We see a lot of patients in the clinic complaining of shoulder pains, and it's not surprising actually, because it's estimated that 70 percent of people will suffer from shoulder pain at one stage in their lives. And another statistic that's come out is that once you have the shoulder pain, almost 50 percent of patients will still have it 12 months after the onset of the pain. So it's something that persists for a long, long time. Once you have it. Hi, my name is and I'm a chiropractor at Milton, and Fordham chiropractic clinics were located on the outskirts of Bozeman, Edmonds, and Cambridge.

And today I would like to tell you a few tests so you can find out if you have a shoulder problem, what's actually causing the shoulder problem because we need to know what's causing it first before we can do any give you any help before you can give yourself any help with it. So I'm going to give you a few tests to find out which structure is causing the shoulder pain. I'm going to go from top to bottom. So the first structure to actually cause you shoulder pain is your neck.

Shoulder pain can arise from your neck, especially if you're suffering from a medical hoppity, which is essentially a nerve being pinched in the neck. And, you know, when you have ridiculous because you have this shooting pain from your neck into your shoulder, into your elbow, into your arms, sometimes even to your fingers. And of the tests you can do is what we call differential compression tests. And what you need to do to see my right shoulder is the effect. The side is you need to turn your head to the right and until you head backward and if that reproduces, you're sure the pain of this can also give you pain between the shoulder blades. If that reproduces it, then most likely you're sure the pain stems from your neck. So something needs to be done before your neck.

The second structure that can cause shoulder pain is a structure that we call the brachial plexus and that's a structure and anatomical structure consists of nerves and blood vessels, and it runs essentially from your neck into your shoulder. And it can be compressed here, can be compressed by a muscle or can be compressed by the clavicle, or it can be compressed by the first break-even. And the test we need to do to determine if to break your plexus is the cause of your shoulder.

Pain is what we call the roos test now with the rules. That's what you need to do, is stick your arms up like this 90 degree in the shoulder, 90 degrees in your elbows, then pull your arms back a little bit. So you pull your arms a little bit. And then what you do for three minutes is you open and shut your hands. Now, this test is positive if you have a havingness or a weakness in the arms, or if you get numbness and tingling in the hands now, you will get obviously tired when you do this. You're looking for four really havingness and the weakness in the arms for three minutes. If that's positive, then your shoulder pain might be caused by a compression of the brachial plexus. 

 The third structure that can cause a shower. The problem is a tear in one of the rotator cuff muscles. So the rotator cuff muscles surround the joint and keep the joint in place. And I'll give you the two most common ones, the common and the Communists. The tear of a muscle in the rotator cuff is in a muscle called the supraspinatus. And what we do for this one is the empty contests. So what you do with this is you straighten out your arm, you point your thumb towards the ground so you get like a 30-degree angle front here. And then with the other hand, you apply a little bit of pressure and you resist it.

And if this is sore, then most likely you've got a tear in one of the rotator cuff muscles called the supraspinatus. The other tests we can do for another muscle, part of the rotator cuff is the interest penalties. And what you do, the test you do to test if you have a tear in this muscle is you put your elbow into your side, you turn your arm out a little bit, you hold it here. And with the other hand, you pull and you see if this inflicts your pain in your shoulder. If it does, it's an infrastructure natus tear in the course of your shoulder. Probably another structure that might cause you an issue is the AC joint in the AC joint is located on top of your shoulder. 

 So you go if you come up from your free upper arm, you feel like a hard structure, a bony bit, and you go in about half an inch and you feel a little bit of a dip. And that's the AC joint that's commonly affected with people who push weights and weightlifters and stuff, especially with shoulder presses up and down. And also we see a lot of traumatic events, for example, with cyclists when they land when they fall off the bike and land on the shoulder. You often see here we're almost like a step defect like your shoulder is a bit lower than your clavicle.

That's the AC joint here. So the tests you can do to determine if your pain is actually caused by the AC joint is to put a protest. And what you do is you interlock your fingers and you literally just pull apart as hard as you can. And if you get a little bit of an ache on top of your shoulder, it's probably doing something that can be done about it. It can help you with it. But that's where your problem comes from. The AC joint. It could also be a bit of osteoarthritis. You need to be a bit older for that. Maybe having had a trauma in the past in your shoulder, a lot of grinding goes on. I'm not talking about the occasional clicking when you move your arm, but the grinding stuff that is a few telltale signs of osteoarthritis. And you can have an impingement.

 An impingement is actually one of the tendons within the shoulder joint in the area which gets pinched. So when your shoulder decreases, its space, and attention become stuck, essentially not attached, you can do for that on the right side, literally put your right hand on your left shoulder and raise your arm up. And if this is sore, then you most likely have got an impingement in the shoulder itself. Or you can do the drop arm test where the arms you lift the arm up using the other hand all the way up and you bring it down and a drop arm test, which means you get to a stage where it gets really show. You actually can't keep it up. You can't get the arm up itself. You need to go like that. You have this painful arc. That's a positive sign as well for an impingement because the first thing we need to know, what's actually causing your shoulder problems then we can help is a few things we can do for you to help.

You can also read the article about knee pain