Having suffered a fairly serious shoulder injury at the start of this year I know how worrying and frustrating it can be. You may or may not be able to think of something that you did but suddenly your shoulder has gone from working perfectly to giving constant pain almost overnight.
Lifting your arm above shoulder height is near impossible, reach behind you, no chance, not without some serious pain relief. Forget for a moment and make a sudden movement and you get reminded quite painfully. If you're lucky, you may just be able to get comfortable enough at night to get an hour or twos sleep before yoru alarm clock tells you to stop trying.
I tore one of the muscles in my rotator cuff. It's a shoulder injury that will afflict anything up to 30% of us at some time in our lives. Either as a result of wear and tear, age related or down to a repetitive sports or work activity, or it may be the result of a knock or even lifting something that is too heavy.
The rotator cuff is a group of muscles that help to hold the arm into the socket of the shoulder joint. There are four of them and they all start on the shoulder blade and attach to the head of the humerus or upper arm bone to be technical. Each of the muscles takes a different route from the shoulder blade to arm, but the end result is that they form a cuff around the shoulder joint stabilising it and keeping all the bones where they should be.
I lifted something that was too heavy, felt a pop in my shoulder and that was it, the start of months of misery, trips to the doctor, MRI scan, Xray, a couple of visits to a specialist and the diagnosis was confirmed as torn rotator cuff with shoulder impingement.
I had torn my supraspinatus muscle which is one of the four rotator cuff muscles. It had become inflamed and was now too big for its usual channel which runs underneath my collar bone. I was offered surgery to shave a piece off of my collar bone to allow the muscle to move more freely and heal. Unfortunately the op was three months away and I was already fed up of the pain.
So I did some research on the internet and started physiotherapy. Taking it steady at first, so as not to aggravate the condition I started a series of shoulder exercises aimed at getting my shoulder moving again.
I am told that this doesn't always work. Some shoulder injuries need surgery and there is no way round it but my thinking was if the pain was coming from a pinched muscle as long as the exercises didn't cause pain I wasn't making things any worse and there was a chance that I could improve things so I persevered gradually increasing the level of exercise.
I am now pain free. The operation date is still ahead of me and it is looking as though it won't be needed. It seems that physiotherapy features strongly in the rehabilitation of most shoulder injuries. In my case a bit of research on the internet helped me to avoid shoulder surgery and fix my shoulder injury.
