Treating Painful Shoulder Conditions
Treating painful shoulder conditions often involves the following steps:
- Change your daily activities, allowing sufficient rest to let the area heal
- Appropriate exercise and stretching to return strength and flexibility
- Ensure that you neither overexert or underexert in your habitual activities to promote optimum healing. This requires a degree of balanced common sense.
Depending on the severity of the shoulder injury you may need advice or treatment from a specialist, as outlined below.
Taking medicines
Your doctor would usually prescribe medicines in order to bring down the pain and inflammation. These may be in the form of over-the-counter medicines or, for serious inflammation, might involve a steroid injection. The frequency and dosage that you will rely on to treat painful symptoms will be advised by your doctor.
Physiotherapy
Physiotherapists are trained specialists and are able to help:
- Reduce painful symptoms
- Heal the area quicker
- Reduce long term problems resulting from the injury
They often do this through targeted stretching and strengthening exercises, although therapeutic techniques such as acupuncture or massage are often also helpful.
Occupational Therapy
An occupational therapy can help with habits that might be difficult in the healing period. These might include things such as, dressing, certain work tasks or other household chores. An occupational therapist can provide helpful advice and techniques to create optimal healing environments.
Shoulder Surgery
If the injury is too severe to heal on its own or with other conservative measures, then surgery may be recommended as a final treatment option.
Some shoulder issues such as some kinds of rotator cuff tears and repeated dislocations are not effectively treated with simple measures, such as exercise. In these circumstances either your Doctor or another specialist may recommend surgery. There are a range of surgical techniques and procedures used to correct a wide range of painful shoulder injuries. Your shoulder surgeon will be able to advise on the most appropriate technique in your particular case.
