Swat it, Lift it, Tear it
The Painful Saga of Rotator Cuff Injury
Did you know your shoulder is the least stable point in your body? And you thought it was your brain cells around tax time.
If you’ve ever felt the pain of a rotator cuff injury, you know it is no laughing matter. It can send a searing ache from the back of your shoulder to the round of it, followed by shards of pain that shoot down your arm – especially at night. There are other variations on cuff pain -- from sharp pain that immobilizes your arm to pounding pain that doesn’t exactly make you cry out, but it leaves you exhausted and moody.
The reason there are so many ways your shoulder can hurt is because there are so many ways to hurt your shoulder. Again, no laughing matter. But as mentioned above, your shoulder is the least stable part of your body -- more precisely, it is the least stable “joint” in your body. And yet it is the hinge that literally fastens your arms to your trunk. Which makes it sort of important, to say the least. From reaching up to get your coffee cup from the cupboard in the morning to snapping off the light at night, your shoulder is involved in virtually every moment of your day.
And yet it is held together with the organic equivalent of scotch tape and shoe string. . . .
The shoulder consists of 3 bones, says eMedicineHealth.com (an online consumer health information source): the clavicle (collarbone), the scapula (shoulder blade), and the humerus (upper arm bone).
A crisscross of ligaments in the front joins your shoulder to your body while in the back, four muscles work together to hold things in place. These four muscles make up the “rotator cuff”, and it is their job to keep the head of the humerus (the long bone that runs from the shoulder to the elbow) flesh against the shoulder blade. When one of these muscles gets strained or torn or damaged in some way, it causes pain of one of the sorts mentioned above. The damage can come from something as mundane as holding your arm at odd angles as you work the mouse on your computer hour after hour, day after day. Or it can come from one-handed, power swats of the volleyball during rec league on Tuesday nights.
The point is that, left untreated, rotator cuff injuries often scar over and slowly, but surely tighten around your shoulder and begin to chip away at you quality of life – first stopping you from playing a favorite sport like baseball or volleyball that requires overhand movement. Then perhaps making it too painful to hold your children or grandchildren. Until eventually, you may need to ask a loved one to get that aforementioned coffee cup down from the cupboard.
Fortunately, rotator cuff is very treatable injury with structural bodywork.
When patients come to me with rotator cuff injuries, my first job is to take away the immediate pain. I can do this with deep tissue treatment that breaks down the scar tissue (which is the culprit in long term chronic pain) and releases taughtness in the surrounding muscles. The second thing I do ia free the area of adhesions that typically collect between muscle fibers in the cuff. And finally, I encourage blood flow into the damaged area to deliver, the nutrients needed for your body to heal itself fully.
By the end of treatment, most patients are pain free and ALL patients have greater movement in their shoulder area than when they walked in.
So now the only thing between you and a pain-free, fully functioning shoulder is a phone call to my appointment desk. Give me a call.
