As a massage therapist, I commonly see people with shoulder pain and shoulder injury. Being one of the most mobile joints in the body it can very easily fall victim to poor posture and mechanics.
Often times, people in the Lancaster Pennsylvania region come to me after seeing many other health practitioners without success. Each person gives them a different reason or diagnosis for their pain be it rotator cuff injury, labral tear, proximal biceps tendonitis, you name it!
This merry-go-round of clinicians usually makes people feel broken which leads them to fear doing the things they love like playing with their children or playing their favorite sport. Leading only to less movement and therefore more pain.
The ribs and shoulders are closely related. Poor breathing mechanics and/or previous injuries in the ribs can cause shoulder pain and injury
One aspect of shoulder pain and dysfunction that is often overlooked by traditional therapies is the role of the rib cage. What I find often with patients in my office is that poor breathing mechanics has changed how the shoulder blade lays on the ribs. This displacement of the shoulder blade can overload certain tissues when we go to do work around the house or play sports or workout in the gym.
Often these other therapies have been unsuccessful or only short-lived because they only addressed the shoulder itself and not what I call the driver or root cause of the pain.
What you will find is that you don’t address the root cause (the rib cage) is that the shoulder pain continues or comes and goes
