I really need to figure out whether it's going to make things better or worse, but unfortunately, that feels like something a doctor can't guarantee one way or the other.
Any anecdotes or other experiences/thoughts are appreciated.
I used to suffer from chronic low back pain. It hurt to get out of bed every day for years. 1-2 years after getting into bodybuilding the pain disappeared and didn’t come back. Not only that, but I’m not physically limited by my back whatsoever.
I’m not suggesting you start bodybuilding. But the things I think that helped was 1) weight training, 2) mobility work / stretching, 3) physical therapy. That combo can be really powerful.
One side note: There are core strength/posture issues but also issues that need medical attention. The tricky part is figuring out which.
I still wouldn’t stop weight training, as it’s a part of my life that I love. However, despite never going for ambitious PRs, I have chronic pain that I never had prior to starting - and no amount of physical therapy has resolved it.
As always, YMMV.
I would recommend doing band work and calisthenics and also highly recommend analyzing your kinetic chain and form in any activity you do and figure out how to reduce shoulder arm and wrist for any force generation in sports such as tennis, golf, throwing etc.
After playing college tennis and developing bad shoulder issues with MRI indicating that surgery would be recommended. Two years prior my high school friend had had the same surgery and ultimately developed a opioid dependence during the crises and subsequently died of an overdose after 18 months of spiraling.
I ultimately was able to attribute the onset of flare ups to weeks where I was hitting a lot of serves and at first simply instituted a “pitch count” and later studied my form and discovered that I was not loading as much as I should have been from the base of my kinetic chain and a lot of that load was being put on my shoulder.
About 12 years later and I’ve recently switched to pickleball (no over head serve) and jokingly refer to myself as a tennis refugee.
You yourself recommend band work which is putting your shoulder under load
The real answer is the shoulder is complicated mechanically and you need to work on reinforcing or building the smaller groups (Is, Ys and Ts type of exercises and many others), if you can actively stabilize your shoulder this way you will reduce pain, inflammation and decrease the propensity for injury, allowing you to do traditional shoulder exercises like press etc without issue. I suggest working with a good PT
My mother-in-law has spinal surgery last christmas, the pain for her, prior to the surgery, was unbearable so it's hard to justify not running from that into the arms of a surgeon. The surgeon showed exactly what was to repair though so it was simple enough to understand and clear in the way it was going to help her.
About 9 months out from that surgery and she doesn't have anymore pain.
I dunno if spinal surgery is comparable to shoulder surgery.
I had spinal surgery; the scans were conclusive (specific disks had ruptured), the surgery to put in prosthetic disks (2x in total) is apparently quite routine, and the procedure itself is simpler (limited 3D motion in each vertebra - if you lose motion between any two vertebra after surgery, you might not even notice).
Compare to shoulder surgery where the scans are frequently inconclusive ("we think this surgery might fix the pain, but we are not sure"), and the surgery is uncommon, and the procedure itself is complex (large range of large movements across a large number of axes).
I know about a dozen people in real life who have had spinal fusions, but not one who has had shoulder surgery.
At the least I would heavily consider exhausting conservative treatment first. All but the worst tears can heal on their own, it just takes time and steady effort.
No matter what you choose to do, the adherence to rehab will determine your ultimate outcome.
That doesn't mean that surgery is always the appropriate treatment (I'm living with a shoulder labral tear that's untreated). But it is not even remotely true that tears heal on their own. Example, I just had an MRI on my tear, and the ortho said it looked exactly the same as the last MRI I had 8 years ago- no better, no worse
Labral tears look bad, yes, I'm talking more about tendon partial tearing here, which I think is more common than labral tearing (though I think, like the meniscus in the knee, after a certain age we probably all have tears in these tissues that are asymptomatic, so it's really a matter of degree).
For a long time it seemed to be accepted wisdom that even a partial tendon tear required surgery, but there's a lot of newer evidence that the body can recover from these with the right rehab protocols and time.
As an anecdote: Family member has a partial lateral meniscus tear in the knee. Surgery was considered as if successful then returning to running might have been possible. Specialist opinions varied as did their reading of the MRI scans.
After a lot of research there was emerging evidence that long-term, surgery was more likely to result in osteoarthritis. So had to weight up long-term mobility over short-term pain relief and not having a major lifestyle change.
You see professional athlete undergoing surgery the next day, but their income relies on regaining usage as quickly as possible. The alternative is physio exercises to strengthen the supporting muscles and avoiding anything that might cause a re-injury.
