Today we’re talking about the underlying cause of shoulder issues that is ignored by your doctor. Most people don’t really understand what’s causing their issues. Therefore, they’re just stuck treating symptoms or effects and never really getting better. This leads to more medications, more surgeries, and more pain.
Ultimately, the pain and those medications and surgeries are going to take away from your quality of life.
What conditions am I referring to?
- Any type of shoulder sprains and strains
- Rotator cuff injuries
- Bursitis
- Repetitive stress injuries
- Major damage from an accident.
All of these conditions can be corrected naturally through the right type of techniques.
Watch the video now!
Prefer to read? Here’s the gist of what else Dr. Tim spoke about in this video clip.
Addressing the Ignored Causes of Shoulder Pain
Most shoulder issues actually stem from the neck. I’m going to explain to you today exactly why that is.
When we look at the spine. Number one is you need to have a curve in your neck.
The reason why that’s important is because these muscles actually control all the nerves into your shoulder and into your arm. Nothing in your body can heal without first getting a signal from the brain through the nervous system out to those joints and tissues.
So if there is an interrupted signal in the neck because you have lost the normal curve, because your spine is shifted out of its normal alignment, this is going to affect these nerves. If these are the nerves that are going into your shoulder and your arm, that’s going to keep your body from healing and repairing the way that it’s designed to.
So I’m going to show you exactly what this looks like on an X Ray and how we’re able to evaluate this through exam and nerve scans to help find the underlying cause of many people’s shoulder issues. We are seeing a significant improvement and even complete restoration of shoulder function in a relatively short period of time with the majority of our patients, even when their medical doctor or PT massage therapists weren’t able to help them.
Why? Because we’re actually addressing those ignored underlying causes.
How Misalignment In Your Spine Causes Pain In Your Arms
This here behind me is a diagram of how your nervous system works. If you look closely here at the bottom part of the neck, this shows that these are the muscles that go into your neck and shoulders. When these nerves are being irritated from misalignment in the spine, it creates a very specific condition called subluxation.
No doctor looks for subluxation!
Subluxation causes stiff neck, pain in the upper arm, and pain down into the arms. This is one of the primary causes of shoulder issues that we help find and correct for our patients.
Using a Computerized Nerve Scan To Determine Which Nerves Are Stressed
This is another test that we do. This is a computerized nerve scan. We can actually look at the nerves that come from your spine that travel out to your muscles to see what’s working and what’s not. The picture in the top right shows an EMG electromyogram. It’s a scan we do to be able to look at the nerve supply into the muscles of your body to see how your body is adapting to stress.
When you’ve lost the normal alignment of your spine this causes stress on those nerves and they have to start working harder than normal. For many people this creates tightness and tension. So, a lot of people with shoulder problems also have stiff neck, stiff, upper back, chronic pain issues, sometimes even numbness and tingling into the arm. It’s because of these nerves in the neck that are being stressed and that issue is not being addressed.
Why You Shouldn’t Take Medicine For Shoulder Pain
The worst thing you can do is relax the tight muscles by taking an ibuprofen or muscle, because the tight muscles is your body’s natural response to try to protect the shoulder and the neck. If you go in and relax that you’re actually making the problem worse.
Not to mention the dangerous side effects that exist in those, especially if you’re going to the next level and you’re getting injections and shots and steroids and epidurals. These have been shown to speed up the degeneration of joints and tissues, and this is what leads people to need surgery because they’re covering up the symptom, which is the body’s intelligent response to tell you there’s a problem.
Getting tight muscles and other issues is the body’s natural response to protect those joints and tissues. Therefore, when you take medications, you are causing more damage and you’re weakening the joints and systems both structurally and neurologically. Eventually you cause so much damage, it’s beyond repair. That’s what leads to surgeries and very serious injuries.
Alternatives to Medicine For Shoulder Pain
We can prevent all of that by catching it early and fixing the underlying cause and rather than treating symptoms focused on correcting that cause to restore normal function so your body can heal itself the way it was designed to without medications, without shots and surgeries. I’m going to show you exactly how we do that.
So this is an X Ray of the neck. This is what I commonly see with individuals that come in with shoulder problems. You can see here the neck is totally straight. Ideally you need to have a 40 to 45 degree curve in your neck.
When you lose the curve in the neck, this puts significant stress on the spinal cord and on these nerves. And like I said earlier, these nerves stimulate the muscles and now these muscles are working two or three times harder than they have to.
Also what happens is these nerves control what’s called proprioception, which is how your joints communicate back to the brain. When these nerves are under stress from subluxation misalignment in the spine, as you see here on this x-ray, these muscles start to fatigue more quickly, and they react more slowly. They also don’t recover as quickly and you’re much more likely to get injured.
This is why many athletes, weekend warriors, even just your standard person that sits at a desk all day gets shoulder and arm issues – the nerves in the neck are under constant stress and nobody’s addressing the real issue. Until we take an x ray, we are ignoring the true cause of what is going on. So, we see an x ray like this. We know this is not only affecting the neck, this is affecting the shoulders and the entire arm.
So what you want to do is you want to find a corrective care chiropractor who’s trained specifically in not just finding these issues but correcting them. That’s exactly what we do here at New Life Chiropractic Rocklin.
We do a corrective level care that restores the normal structure and function of the spine, which corrects the nerve issues better, the ultimate cause of why you’re having the problems in the first place. We’re able to take somebody like this to like this in three to six months through the advanced corrective techniques that we’re doing here in the office.
Correcting the Cause of Shoulder Pain – Real Life Results
And this is the difference between treating symptoms and correcting cause. This individual here had been dealing with shoulder problems for two years. He’d been to every doctor. He tried everything including massage, exercise, medication, and shots. The doctor told him all he could do was have surgery.
