Your shoulders are one of the most amazing pieces of design you will ever see. Your shoulders provide you with flexibility, control, strength, and precision. With your shoulder, you can move your arm up and down, rotate your arm, and engage in all of these actions while at the same time exerting force. What you may not know is that the strength and mobility you have in your shoulders is all because of your rotator cuff. Likely you’ve heard the term rotator cuff before, but maybe you don’t know what it is. Basically, this term describes four muscles in your shoulder that give you strength and stability. Because of its complexity, multiple factors must be working as they should for your rotator cuff to function properly. If one muscle, one ligament, or the bone is in any way damaged, the result can be excruciating pain, a loss of strength, limited flexibility, and limited mobility. This is where rotator cuff repair comes into the picture.
If you are dealing with an injury to your rotator cuff, no doubt you have noticed how your life has changed for the worse. Things that you were able to do with ease prior to the injury are now a challenge, if not impossible. There are a whole host of reasons why you might have damaged your rotator cuff. It could be that you have a job that requires you to be repeatedly doing the same thing. The repetitive stress injuries to the rotator cuff are often seen in athletes. For example, tennis players are constantly making the same forceful movements with their shoulders. The same is true with golfers and pitchers. This is because repeatedly doing the same thing with a lot of stress can strain your rotator cuff beyond its designing specifications. The result is damage and pain.
One of the reasons why rotator cuff injuries happen so frequently, especially as we get older, is because our body does not have the same capability to provide the rotator cuff with the blood and the nutrients that it needs. As we age, our rotator cuff is not able to repair itself as easily as it could when we were younger. And, unfortunately, if you damage your rotator cuff one time, it becomes prone to repeated injuries.
As we mentioned, there are a lot of symptoms connected to a rotator cuff injury. First, you are going to feel pain. You will also experience muscle spasms and a loss of range of movement. You might feel some impingement. Since your rotator cuff is not working properly, you might adjust the way you do certain movements in an unnatural way, which will cause injuries to your elbow, your wrists, or your hands. With time, all of this can lead to you having arthritis.
For this reason, it is important for you to seek professional treatment for rotator cuff repair immediately. Consult our doctor at Angelo Mattalino, MD in Phoenix. Contact us today to schedule an appointment and get started.