Soft Tissue Injuries:
sprains, strains, tendonitis

Soft tissue injuries can include injuries to the skin, muscles, tendons, ligaments or the tissue capsules that surround certain joints.

A soft tissue injury is damage to any biological tissues except for bone i.e. bone tissues.

So, it is easy to define a soft tissue injury as damage to any of the tissues in the body except for bone (tissues).

Examples of soft tissue injuries include:

• damage muscles
• damage to tendons
• damage to ligaments

There are several types and examples of soft tissue injuries. In general they can involve pain, swelling, bruising, reduction in or loss of function of the affected part of the body, or a combination of these symptoms.

Soft tissue injures can be classified into two main groups:

• Open wounds, and
• Closed wounds

What is the difference between an open wound and a closed wound ?

The difference between open wounds and closed wounds is that open wounds allow blood to leave the body whereas closed wounds do not involve any external bleeding (although there may be bleeding under the skin, which is called a bruise).

In some cases a single incident can result in both “open wounds” and “closed wounds” in the same area of the body e.g. impact at speed may result in a forearm being both grazed and bruised, perhaps on opposite sides of the limb. However, if any blood escapes from the region of the injury the wound is generally classed as an “open wound” even when there are also some symptoms that could apply to “closed wounds”.