Painful Shoulder Conditions
You might experience shoulder pain especially when lifting up your arm. This pain often disturbs your sleep. These are the conditions causing shoulder pain:
​
Inflammation of the shoulder rotator cuff tendons (rotator cuff tendinitis)
Rotator cuff tears
Inflammation or arthritis of the acromioclavicular joint (ACJ) (ACJ arthritis)
These conditions are caused by chronic injury, resulting from repeated stress on the shoulder. The conditions can either occur individually or together in the shoulder.
​
What is the treatment for painful shoulder conditions?
In early or mild cases, this shoulder pain may be treated with pain-relief medication. Physiotherapy should be done to strengthen the muscles around the shoulder. The aim of physiotherapy is to reduce the shoulder pain and to preserve good motion and function of the shoulder. If all this fails to relieve the shoulder pain, injection of steroid medication (anti-inflammatory) to the shoulder may be performed. These injections relieve pain and inflammation. However, these injections usually provide only temporary relief and cannot cure the problem.
The best treatment for these conditions is surgery. Surgery to the shoulder is now very advanced and is performed by arthroscopy, using key-hole sized incisions. By using shoulder arthroscopy, tears and inflammations of the tendons can be treated / repaired.