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CHRISTOPHER CAMP: Our athletes and patients have a lot of different type of elbow problems that can arise. Commonly, we see tendon problems. On the inside of the elbow, it's more commonly called golfer's elbow. The ones on the outside of the elbow are commonly called tennis elbow. Those injuries are not exclusive to those types of athletes. Anybody can get them. But those are sort of what they're called.

ELENA JELSING: The treatment strategy for tendinopathy-- so we would start with physical therapy.

CHRISTOPHER CAMP: The next is in a category of things like injections and orthobiologics.

BRENNAN BOETTCHER: So for example, someone with tennis elbow may need just one treatment before that problem is cured.

CHRISTOPHER CAMP: One of the most common injuries that we see to the elbow, particularly in our throwing athletes, is an injury to the medial ulnar collateral ligament of the elbow. That's a ligament that runs on the inside part of the elbow. This injury is very commonly known as the Tommy John injury or Tommy John surgery.

DAVID SOMA: Putting your hands on the athlete, feeling and touching to see where the pain is can really help us to guide that diagnosis and treatment.

CHRISTOPHER CAMP: The largest growing segment of the population that has these injuries are actually our adolescent and high-school-age baseball players. The most common symptoms of having an injury, if it's a pitcher, they usually notice decreased velocity, accuracy, and fatigue. And the MRI almost every time can help give us the diagnosis and tell us how severe it's injured and where it's injured. So the vast majority of Tommy John injuries, if they're caught early, have the potential to heal without surgery.

There are several different surgical options. One is to do a simple repair, which means we just take the ligament, and we sew it back down. Another is to do something called a reconstruction, which means we put a new ligament in the elbow, and that's traditional Tommy John surgery. Hopefully, that gets them ready for their next season. The success rate is quite high, over 90% chance of success. As we begin to understand this more in the professional athletes, we can now adopt those same principles into our everyday athletes.

Exciting advances that we've had is to augment our repairs, or reconstruction, with a small little suture tape, which is something that we add when we put the graft in, which serves as sort of a brace for the elbow, and it helps to share the load with the ligament.

And that has been really phenomenal in allowing our athletes to start rehabbing earlier. On average, it probably takes about 12 to maybe 16 months. And now we've been able to do that in around nine months or so, which can make a really big difference in a young athlete and potentially save their next season of baseball.