What We Treat

Elbow, Wrist & Hand Pain Treatment in Lakewood

The jar you hand to somebody else now. The coffee cup you switched hands for without noticing. Your hands do thousands of small jobs a day, so pain there rewrites all of them. It has a cause, and finding it is the whole first visit.

Tennis elbow Wrist tendon pain Grip weakness Talk to a Specialist

Sound Familiar?

Does this sound like you?

  • Turning a jar lid and feeling your grip quit halfway
  • Switching the coffee cup to the other hand without even deciding to
  • An ache on the outside of the elbow that spreads down your forearm by mid-morning
  • Waking with fingers that need a minute of shaking before they work properly
  • Buttons and zips taking two tries and a word you wouldn’t say in front of the grandkids
  • A wrist you keep repositioning at the keyboard and never get comfortable

Two or more? You’re the one who fixes everybody else’s stuff. Your hands are worth the same trouble. Keep reading.

Why It Happens

The sore spot and the cause are rarely the same place.

Your hands and arms run thousands of small, repeated motions a day. Tendons handle that fine until recovery time gets shorter than the workload. Then they stay irritated. Add a keyboard set at the wrong height, a grip you changed to protect something else, an old fall that never fully settled, or wear in the joint itself, and the same tissue keeps getting reloaded before it’s ready.

Nerves make it harder to read. A nerve can be irritated at the wrist, at the elbow, or up in the neck and still send the symptoms straight to your fingers. That’s why chasing the sore spot so often misses. A cause-first evaluation watches how you actually move, grip and sit, then tests strength, flexibility and nerve signal until the real driver shows itself. For stubborn tendon pain that hasn’t budged with anything, Shockwave Therapy is one option we can talk through.

Physical therapist testing a patient’s wrist motion and grip strength during a hands-on evaluation

The Honest Truth

Hands don’t get a day off.

If you keep waiting

  • You grip differently to protect it, and the strain moves up into your shoulder and neck
  • Work you used to do without thinking becomes work you schedule around
  • A tendon that keeps getting reloaded every day takes longer to settle than one caught early

If you start now

  • Thirty to sixty minutes, and you walk out knowing what’s actually irritated
  • Hands-on treatment and the first ergonomic fixes start in that same visit
  • A plan with an endpoint, aimed at recovering without surgery or medication wherever we can

Nobody regrets starting too early. Plenty of people wish they hadn’t waited.

How We Fix It

The same four phases. Built for your hands.

Every plan has an endpoint. Here’s what the four phases look like from the elbow down.

First visits

Pain

Take the load off the angry tissue.

Hands-on work, plus a few changes to how you grip, type and lift, so the irritated tendon finally gets a gap between hits.

Once it calms down

Prime

Get the motion and the glide back.

Joint and soft tissue work restores wrist and elbow motion, and gets stiff nerves gliding again instead of catching as you reach.

As strength returns

Perform

Rebuild a grip you can trust.

Progressive strengthening through the hand, forearm, elbow and shoulder, so your grip stops borrowing from parts that were never built for it.

Before you finish

Prevent

Make the daily workload survivable.

Your desk, your tools and your technique get set up so the same thousand motions stop costing you. That’s the endpoint, not another appointment.

Related Conditions

Pain rarely stays in one place.

Arms compensate, and the strain travels. Here’s what else we treat.

1

Arthritis

Joints that ache to get going and stiffen the moment you sit still.

Learn More 2

Neck Pain

Where the tingling in your fingers sometimes actually starts.

Learn More 3

Pre & Post Surgery

Going in stronger, and getting your hand back to normal after without guessing.

Learn More

Questions, Answered

What people ask before booking for hand and elbow pain.

Loaded the right way, no. Rest alone tends to leave a tendon weaker and just as easy to set off again. The skill is giving it the amount it can handle right now, then adding to it as it settles. A licensed physical therapist works that out at your evaluation and adjusts it one-on-one, every visit. If something flares you up, we change it at the next session, not in three weeks.

Not to get started. California Direct Access lets you see a licensed physical therapist for up to 45 days or 12 visits, whichever comes first, with no physician sign-off. We accept 14 insurance plans, and we go through your benefits with you before you commit to anything. If your evaluation points to something that needs a physician or imaging, we will say so and help you get there.

You get an answer at the evaluation, not a guess before it. How long you have had it matters more than almost anything else. As a general guideline, 2 to 3 visits a week for 4 to 6 weeks gets the most out of a plan, and sessions run 30 to 60 minutes. Either way you get a plan with an endpoint, so you always know which phase you are in and what is left.

Book Your Visit

Ready when you are.

Request a time and a real person calls you back during business hours. No phone tree. No ‘someone will reach out.’ Just a plan.

  • Hours Monday–Friday, 9:00 AM–5:00 PM
  • (562) 512-3320 Prefer to talk now? Call us.
  • No doctor’s referral needed to start

We call back during business hours, Monday to Friday

Step 1 of 5

So we know who to look for when you walk in.

Visit Us

Care this good, this close.

The PT People

Take Me There (opens in a new tab) Call Us