Hydrotherapy to Cure Tennis Elbow

Hydrotherapy is another way to use water at home for healing, in addition to icing your injury. While this probably won’t cure tennis elbow on its own, it will speed the healing process a lot! The main techniques presented here are contrasting hydrotherapy and heat therapy.

Contrasting hydrotherapy simply means getting 2 containers of water (buckets or sides of a sink) and filling one container with cold water and one with hot.  Then, you dip your elbow into the hot container for 1-2 minutes, and then move it to the cold container.  This alternation of heat will force your nevus system to try to stabilize the temperature in your arm(s) and consequently increase blood flow to your arm(s).  You can use this technique with cold-packs and hot-pads, but water is much better at conducting heat into or out of you body in a uniform fashion.

Heat therapy is a technique that is similar, but uses only heat to increase your blood flow.  Also, it has been shown that heat can lessen the pain and even treat trigger points in muscles, but the reasons behind this are still unclear.  Anyway, heat therapy consists of heating your arm around the elbow with hot-pads or hot water. 

I prefer to use very hot water, almost scalding from the stove, and dip small towels in the water and then apply the towels to my elbow and the muscles surrounding my elbow.  Then, switch out the towel for another hot, wet one every 3 minutes, or when you feel that the towel has cooled down a lot.  I usually keep this heat regime going for 10-15 minutes, or until the water in the pan that I am dipping the towels in becomes cool.  This is a bit painful, but in one weekend I was able to relieve a case of my own tennis elbow through this approach.
  
This approach is similar to a Macrobiotic technique of applying a hot ginger compress.  If you find heat therapy working for you, you may want to try a hot ginger or other compress to help accelerate the healing process. The ginger works as a natural anti-inflammatory.

If you have soft tissue damage and your elbow starts swelling, IMMEDATELY STOP THE HEAT THERAPY AND START ICING IT.  You have inflammation too advanced to use heat therapy at this time and should just do intensive icing of the inflamed area.  Use this along with other more conventional methods of curing tennis elbow.