Hi, I’m Dr. Soucie with Barley Wellness in Fairhaven, MA. I’m going to talk a little bit today about the shoulder, and treatment options that can help your shoulder pain. A little bit of anatomy, the shoulder is a ball and socket joint, it sits inside the scapula or the shoulder blade.
Common Causes For Shoulder Pain In Fairhaven, MA
There are a number of groups of muscles that help initiate shoulder muscle. Once the rotator cuff muscles starts the motion and gets up a little higher, your muscles here start following through the motion, your shoulder is supposed to drop down into that little cup, and then your shoulder blade starts rotating. So you have full motion.
There are a number of things that obviously can upset that motion. One is obviously, if somebody has an accident, and they sprain or strain the muscles. Obviously, there are rotator tears that can happen rotator cuff tears, but often that’s not as common as people think everyone comes in worrying that they need soldier shoulder surgery. And that’s not necessarily the case.
Chiropractic Care For Shoulder Pain In Fairhaven, MA
One of the most interesting things about the shoulder is that it hangs off of your central spine. So how the neck functions and how the mid-back functions or the thoracic spine really affect your shoulder function. One of the chief things that we see with shoulder dysfunction is just really bad posture, shoulders rounded forward, head forward posture kind of forward like this, and it closes down on the space that the shoulder has to function in the rotator cuff in their biceps muscle here. Another structure for the shoulder is the collarbone and the collarbone exit like a leather arm lever arm to let you raise your arm up all the way. So with the shoulder bad posture, you can get some rotator cuff pain.
In order to get the shoulder functioning optimally, we would work on adjusting the spine, the neck, and the shoulder, getting the shoulder blades back and down. We use a number of muscle balance and posture exercises to really change the function of the shoulder.
Another issue that people have is when this happens in the shoulder doesn’t drop down on the joint, people start hiking their shoulder up to move, and you’re the first rib gets stuck up here. And the shoulder gets jammed right in here and they have a hard time raising it up. So what they do is they lift their shoulder up to try to move their arm and that creates a lot of pain and a lot of dysfunction. So what we would do here where the wellness is we go ahead and adjust the spine, the first rib and we literally adjust the shoulder joint and bring it down. So when you raise the arm up, it drops like it needs to.
Frozen Shoulder Treatment In Fairhaven, MA
There are other issues that happen with the shoulder. Everybody’s heard of frozen shoulder. Usually, it happens on the non-dominant side. So if this person’s right-handed, it usually happens on the left side, they start with a little bit of shoulder pain. So they don’t use it as often, the shoulder capsule starts shrinking up, it gets inflamed and you have a lot of pain in every direction.
We help to decrease the inflammation, we help increase function, we get the muscle spasms to calm down. We give a lot of stretching and stabilizing exercises for the rotator cuff, the deltoid muscles, the upper trap muscles, the rhomboid muscles, all these muscles that are involved in changing the shoulder, and moving the shoulder.
One of the other things that can happen is when you have really bad posture and your neck is very, very forward. It puts a ton of stress along the top and your shoulder and people will come in saying I have shoulder pain, we’ll do an exam and actually, the shoulder is functioning fine. It’s this part of the upper part of the shoulder, the upper back that actually has problems. So we get in there and we work on the posture, we adjust the neck and we get the mid back moving better. We also work on opening up the shoulder area here, get the head back and people function a whole lot better.
Shoulder Pain Treatment Options In Fairhaven, MA
There are other things that also come with shoulder issues people wind up with headaches, neck pain, jaw pain, and mid-back pain and they don’t realize it’s all coming from that bad posture.
Along with adjustments, we have some great massage therapists here. We’ll send the person over and they’ll just work the whole area.
