Reasons to Use Physiotherapy to Handle Shoulder Pain
Posted on: 17 August 2021
When shoulder pain hits, it can make many aspects of your life difficult. You depend on your shoulders for lots of tasks, including getting dressed in the morning and lifting yourself out of a chair. Although other medical and surgical options are available, you may want to try a physiotherapy clinic first. Here are some reasons to use physiotherapy to manage your shoulder pain.
Tackling the Direct Cause
Although treatment options such as injections are available, they're a temporary fix. Injections will reduce your pain for a while, but unless you address the underlying cause, then you're likely to experience a resurgence of your pain. In contrast, physiotherapy can help to strengthen and repair your rotator cuff muscles. In the long term, this results in the pain not coming back.
Therapies such as injections can aid physiotherapy, though. If your pain is too great for you to attend a physiotherapy clinic, you can use your injection as an opportunity to ease the pain and proceed with your treatment.
Exploring Alternative Pain Relief
Understandably, many people don't like to rely too heavily on medication to relieve their pain. At your physiotherapy clinic, you can explore alternative forms of pain relief. One common treatment is hot and cold therapies.
Heat therapy can relax stiff muscles, which should then give you a greater range of movement in your shoulder. Cold therapies can reduce swelling, and with less swelling, moving becomes easier. In addition to increasing movements, less swelling makes it easier to engage with your physiotherapist. You don't require any specific equipment for such therapies. Both hot and cold compresses are easy to make at home, but your physiotherapist can offer guidance if you need it.
Carefully Targeted Treatment Plans
The repair of your shoulder's rotator cuff muscles often calls for a bespoke treatment plan. With each session you engage in, your muscles will gradually improve. As such, any prescribed exercises you use now may not be relevant in a few weeks' time.
Your physiotherapist will assess your shoulder's range of movement at each session. From there, they'll review the exercises you're using and look at altering them. By slowly tweaking your exercises over time, they make it more likely that you'll recover and enjoy a pain-free life.
How long your recovery lasts will depend on the nature of your injury. Overall, attending your physiotherapy sessions regularly and following the physiotherapist's guidelines as closely as you can should help to hasten your recovery.
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