Has anyone torn cartilage in their wrists?

**Evilfishtank** · Posted On: 1/19/2011 9:39pm

I had to stop training because of really bad wrist/forearm/elbow pain bilaterally. I got cortisone shots in my elbows/upper forearm and it doesn't hurt as much but an MRI of my wrists revealed that the "radial attachment of the triangular fibrocartilage". Has anyone else had this? The doctor and the Internet said that cortisone shots were the next step. If that doesn't work than I need surgery...damn.

**W. Rabbit** · Posted On: 1/30/2011 8:44pm

Originally Posted by Evilfishtank

I had to stop training because of really bad wrist/forearm/elbow pain bilaterally. I got cortisone shots in my elbows/upper forearm and it doesn't hurt as much but an MRI of my wrists revealed that the "radial attachment of the triangular fibrocartilage". Has anyone else had this? The doctor and the Internet said that cortisone shots were the next step. If that doesn't work than I need surgery...damn.

As a matter of (verifiable) fact...(somewhere I have an x-ray), experienced TFCC damage in my wrist (in addition to a completely broken ulna and radius bone) around the age of 13 from a horse riding injury.

This is pretty serious tissue damage at a critical point where the plates of the bones of the hands meet the two primary bones of the forearm. Lucky for me the pain of the broken bones probably obscured whatever pain I had from the torn FLCC tissue but I remember this is a common place for athletes to injure themselves, and treatment is relatively effective.

You basically have broken dead tissue floating around in the spaces between the bones of your wrist, and it's causing inflammation. The cortisone shots will try to lessen that inflammation, but it could be a short term victory, leading to the requirement for debridement, where they would get all that dead tissue out of you. Athletes usually recover well from these injuries according to the research below.

Triangular Fibrocartilage Complex (TFCC) Repair and Rehabilitation

(Cuong Pho DPT, Joe Godges DPT ,Loma Linda U DPT Program, KPSoCal Ortho PT Residency)