sugar Land and in Houston, near the Houston Galleria.
This is based on an interview with Dr. Bennett:
Another problem that can affect the elbow is called olecranon or elbow bursitis. The olecranon is this pointy bone at the back of the elbow. There’s a little sac of fluid on top of the olecranon, called the bursa, which allows skin to slide around that bony tip.
Sometimes people bump or hit the olecranon and get what’s called elbow or olecranon bursitis. If you think of that fluid sac as a balloon, it tends to expand or swell with injury, and these patients develop a little ball at the end of their elbow. The injury can be caused by a fall to the back of the elbow, but it can also be aggravated by frequently resting your arms on your elbows (it’s sometimes called student’s elbow). This swelling can become painful, annoying, and bothersome to the patient in his or her daily activities. Usually it’s treated without any kind of surgical intervention, and it’s treated primarily with a compressive dressing as well as an anti-inflamatory medication. Occasionally, we’ll do an aspiration where we suck out the excess fluid from the bursa.
However, if conservative measure fail to bring relief and the bursitis does not get better, then we can do an incision where we take out that little fluid sac and the elbow heals up fine. I’ve been doing these surgeries arthroscopically with a mini-camera so the procedure is minimally invasive with only two little poke holes, and we can remove that sac from the inside out. So there are no big incisions, and patients can return to their normal activities relatively quickly.
If you’re experiencing pain, stiffness or restricted motion in an elbow, please give our office a call at 281-633-8600. The earlier you treat these problems, the more likely it is that non-surgical treatments will give you the relief you need.
