The most frustrating question I encounter when treating a inpatient with icy shoulder is apathy. When the inpatient arrives for their first therapy session they are ordinarily in desperation mode because of the sleepless nights they have encountered over the past 6 months due to shoulder stiffness and pain. They are willing to do just about anyone short of cutting off their arm to get rid of the pain and return function... At least that's what they say to my face during this all prominent first visit. "What's the best icy shoulder exercise?" is ordinarily one of the first questions I get, and the patient's apathetic expressions begins when I begin explaining that icy shoulder rehabilitation consists of a aggregate of rehearsal and rest, performed in many but brief sessions throughout the day. "Do you think going to a chiropractor would help me more?" has been another query on more than one occasion. "Not necessarily, sir" is the reply followed by "their are many techniques to treating your stiff shoulder, most of which are pretty good, but the prominent thing is that you are somewhere taking action".
Now I'm not trying to sound like a "self-help" guru, but taking daily operation is the absolute crucial first step person with icy shoulder can do to help speed recovery. Despite favorite belief, just resting the shoulder only makes it more stiff and painful when you have to move it.
Now the next most prominent step is to avoid manufacture it worse. Now as I just wrote the old line, I can practically here the sarcasm laden reply of thousands of web surfers as they say "ya think?" any way this is not as obviously simple as it seems. You see, in the world of injuries and recovery, my wife is known as a "tester". If she happens to have an injury such as a painful shoulder, neck, etc... Then everyday, no, any times a day she "tests" that injury to see if it still hurts. For instance if reaching overhead pinches or hurts her shoulder, she will repeat this movement throughout the day to see if "it's getting any better". The point of all of this is to emphasize that if you happen to be a type "A" personality, then bulling your way straight through the day using your painful shoulder is not the answer.
This is not to say that you will not feel pain throughout the day during specific icy shoulder exercise, because you assuredly will. The prominent plan here is to comprehend the distinction between "damaging" pain and "non-damaging" pain. Now I can go into a whole section on the distinction between the two (which is out of the scope of this article), but basically "damaging" pain is pain you feel when, obviously, damage is being done to soft tissue, ligament, or bone. Damaging pain is often described with words such as "sharp", "tearing", "nerve pain", and "shooting". Most habitancy automatically stop when encountering damaging pain (although some low-pain-threshold habitancy will push straight through damaging pain).
By contrast, non-damaging pain is is pain felt due to shortened muscles, ligaments, soft tissue, connective tissue, or tendons and is often described with words such as "achy", "dull", "pulling", and "pressure". indubitably there are many more words to impart these two types of pain, but these are the ones I have encountered over thousands of inpatient visits over the years. The point of all of this is that if you do rehearsal and do not push straight through non-damaging pain with icy shoulder exercise, you Will Not enhance your chances of recovery. A trained physical therapist can help give you the best aggregate of icy shoulder rehearsal to maximize your recovery.
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