Windmill your arms, reach up for something, pull a door open, swing a racket, scratch your back — it’s amazing what your arms and hands are capable of doing, and it’s all thanks to your shoulders.
The flipside to this incredibly large range of motion is that shoulder joints can, and do, succumb to injury and wear and tear quite often.
In this month’s blog post, shoulder expert and board-certified orthopedic surgeon Dr. William Schell wants to touch on some differences between two of the more common shoulder issues we see here — rotator cuff tears and superior labrum, anterior to posterior (SLAP) tears.
A great step toward better understanding shoulder injuries is to become more familiar with the anatomy of these major joints. Your shoulders are ball-and-socket joints that bring together three bones:
The ball in your shoulder refers to the top of your humerus, while the socket (glenoid) is a shallow depression in your shoulder blade.
Attaching your arm to your body is a group of tissues called your rotator cuff that joins together four muscles to form a tendon that covers the head of the humerus. The head of the humerus is further held in place by a thick piece of fibrous tissue called the labrum, which forms a sort of seal and wall around the socket that keeps your upper arm bone stabilized.
With our anatomy lesson fresh in our minds, let’s look at a rotator cuff tear, which sends about 2 million Americans to doctors each year.
These injuries can be acute or develop over time, but whatever the timing, the injury describes a tear in the connective tissues that can be either partial or complete.
Symptoms from a rotator cuff tear include:
These symptoms typically worsen over time if you don’t seek our help, especially if you’re dealing with a full-thickness tear, which doesn’t heal readily on its own.
A SLAP tear is damage to the labrum that holds your upper arm in the socket. Like a rotator cuff tear, SLAP tears can develop due to an acute injury or over time due to repetitive and stressful movements.
Symptoms of a SLAP tear include:
We often focus on this last symptom to narrow down where the damage is — the catching in your shoulder is the hallmark of a SLAP tear, whereas rotator cuff tears often come with the crepitus.
Given how close together and connected the tissues are in your shoulder, it’s nearly impossible to figure out what’s going on inside without a proper evaluation.
When patients come to see us with shoulder pain, we review their symptoms and then put them through a series of movements to further narrow down the potential causes.
Then we turn to advanced imaging, such as CT scans and MRIs, which can really help us figure out which tissues in your shoulder are damaged. Even then, we sometimes can’t identify the issue with 100% certainty, so we perform shoulder arthroscopy.
The good news is that if Dr. Schell does perform a shoulder arthroscopy, he can often make repairs at the same time as this minimally invasive procedure.
If you’re dealing with shoulder problems and want to get on the road to a more stable and pain-free joint, it’s time to come see us for an assessment.
To set that in motion, please contact Dr. Schell and our team at our New York City office — located on Columbus Circle on the Upper West Side — at 646-381-2646. You can also message us by clicking here.
