Ouch! Shoulder pain and how to treat it

​You probably don't think about your shoulders much, until you suddenly experience pain in one of them. Shoulder pain can make a simple act — brushing and drying your hair, reaching behind your back to fasten a bra, or grabbing something overhead — seem like a monumental task.

The most common cause of shoulder pain occurs when rotator cuff tendons become trapped under the bony area in the shoulder. The tendons become inflamed or damaged. This condition is called rotator cuff tendinitis or bursitis.
Sometimes shoulder pain is the result of injury to another location in your body, usually the neck or biceps. This is known as referred pain. Referred pain generally doesn’t get worse when you move your shoulder.
Shoulder pain may also be caused by arthritis, torn cartilage, torn rotator cuff, swollen bursa sacs or tendons, bone spurs (bony projections that develop along the edges of bones), pinched nerve in the neck or shoulder, broken shoulder or arm bone, frozen shoulder
dislocated shoulder, injury due to overuse or repetitive use, spinal cord injury and heart attack.
Massage therapy can very often be beneficial for shoulder pain, if not directly, then by releasing muscle restrictions in the surrounding tissue which allows for free range of motion in the joint. By lengthening muscle fibers, releasing trigger points and stretching tendons with range of motion stretches, we can improve function in the shoulder joint and help to reduce pain for our clients.