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Home › Articles › Illnesses, Diseases & Disorders › Out of Socket

Out of Socket

The Facts on Nursemaid's Elbow

By Teri Brown

Pages:  1  2  3  4  

Nursemaid's elbow sounds almost benign, hardly alarming at all. But you only have to hear a baby or toddler screaming in pain once to know the condition is in no way harmless.

Kim Chapman from Katy, Texas, remembers that sound all too well. Her 22-month-old son, Cody, was playing around on the bed when Chapman asked her 10-year-old daughter to get him down. Her daughter pulled her son one way by the arms as Cody pulled in the opposite direction.

"He started crying and pointing to his arm," Chapman says. "I couldn't get him to stop crying, which is unusual for Cody. He finally fell asleep in my arms, but he would still cry out about every five minutes. I just knew he had broken or sprained his arm."

Her husband wanted to wait until the morning to take him to see his pediatrician, but Chapman had a gut feeling that something was very wrong. She was right.

"When the nurse looked at Cody's arm, she straightened it out and bent the arm," Chapman says. "The nurse felt a pop and knew it was nursemaid's elbow. The doctors wanted my husband to stay so they could keep an eye on Cody for a while. My husband said he was out of pain as soon as the nurse bent his arm."

What Is Nursemaid's Elbow?
Dr. Richard Gross, a pediatric orthopedic surgeon at the Medical University of South Carolina, says that nursemaid's elbow is actually very common. "Nursemaid's elbow is a partial slippage of one of the bones forming the elbow joint," Dr. Gross says. "It only occurs in young children because the bone (radius) is not held as firmly by the ligament as it is in older children or adults."

Dr. Sheldon Simon, Chief, Division of Pediatric Orthopedics at the Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City, says that there are two bones of the forearm, the radius and the ulna, that at the elbow contact the bone of the upper arm (the humerus) to form the elbow joint. "As a unit the forearm bones flex and extend about the humeral bone," Dr. Simon says. "The radius also rotates (twists) about the ulnar bone. Holding it in place so that as it twists is a ligament just below the elbow joint that wraps around the radius in an area we call the radial neck."


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