Tendon Pain Scams You Should Avoid

If you traveled throughout the world in 2012, taking a poll to see who was suffering from tendon pain, the total number would be something well over ten million people. Given this fact, there are a lot of products out there that claim to be able to get rid of it. Some of them are worth the money they charge, but unfortunately a lot of them are nothing more than scams, pure and simple. Here are several things to be careful of if you're suffering from tendonitis or tendonosis.

Creams and sprays. Everybody likes the idea of just being able to rub or spray something on your bicep and have the pain go away. But compounds like capsaicin, menthol, "transdermal" MSM or glucosamine have no scientific evidence at all showing effectiveness. They might give some temporary relief, but they aren't going to cure the tendon trouble.

Braces, wraps and make-shift casts. It's true that immobilizing a limb or joint can prevent further pain from happening. And in some rare cases (like, one percent) of tendonitis, it may even be a necessary part of the healing process. However, most cases of tendon pain require movement of the affected area in order to heal properly. Even if movement isn't strictly required, rehabilitation programs that incorporate movement have been shown to heal the tendon faster than those that don't.

Herbal cocktails and pills. There are a lot of naturopathic cures for pain, and many of them are good for treating that indication. But things like willow bark (which is really just aspirin), Devil's claw, boswellia and so on don't have any effect at all on tendons themselves. Tendons are made of collagen, and collagen just isn't affected by these substances. Rather, what they do is break the pain transmission pathway to your brain. You will probably feel less pain, but this doesn't mean that true healing is taking place, or that you're not doing further injury to your tendons along the way.

Self-administered rehabilitation programs. I have to say that some of these actually do work. The thing to watch out for here is exercise or stretching prescriptions that are dangerous. For example, some programs recommend standing on wobble-boards for Achilles tendon pain before complete healing has taken place. This is just a bad idea all the way around. If you have a damaged Achilles tendon, the last thing that you want to do is stand on an unstable surface while it's still healing up. That's just begging for a re-injury, which can set you back several weeks or months.

Then there are plain old internet marketing scams, which promise to cure your pain if you'll just give the marketer your name and email address. Once you've done this you'll be put into an automated emailer program that will bombard you with useless and unwanted information about all sorts of products that you're probably not interested in to begin with. It's true, this won't make your tendon problem any worse... however, it also won't make it any better. And who needs the hassle?

Don't give up hope, though! Some legitimate tendon relief products do exist, and some review sites seem to do a good job giving consumer information. If you decide to visit one of these sites, make sure that it doesn't have affiliate links to the products it recommends. Ones that do are often nothing more than cash generators for the people who put them up. They laud every single product on the site to the skies, and hope that readers will click on a product or two so that they can take home commissions. Make sure that the reviews you read are from a site that doesn't have a financial interest in what you buy, and gives you fair and unbiased information so that you can make a good choice.

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