MRI? If your shoulder hurts there are a ton of shoulder exercises and posture improvements you can practice to greatly help.
How much can you move your arm? (forward, back, and side) Thats all they checked when I tore mine last year. I couldn't move mine more than a couple inches off my body. Then got an MRI to confirm.
Getting old is getting old, I'm stuck with it. I have a small bone spur in my left shoulder that can give me a problem if I reach for something or bump it the wrong way. Then it hurts for a few days. If it's real bad, I have to get a steroid injection. Something about the bone spur irritating the surrounding muscle,which gets inflamed, which makes the bone spur even worse. Maybe you have something like that. Good luck! My advice? Viagra is your friend.
Maybe I just tweaked it. Had some arm tingling and slight weakness after the tweak (I moved my arm to emphasize a point I was making and it tweaked; again, getting old?) I thought, well, if it's going to be a little sore, I put a little icy hot on it, but it burned more than it should, telling me something must be torn (if only a little). Not so much pain yet today but I can tell something isn't 100%. Hopefully just something minor. Weird....everything hitting all at once lately.
had some shoulder problems a while back and an x-ray ruled out specific cartilage problems, did the recommended physical therapy for strengthening and saw significant improvement. so x2 on the exercises option as a possibility.
I had a partial tear on my labrum but with rehab, swimming, acupuncture I was able to increase stability and strength without surgery.
I have a total tear in the labrum right now. I'll have surgery in a month or so. I honestly didn't know I had a tear for a couple of years. I think I hurt it playing basketball 2-3 years ago. I remember it hurting but I figured it would go away. The pain went away, except when I'd put my arm up above my head. I wasn't doing a lot of that at the time, so I didn't worry about it. I finally decided to do something about it, went to the doctor and found out it was a major tear. The surgeon said I couldn't tear it any worse than I did. D'oh. This is what I learned if you want to get it diagnosed. You go to a sports medicine doctor and they can tell a lot just by moving your arms around. But, insurance doesn't want to pay for an MRI to really see the tear until you do some physical therapy on it. So, the doctor will give you a month of that. PT supposedly fixes a lot of problems. If the problem is still there, you get an MRI. If the doctor sees a tear, they'll refer you to an orthopedic surgeon. They'll do some additional diagnosis and then you decide whether you want surgery. I'm told the recovery is brutal on pain, I'll be 3 weeks in a sling, and I'd start PT again about 1 week into recovery.
Thanks sincerely for sharing that. Yikes. Family member had that surgery and you've heard right but after subsequent PT, he regained pretty much full movement. Worked great. For now, we will look forward to short and cranky posts!
With a full tear PT isn’t going to do a lot without surgery . With a partial tear it can be very beneficial. If you have surgery make 100% sure you attend all the PT or there is a real chance you get adhesive capsulitis and have a very limited range of motion.
I'll offer a different opinion on sports medicine based on personal experience. I had a 3/4 partial tear of my achilles tendon and went to a sports medicine doctor thinking that was the way to go. They did as you describe, put me on PT to "strengthen" my ankle. No improvement. A month or so later I went to an ankle specialist, orthopedic surgeon. He instantly did the MRI that diagnosed the 3/4 partial/corkscrew tear, and put me in a walking boot. He also said the PT the sports doctor had put me on hurt my tendon more than it helped. This is after my wife had her first bad hip mis-diagnosed by a sports doctor (who is also a family friend) for over two years--she finally went to a hip specialist who only had to look at an x-ray to diagnose the hip displasia in under 10 seconds. His sarcastic comment was "Don't they know how to read an x-ray at your doctor's office?" Needless to say neither of us are big fans of sports medicine clinics, and I'll never go that route again. Go to a shoulder specialist right off the bat, right from the start.
Fair enough. I have my own bias on surgeons, that they have a preference for cutting. They have personalities that like to go in and fix things. And the financial rewards are richer there as well. That's probably an unfair generalization. But because I wanted to avoid surgery, I wanted to ask the opinion first of someone I could feel confident would try to fix the problem without surgery. It's working out okay for me. Maybe the lesson here is the old advice people always hear (but never execute on) -- get a second opinion.
nope, good point. and in my case the orthopedic surgeon went directly to a non-surgical solution (the boot) that worked and had me back up and running two months later. But after a lifetime of beating around the bush and starting with GPs and working our way up the medical food chain with referrals etc., my wife and I both have reached a point where we would much rather go straight to a specialist, right from the beginning.
Any shoulder specialist you all recommend in the Houston area? I got an x-ray a year ago that showed calcification in my shoulder which causes the pain to vary. Workouts aren't really painful outside of the incline bench which is a real struggle so have decided to avoid it altogether.
As far as all this goes, the problem seemed to get better the next day (arm was weak, numb that day) but seems I have lost hand and arm strength. Xray in the neck showed some degeneration in discs and they want to schedule and MRI to see if I have a pinched nerve (I don't think it's the rotator cuff now). Wonder if anyone has had a pinched nerve and what kind of symptoms (arm and hand weakness are a possible symptom; please, no fap jokes).
I did the surgery about 10 days ago. It's pretty amazing how they can just punch a couple of holes in you and do repairs with a camera instead of cutting you open. The stitches were removed in 6 days. But the reason I bumped the thread is that I'm sick to death of this stupid arm sling, which I'm supposed to wear for another 10 days. I'm looking for someone to talk me out of just taking the thing off. I don't have much range of motion back yet, but I can walk around and do simple things without it. I'd at least like to ditch it for sleeping. The official medical advice strikes me as highly conservative because they aren't the ones wearing it.
