Most people try to push through it when they feel a little bit of pain or soreness. And sometimes that’s fine, but when it comes to your shoulders, it’s best to get checked out to make sure there’s nothing serious going on. I am Toni Drinkard, a physical therapist here at Rebound Physical Therapy in Topeka, Kansas. Today, we’re going to talk about shoulder pain and why it matters.
Ignoring Pain Snowballs into Worse Symptoms
A lot of times when we’re in pain, we wait until the pain progresses to seek help. I often describe it as a snowball effect where shoulder pain may start out with just a little bit of pain, or a little bit of immobility, that we can live with; but then we wait, and the snowball builds until we’re at the end of the hill and it smacks us. Then we are really limited, or we get pain at night, and it’s just bothering us all the time.
What Do Physical Therapists Recommend?
I always recommend if you have just a little bit of pain or limitation that’s starting, go into physical therapy, go in for that first evaluation. Because then we can start that healing process early and nip it in the bud; and maybe it’ll be just one or two visits, just to get you back on the right track.
The other thing is that evaluation will let us find other potential issues that we could work on before they get too bad. What if it’s rotator cuff tendonitis? What if it’s impingement? There are multiple things that could be going on that, with our education and training as physical therapists, we can help thwart to put you on the right path.
How Core Stabilization Impacts Your Shoulders
We talk a lot about core stabilization in general. A lot of times, we don’t think about our shoulder blade muscles as our upper extremity core, but they are. Often with our postures, whether we’re working at a desk or we’re doing the weekend paint job, we don’t have that scapular stabilization or strength (or know how to get it). Then our rotator cuff does too much and our shoulder pays for it. This builds up over time, and you likely don’t know how to treat it yourself, but our team here at Rebound does.
Call Rebound for an Evaluation
There’s a lot that goes into shoulders, but I just want to make sure that you get help and know that there’s a place that you can get answers for your shoulder pain. If you need anything or have questions about shoulder pain, reach out to us at (785) 271-5533 so we can help fix it quickly and nip it in the bud to get you back in action.
Tags: physical health, Therapy, shoulder pain, shoulder, pain relief
