Shoulder Pain Relief
We never really think about how much we use our shoulders in daily life until we experience shoulder pain. Your day is probably filled with reaching, lifting, stretching, picking things up and other activities that involve your shoulders. As a result, shoulder pain can reduce your quality of life in a big way. Almost every type of shoulder pain can be alleviated and treated with physical therapy. If you’re living with severe shoulder pain, don’t hesitate to give us a call and schedule a consultation with a physical therapist at Physio Blend.
What is Shoulder Pain?
“Shoulder pain” is really just a generic term for something that makes your shoulder area hurt. The shoulder is a complicated ball and socket joint that includes your collarbone (clavicle), your upper arm bone (humerus) and the shoulder blade itself (scapula). The shoulder has ligaments and muscles attached to it from your back, chest, and arm. An injury or debilitating condition to any of those attachments, bones, ligaments or muscles can lead to “shoulder pain.”
The only question is, how serious is the pain? Some types of shoulder pain are so severe that it can completely restrict your movement — for months at a time. If it is an ongoing pain that doesn’t seem to be getting better, you should seriously consider physical therapy for pain relief and to help you recover.
Causes of Shoulder Pain
Here’s a closer look at the different causes and types of shoulder pain:
- Fracture: A shoulder fracture usually happens as a result of sudden trauma, such as a car accident or a collision during a sporting event. Any or all three of the bones that meet at the shoulder joint can be impacted (collarbone, scapula, and humerus). The most common cause of a shoulder fracture is simply falling and catching yourself on one hand — like football players do every single day!
- Rotator Cuff Tendonitis The four main muscles that allow you to move your shoulder make up the rotator cuff. These muscles help hold the ball of the humerus in your shoulder socket while you move your arm. The tendons from these muscles attach to each other underneath the shoulder blade. If one of those attachments gets pinched due to an injury the result is tendonitis (and sometimes very intense shoulder pain).
- Bursitis: We all have fluid-filled sacs in our bodies that help certain structures glide over each other. These sacs are called bursa, and one of them sits between the shoulder blade and the arm bone. If the bursa gets pinched, it leads to shoulder bursitis.
- Frozen Shoulder The technical name for a frozen shoulder is adhesive capsulitis. This condition comes on slowly and it cannot be identified with an X-ray or MRI. Eventually, the use of the shoulder becomes so severely restricted that it becomes too painful for everyday activities, such as reaching into your back pocket or putting on a belt. It’s believed that a buildup of scar tissue in the shoulder muscles could be one of the causes of this mysterious and painful condition.
Diagnosing Your Shoulder Pain
Physio Blend uses sophisticated diagnostic methods to help determine the root cause of your pain, and which services you help resolve your pain or injury quickly. There are numerous benefits to diagnostic services to help discover the cause of your pain before we even treat you. For one, it saves you time and money!
Before we begin treating you, we are able to know what the problem is (and show you!). Diagnostic testing allows our experts to determine what is the best course of action for your treatment.
Diagnostic testing also lets us be more accurate than other physical therapy clinics that do not use testing. Being able to see the pain with these tests helps us treat you with efficiency by providing us with knowledge of exactly where the pain is coming from. This is huge for physical therapists and could revolutionize the entire industry – Most PT clinics don’t offer all or any of these tests pre-treatment!!