Now he had already had surgery on the left shoulder and that didn’t work and he was about to get surgery on the right shoulder until someone finally referred him into the office. W were able to find the true cause that no other doctor looked at. And less than six months we took them over to here where now he’s having no more shoulder issues.
He’s able to work out again. Every single time he comes in he tells me how appreciative he is that he never had to get surgery. He’s taking no more medications and he’s been able to resume normal activity that he wasn’t able to do that was significantly limiting the quality of his life and the enjoyment that he had.
That’s really what it’s all about. Correcting the cause. Restoring function. So you can live a better life and enjoy the activities that you love to do and avoid the drugs and surgeries that are very dangerous and detrimental to your health.
Exercises to Rebuild Shoulder Strength
So in addition to the corrective chiropractic care we do, there are specific exercises that we recommend to our patients and things that you can start doing now to help rehab a shoulder issue.
Now, if you have severe pain that’s not going away, I recommend you get in and see a corrective care chiropractor immediately. If not, here are some things that you can start doing right away.
So I’m going to demonstrate to you some exercises right now that you can start doing to help rehabilitate the shoulder. There’s a simple progression. I’m going to start with the easiest beginner version and then we’re going to work our way up to more of an advanced level to be able to do that.
Notice that’s a disclaimer. If you’re having chronic shoulder problems that aren’t resolving, if you have instability or major injuries to the shoulders, you want to make sure you consult a corrective care chiropractor prior to doing this. That way you’re able to fix the underlying cause that we talked about previously. These are exercises that we give our patients in conjunction with the corrective care they’re already receiving in the office.
Shoulder Exercise 1
This first exercise is relatively simple.
- 2-1/2 to 5 pound weights. This is a 5 pound dumbbell.
- Have your palms facing forward with your shoulders locked out.
- Keep your shoulders back.
- Hold your chin slightly up.
- Let your arms slowly swing forward and back like a pendulum.
- Do this 50 to a 100 times a day.
This is helping decompress the shoulder joint, the labrum, stretch and strengthen the rotator cuff muscles, bring in oxygen and nutrients, increase blood flow to the joints and flushing out toxins and inflammation.
Now I want to show you the wrong version as well. Two things you want to look out for. Number one is you don’t want the chest to move. My chest should not be moving as I’m doing this. Number two is you want to make sure your chin doesn’t go down.
Shoulder Exercise 2
For the next level up in the progression use slightly heavier weights. This is an abduction exercise and will strengthen your shoulders.
- 5 to 10 pound dumbbells.
- Hands down at your sides
- Palms facing towards you
- Lift your shoulders straight up
- Do this anywhere from 15 to 30 times
This is not a strengthening exercise to see how strong you are or how much weight you can do. You should be able to do it easily and multiple times.
Now push your palms out away from you and do the same thing up and down again, 15 to 30 times.
Shoulder Exercise 3
The next exercise is a shoulder press.
- Start with your palm facing towards you.
- Push it up and away.
- Alternate sides.
- 15 to 30 times
You’re not seeing how strong you are. You just want to get motion in the shoulder and start to strengthen and stabilize the supporting muscles of that shoulder.
Shoulder Exercise 4 Using a TheraBand
The final exercise is the most advanced in the progression. It’s done with a TheraBand. This is a type of exercise band that we use for many different areas of rehabilitation in the office.
For this one specifically, you don’t want to do if you have any instability in the shoulder or any major dislocations because it’s putting a lot of stress on the shoulder, more stress than any of the other exercises that we’ve done.
This band is about 10 to 15 pounds. You can do this with a band that offers as much as 20 to 25 pounds of resistance. Where are we going to work here is we’re going to create tension and bring the band apart in front of the chest and then bring your shoulders behind you and then back forward again.
You’ll feel this at the point of greatest tension in your shoulder.
Repeat 15 to 30 times as part of your shoulder rehabilitation. It will help completely stabilize that whole area.
Exercise + Chiropractic Corrective Care = Shoulder Rehabilitation
You start working on these exercises, it’s going to help rehab your shoulder. Again, if you notice any chronic pain, worsening pain, or you find that it’s not improving, you want to make sure you’re getting to a corrective care chiropractor as soon as possible to address the underlying issues that’s coming from the neck and the nerve supply.
The reason we did this video is because many people are suffering with shoulder issues. In fact, myself, I had injuries to my shoulder from playing baseball and other dislocations that caused major damage to my shoulder. Like many people, my doctor just prescribed medications, typically ibuprofen or ice that led to very severe injuries. That eventually led to the ending of my career unfortunately, which was very sad.
I didn’t find chiropractic until later on and I found that when we did the x rays on my neck, I had a complete loss of my curve and I had been going about the shoulder care all wrong, which is what led to the major injuries that I experienced.
I see people like this coming in all the time and now thankfully I’ve been able to not only rehab my shoulder to where I’ve been able to resume, normal function, but we’ve been able to help many other people who are struggling with shoulder problems. These injuries are limiting their ability to do the exercises, activities, and things that they love.
Instead of being prescribed more medications and getting more shots and surgeries, we can help you find a natural solution where the body’s able to heal itself without all those other dangerous medical interventions.
Ready For a Shoulder Assesment?
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If you live far outside the Rocklin, CA area and it’s not possible for you to make it in here, we can help you find a corrective care chiropractor in your area that can first assess the spine and the nervous system to see the root cause of your issues and can help you through the correction process to be able to get better so you can resume the activities that you love live in the quality of life that you deserve.