Bone Fractures

Bone fractures, commonly known as broken bones, happen to millions of people across the country each year. Typically caused by sports injuries, car accidents or falls, these painful injuries take time to heal. Your healthcare provider has several options to treat fractures.

What is a bone fracture?

When you break a bone, healthcare providers call it a bone fracture. This break changes the shape of the bone. These breaks may happen straight across a bone or along its length. A fracture can split a bone in two or leave it in several pieces.

What types of bone fractures are there?

Healthcare providers can usually categorize a bone fracture based on its features. The categories include:

• Closed or open fractures: If the injury doesn’t break open the skin, it’s called a closed fracture. If the skin does open, it’s called an open fracture or compound fracture.
• Complete fractures: The break goes completely through the bone, separating it in two.
• Displaced fractures: A gap forms where the bone breaks. Often, this injury requires surgery to fix.
• Partial fractures: The break doesn’t go all the way through the bone.
• Stress fractures: The bone gets a crack in it, which is sometimes tough to find with imaging.

A healthcare provider may add extra terms to describe partial, complete, open and closed fractures. These terms include:

• Avulsion: A tendon or ligament pulls part of the bone off. Ligaments connect bones to other bones, while tendons anchor muscles to bones.
• Comminuted: The bone shatters into several different pieces.
• Compression: The bone gets crushed or flattened.
• Impacted: Bones get driven together.
• Oblique: The break goes diagonally across the bone.
• Spiral: The fracture spirals around the bone.
• Transverse: The break goes in a straight line across the bone.