If a toe is swollen after being kicked, is it a fracture?

If you don't pay attention to your toes, they may be injured by weight, such as when you play football, or if you accidentally kick them against a wall or something hard, which can cause swelling. This can cause severe pain, but this pain cannot determine whether a fracture has occurred. You need to go to the hospital for examination. If it is just tissue damage, it is generally not very serious. However, once a fracture occurs, you need good treatment.

Is it a fracture if the toe is swollen?

Soft tissue damage caused by external force, but if you are worried, you need to go to the hospital for an X-ray. The X-ray mainly checks whether there is any problem with the bones.

What examination items should be selected for fractures?

Conventional X-ray examination: It is better for diagnosing trauma or diseases of denser tissues such as bones, but it has almost no diagnostic significance for the diagnosis of soft tissue diseases. Simply put, if there is a problem with the bones, we can choose ordinary X-ray examination to judge, but it is not a suitable choice for examining muscle and soft tissue.

CT examination: In addition to examining bones, it can also diagnose and accurately locate soft tissue abnormalities. Everyone, please note: For common limb fractures, ordinary X-ray examinations are fully sufficient, but for intra-articular fractures, spinal fractures, herniated discs, and those that need to clarify the location of fracture fragments or suspected fractures, CT scans with additional three-dimensional reconstruction are generally required.

MRI examination: It produces images based on the content of hydrogen protons in the body. Since cortical bone does not contain hydrogen protons, MRI examination is not suitable for the diagnosis of fractures. On the other hand, fractures are sometimes accompanied by muscle and tendon injuries. For example, injuries to muscles, tendons, cartilage or meniscus are difficult to be shown by X-rays or CT. At this time, we need to seek help from MRI.

In general, X-ray examinations after trauma can reveal relatively obvious fractures. For patients who are highly suspected of having fractures clinically but have negative X-rays, a CT scan is necessary to confirm the diagnosis. Sometimes, even a negative CT scan cannot completely rule out fractures, so an MRI scan is necessary, especially when bone contusion or soft tissue injury is suspected, an MRI scan is even more justifiable. The patient's doctor should choose the appropriate examination method based on the patient's injuries, and the injured and their families should actively cooperate and follow the doctor's arrangements for appropriate examinations.