article_snippet: Doctors had reviewed the X-ray of her elbow and there was a fracture after all, in the olecranon, the protruding bone that forms the tip of the elbow.
article_snippet: For a second X-ray showed that the fractured bone fragments had moved 4mm in the intervening days.
article_snippet: You can identify a major fracture of a large long bone across the room,’ says Mr Kelly.
article_snippet: ‘Hairline fractures, where the bone is broken but not misaligned, appear as a fine line on an X-ray which can be overlooked,’ says Dr Adrian Boyle, emergency medicine consultant at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, in Cambridge.
article_snippet: Or the bone may be hidden
article_snippet: this commonly happens with fractures to the scaphoid bone, one of the smallest in the wrist and the one most likely to break.
article_snippet: ’ Guidelines issued by the College of Emergency Medicine recommend that patients with a suspected scaphoid fracture and tenderness in the wrist area should be offered a Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scan even if the X-ray comes back clear.