22 Jul What Are the Most Common Causes of Shoulder Pain
Shoulder pain is something we see quite frequently at Lone Star Pain Medicine. We offer a variety of treatment options including facet joint injections, cervical epidural steroid injections, and medial branch blocks. But before we can recommend treatment, we need to identify the cause.
Getting to the root cause can be fairly routine. But it can also be challenging at times. Why? Because there are so many different things to look at. There isn’t just a single condition or injury we can pinpoint in every case of shoulder pain.
To illustrate just what Lone Star Pain doctors and their patients are up against, let us take a look at the most common causes of shoulder pain. You may have personal experience with one or more of them.
Degenerative and Inflammatory Diseases
Identifying the root cause of shoulder pain usually begins by assessing where the pain originates from. Pain’s origin tells us a lot. When a patient complains of pain inside the shoulder joint, one of the first things we look at is degenerative disease. We also look at inflammatory diseases.
The most common degenerative disease that produces shoulder pain is osteoarthritis. Osteoarthritis is so common that nearly everyone experiences it to some degree. It is a product of age. As for inflammatory diseases, something like rheumatoid arthritis can cause shoulder pain.
Connective Tissue Problems
Shoulder pain can be caused by problems relating to connective tissue. Frozen shoulder is a condition in which inflamed connective tissue around the shoulder joint produces stiffness and pain. Meanwhile, shoulder impingement results in pain due to tissue irritation. Bursitis in the shoulder is often linked to shoulder impingement.
Injury Damage
Second only to osteoarthritis as a cause of shoulder pain is injury. You name the injury, and we have probably treated a patient for it. One of the first that comes to mind is a rotator cuff tear. We see this injury all the time in athletes. Rotator cuff tears can be extremely uncomfortable, even preventing a patient from sleeping.
Another common injury involves muscle tears. This is pretty common in athletes as well, but muscle tears are also an issue for certain types of workers. Jobs that result in overuse of the shoulder muscles increase the risk of tears.
We follow up with tendonitis. As you may know, tendonitis is inflammation of the tendon. It can also be caused by overuse. Repetitive actions are common culprits in tendinitis cases.
Finally, shoulder pain can be the result of injuries having nothing to do with sports or work. A fall could lead to shoulder separation. A car accident could result in dislocation. The types of injuries that could create shoulder pain are almost limitless.
Unrelated Musculoskeletal Issues
The final cause of shoulder pain is often more difficult to diagnose – unrelated musculoskeletal issues. These types of issues generate what we call referred pain. In other words, the source of the pain is not actually the shoulder. Pain is referred to the shoulder despite the problem being somewhere else.
A good example is cervical radiculopathy (a pinched nerve in the neck). There is actually nothing wrong with the shoulder in this particular case. But pain radiates from the neck into the shoulder to create a dull, aching sensation that is often accompanied by tingling.
Lone Star Pain Medicine offers a variety of different treatments for shoulder pain. That is because so many different things can cause it. If you regularly experience shoulder pain for which you can find little relief, we invite you to come out and see one of our pain medicine doctors in Weatherford.
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