The Simple Causes of Shoulder Pain | Chiropractor for Shoulder Pain in West Omaha, NE
Hey there! Dr. Jeremiah Samples from Family First Chiropractic and today we’re gonna get real about the truth behind your shoulder pain. Today we will talk about the simple causes of shoulder pain. Now, when I refer to shoulder pain as a clinician, what I’m talking about is anything affecting the entire shoulder girdle, which could include the upper arm, the clavicle itself, or the scapula. These also involve structures from the cervical spine and the thoracic spine, because the nerves that flow out from here, travel underneath that clavicle. That’s what supplies the muscles of your arm and your hands and basically keep everything moving, including the structures for blood supply.
3 Common Causes of Shoulder Pain
Now when we have shoulder problems it basically boils down to one of three things. Those are poor posture, poor mechanics, or poor maintenance. Now with poor posture, we have to think about how we spent a lot of time hunched over at the desk, driving, and hours using the phone. What this does, it rotates the shoulder forward, drags it down, and then pulls on those nerves. We talked about blood vessels that traveled underneath the clavicle and causes them to pinch down. Now initially, what people will tend to experience is either like a dull ache, numbness, or tingling in the hands and fingers. This is an early warning sign that you are compressing the structures that supply the muscles and the other structures of the hand and the arm. Now, other things that we do is we tend to have heavy bags, or purses that pull down and really clamp down on top of that bone. As a female if you’re wearing a bra you can cause double compression syndrome there to where it will literally just choke off those nerves. Overtime this leads to not just shoulder pain, but instability and further injury.
Poor Mechanics Causing Shoulder Pain
Now, as a chiropractor, the first thing I want to check for is, are the nerves compromised at their source in the cervical spine or in the thoracic spine? And then how does that relate to the shoulder girdle itself and the pain being experienced? Now when we talk about the poor mechanics, what I mean is, “are your shoulder in a compromised position repetitively throughout the day?”. Let’s think of somebody turning a screw over and over and over again, in just one direction. Now what that will do is overuse the rotator cuff muscles and cause inflammation and eventually further injury. Or the other problem being that you don’t use your shoulder enough, and you spend all day at a desk, or behind a computer. Then during the weekend, you decide that it’s time to go out there and play catch for a bit. Well, those muscles aren’t used to that. And if you haven’t been working them out, you’re gonna know, because they’re gonna let you know with symptoms pretty quick.
Muscle & Joint Maintenance
Now, it’s important that throughout the day to get up and take breaks from your daily posture. We also want to make sure you’re going through the range of motion of your shoulder to help that synovial fluid lubricate all the joints in there. When we talk about the poor maintenance of the shoulder, that’s what it includes. Are you using enough throughout the day? And are you taking care of it as far as working out those rotator cuff muscles? Those rotator cuffs sit like a pocket around the shoulder and they keep this humeral head intact against the fascia here and with the supporting structures of the clavicle. What this does is allow for lower range of motion and increases your stability. So doing rotations doesn’t take much weight and doesn’t take much more than maybe every other day to keep those muscles healthy. Now, if you have a compromised cervical spine, thoracic spine, then no matter what you do here the end result is still going to have issues with the nerve supply. So it’s important to get your spine checked regularly so that you can be free of subluxations and free of nerve compression.
If you have other questions about shoulder pain or how to maintain your shoulder health, please come see us in our office!
