We asked people to send in their questions about chiropractic care. One of them was from someone who said they had chronic shoulder pain. They've talked to their GP about it, and finally, the doctor said, "Maybe you should go see an orthopedic surgeon about that."
So my patient wondered, “Is there anything that you can do that might be in between what a GP can do and what a specialist might do?”
Absolutely. I see shoulder issues in my office all the time, whether they're referred by someone's general practitioner or an orthopedist. Or even if they're just a patient that comes in and asks me if I can help.
Oftentimes, there isn't a specific mechanism of injury. They didn't really do anything to it. It's just like one day, all of a sudden, it started to hurt. Maybe it started when they slipped and fell on the shoulder, but there's no fracture or tear or anything like that.
That's something that we have really good success in our office treating.
It's a light adjustment of the shoulder if it's shifted forward, and then doing some soft tissue work on it. That might include some active release treatment or Graston scraping. I see patients that come in that have restricted range of motion by 50%, and we do the adjustment and the soft tissue work on them, and after the first visit, they're 90% pain-free and have almost 100% range of motion.
So it's not always a surgical solution that someone needs. Typically, if your general practitioner refers you to an orthopedic surgeon, they're going to evaluate you and more than likely send you back to me as a chiropractor, or send you to physical therapy, to do a trial run before they go into surgery, unless there truly is some significant damage there.
So coming in and getting an evaluation for shoulder pain is definitely something that we can work with.