Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I just bought the TheraICE Rx Hot & Cold Therapy Flexible Ice Pack for my elbow for tendinitis. It goes on easily, is very comfortable and is nicely flexible. I have a small-ish 10.5 inch elbow diameter, and the small size (9-12 inches) fits perfectly. The wrap/pack had a fairly strong odor right out of the box, but that seems to dissipate rapidly, and in the three days since I received it, it has about 80% dissipated - a few more days and I'm sure it will be completely gone. My complaint though is that it just doesn't have the thermal capacity to stay cold for a long enough period of time. The directions say to use it for 15 minutes, my doctor said to ice my elbow periodically for 15 minutes at a time - bingo! Match made in heaven, right? WRONG! Whatever gel this manufacturer is using simply isn't suitable for 15 minutes of usage. I used my infrared temperature gun to track the pack's temperature over time, measuring the temperature on the outside of the pack (see attached chart). At time zero, the pack is at 4 °F. By 5 minutes, the outside of the pack is already above 40 °F, and at 10 minutes it barely feels cold at all (inside or out) at about 57 °F. From there to 15 minutes has really minimal value from an 'icing the elbow' perspective. I can't say what my skin temperature is, but I'd guess it's slightly warmer than on the outside since the pack is against tissue with flowing blood (I measured my skin temp at 3 degrees warmer after taking the pack off, but there were 10-15 seconds for blood to flow before I measured, so don't know how valid that measurement was). Regardless, my personal opinion is that this pack is not capable of delivering cold therapy long enough and deep enough into the tendons and muscle tissue to reduce inflammation significantly. It may be OK for really, really minor tendinitis, but for anything more than that I recommend trying a wrap/pack that has more thermal capacity (if you can figure out how to determine that -- most descriptions I've seen generally lack any thermal capacity data).