Indy Myopain

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Treating Frozen Shoulder
Understanding the True Origins of Frozen Shoulder Pain

Frozen shoulder is a stressful experience for anyone. The term itself is only descriptive, and not a diagnosis as most people assume. The “frozen” aspect refers to an extreme limitation of pain-free movement, but this is in general not due to capsular adhesions, rather to trigger points in muscles. Mainstream medicine fails to provide any reasonable explanation of why this condition develops. Severe pain combined with dis-empowerment, and a lack of understanding is a formula for stress.

The common worldview assumes that shoulder pain, and pain in general, originates in a tear or some other kind of injury that needs to be repaired. My own work has shown me this generally is untrue - I can help shoulder clients get out of pain very quickly, and they can learn to take control of their own health.

I see worsening shoulder pain and frozen shoulder as way stations along a route of progressive adaptation to painful movement, which generally begins with the development of some active trigger points. Trigger points develop very easily with chronic or acute overload, can produce severe pain symptoms, and have nothing necessarily to do with soft tissue damage or injury. Sometimes trigger points may set in during the acute phase of an injury because of stress on the muscles. Long after the injury has healed, the trigger points remain.
A good example of this is fraying of the supraspinatus tendon, also known as a rotator cuff tear. Repairing the tear, which may have little or no contribution to the pain experienced, fails to address either the pain or the original cause of the tear (assuming there wasn’t a specific event such as an accident).
Trigger points and taut fibers in the supraspinatus muscle belly cause pain in the lateral shoulder, causing it to bunch up, shortening and pulling the head of the humerus into the glenoid fossa. This reduces joint space underneath the acromion, which then mechanically rubs on the vulnerable supraspinatus tendon. The pain and trigger points remain long after the healing of the tendon.

Whatever the initial cause of shoulder pain, I see frozen shoulder as a process of adaptation, a seemingly sensible response of the nervous system to protect the shoulder from further “injury”. This is borne out in repeatedly in practice when we unravel the system of adaptations and the pain goes away.

Make Shoulder Pain A Memory.

Treating pain is not very difficult once you understand where it comes from. Unfortunately, the medical system and nearly all alternative practitioners are uninformed about the true origins of pain. Using our system, you can take control of your own pain.

Oddly enough, pain is a mystery to the medical profession. Our medical system is still in the middle ages in terms of understanding pain, which is why we have over 65,000 people a year dying of opiate overdose in the US.

Sadly, a high percentage of addicts begin with a prescribed opiate, and much of it is unnecessary. Pain is assumed by the medical establishment to always be a product of injury or disease, but this is just plain wrong.

I am a trigger point therapist, and it has been demonstrated in repeated studies as well as my own 7 years of clinical experience, the vast majority of pain is from muscles that have developed trigger points.

Trigger Points: Extremely Common and Easily addressed

Trigger points, which are responsible for most pain, are small areas of stagnation in muscle tissue that develop in response to chronic or acute stresses on muscles.
They aren’t injuries, but they commonly send pain to other areas (pain referral) in a way that can feel very much like an injury. This fools everyone – doctors, PTs, most practitioners.
While the pain can be severe, trigger points are fairly easy to correct. And much of it can be done as part of a self-care approach. The techniques aren't difficult – what's important is knowing what muscles to treat and in what order.

An Example: Front of Shoulder Pain
If you go to your doctor with pain in the front of your shoulder, they are very likely to tell you that you have an “itis”... bursitis, arthritis, tendonitis, something torn, some type of inflammatory disease state or injury. Somehow, your body just broke.

It seems obvious and tempting to blame the problem on the structures underlying the pain – however, this is almost never the true cause.
Pain for the most part comes from muscles. A single muscle in the back of your shoulder accounts for the majority of the pain in the front of the shoulder. It’s confusing until you have seen it over and over, in hundreds of people – as we have.
That muscle is the infraspinatus. It can easily become overloaded because functions to stabilize your arm in the shoulder joint any time you move it.
Like many muscles, the Infra is relatively easy to treat. You can apply compression, tapping, ESWT or vibration using a ball or other tool to tender areas on the back of your shoulder, and do specific kinds of movements that will help that muscle shorten and stretch.

Individual muscles are relatively easy to treat.  It’s very rarely about a single muscle. It takes a village. In the shoulder, muscles are required to work together in a complex way because it’s a delicately orchestrated joint with a lot of mobility.
We understand these relationships and can treat you quickly and effectively.  We begin with the most important aspect of correcting shoulder pain, treating the muscles that cause faulty shoulder posture.
Even if you are in severe pain, we will start your body on a path to recovery and significant relief through understanding and treating your muscles and teaching you self care techniques.  We will help you understand “why you have this condition now”, when others do not.