My broken elbow straightens about the same as yours, jefmcg. However, when I saw the surgeon, he said "pain - let's operate," replacing the head of the radius, doing nothing for the pain, and doing nothing for the range of movement (which I think is a large contributor to the pain). When I told him that after the surgery the pain was probably worse, his next idea was to just take the ball out and leave a floating joint. I told him to get stuffed, and I just put up with it. I'm strongly tempted to go private to try to find someone who will file down the joint so that I can straighten it, but it seems like that would be quite a bit of cash that I can ill afford, and the risk would be that it is even worse afterwards.