Shoulder Pain
Having shoulder pain can make activities of daily living frustrating. It might limit your ability to raise your arm, comb your hair, change in and out of your clothes, or sleep on your side, just to cite a few examples. In addition, shoulder pain may affect or disrupt your exercise or weight-training routine.
The most common situations for which people seek help at our clinic include:
▪ Pain felt in the front of shoulder during or after weight-lifting, push-up or chin-up activities.
▪ Sharp catching pain in the shoulder when reaching the arm backwards (eg. to retrieve a suitcase in the back-seat of the car)
▪ Loss of normal shoulder range of motion, following injury or surgery, or from no apparent cause (“frozen shoulder”)
▪ Recurrent shoulder pain or sense of ‘instability’ associated with a prior history of shoulder trauma or dislocation
▪ Rotator cuff muscle strains or tears previously diagnosed from ultrasound or MRI scans
In many cases, although the pain or restriction may occur at first in the shoulder, the symptoms may ‘spread’ to affect other areas. You may feel pain radiating into the arm or up into the neck, or around the shoulder blade. For some, occasional numbness and tingling sensations may be felt in the hands or fingers. Having these symptoms does not necessarily mean that you have a ‘pinched’ nerve. Neither does the inability to raise the arm due to pain automatically indicate a ‘frozen shoulder’ syndrome.
Whether this is your first episode of shoulder pain, or a recurrent problem affecting your lifestyle, your Osteopath will be able to help you. A comprehensive physical assessment is given to identify the cause of the problem, followed by an individual treatment & management plan to help you recover as quickly as possible. If you already have investigations or scans done for your shoulder, your Osteopath will also be able to help you pace your exercise and rehabilitation routine to make sure that your recovery process is managed effectively.
Osteopathy recognizes you as a unique individual so treatment is customized to your needs and not protocol-based. Gentle but firm hands-on techniques are applied to stretch & relax tight tissues, get stiff joints moving and improve general body alignment.
Your osteopath will not only just focus on your shoulder to relieve symptoms, he will also assess the rest of your body as a whole to address other contributing factors (eg. previously-injured or stiff areas) that make you susceptible to shoulder pain. After your treatment, you will come away with a better understanding of how your pain developed and what you can do to take better care of yourself.