He was a regular golfer until last year when the pain got too bad to play through. He just started playing golf again at the beginning of September. He told me after three or so rounds he can’t even tell he had surgery or any previous pain in that shoulder.
He’s had one doctor do his knee surgery and the aforementioned shoulder surgery and he’s really happy with all of their work.
I hope you have as good of an experience as my dad has had.
Just my anecdote but I would say it clearly matters a lot how good your surgeon is and also how seriously you take recovery (which is a slow and painful process in itself). If you have a good surgeon and you do your physio exercises like a good invalid it seems to make a big difference.
I would say ask your surgeon what the reasonable expectation for recovery would be. Mine was pretty frank with me that there isn’t 100% relief in 100% of cases but I felt comfortable enough with the error bars she gave me that I went ahead and in my case that turned out to be a great decision (whereas for example I talked to an eye place about Lasik and it turned out my current vision is within the range of what they would consider successful surgery so I decided not to go ahead in that case).
I had a shoulder injury that was effectively treated by several months of twice-weekly sessions of PT. This was the embarrassingly difficult sort of PT involving doing exercises with carefully supervised form that looked very, very easy and were almost impossible. Before this experience, I never knew that half-pound barbells were a thing or that they might be very difficult to lift the way the PT wanted me to lift them.
Previously if I coughed my arm would fall entirely out of socket and I would need a propfol shot to allow the doc to relax it to get it back in.
In my case I was basically immobilized and in excruciating pain and fear 100% of my day.
Now thats only like 50% of the day
To be honest I'd forget and correct it all the time.
I’ve had a Stanford orthopedist (remotely) review my records, and he feels that surgery may be the only thing that can get me back to 100% (RoM or pain).
PT may help, but it can’t heal the damage that’s been done.
I suffered from peroneal tendinitis that was partially caused by not properly activating my calf/quads/glutes while running, so addressing this fixed the problem.
Most recently, I started to feel some extensor tendinitis swelling up in my foot, looked into it and it was suggested that properly stretching/massaging the tibialis could help this issue. My extensor pain was significantly less / almost gone after.
Back surgery on the other hand is only recommended for crazy illnesses.
Of course, many people don't like the recurring PT appointments, nor do they like hearing that you need to continue the exercises to some degree even after the sessions end. But I've incorporated them into my regular workouts, and a year later have completely functional shoulders. Best of luck.
However, if available I would try to find a good Pilates/dance/sports instructor that has a Gyrotonic machine, which is built for repairing and strengthening shoulder muscles. I had debilitating back issues from sitting in a chair all day and a good instructor fixed it over a year through low impact Pilates. YMMV and group classes tend to be ineffective because so much of it is doing the exercises precisely correct - they were built for injury recovery
100%. But I do like to hear anecdotes, since I know no one personally that's had shoulder surgery.
But agree that everyone's different, and everyone's experiences are different, so I take it with a grain of salt for sure.
But still appreciated!
I've been on and off with being consistent with that over the years and was dealing with lots of back pain. Having a desk job doesn't help.
But when COVID hit, I dedicated myself to Olympic weightlifting and pilates by paying (quite a lot) to have coaches and trainers. Since then I've had zero back pain. I recently quit both to get into long distance running because I was getting to be pre-diabetic, despite eating decently well and doing the aforementioned exercise. (Probably genetic - my dad's mom and my mom's dad were both diabetic.)
After all that - my one anecdata point is that pilates is the absolute best and most sustainable for life. My increased flexibility and core strength have totally changed my life. I couldn't even tie my shoelaces before but now I can squat almost to the ground to pick up my son. I'd put running second because I genuinely think the human body is designed to run and your body will figure itself out once you get into running shape. I love Olympic but you'd really need a good coach and be committed to do it well and not injure yourself.
All the above took me years of consistency and commitment, but now I'm on pace for a 3:10-3:15 marathon next month and I'm in the best shape of my life with zero back pain. I think losing a ton of weight from running has also lifted the stress from my back.
That's my experience, fwiw. Good luck man, hope whatever you end up doing will improve yourself.
I was in the same position at age 42-ish. Shoulder pain in right shoulder so bad that I could not even lift a cup of coffee.
> I really need to figure out whether it's going to make things better or worse, but unfortunately, that feels like something a doctor can't guarantee one way or the other.
I heard the same thing from 3x different surgeons (orthopedic, I think), which lead to...
> Any anecdotes or other experiences/thoughts are appreciated.
... not having any surgery. Over the course of the next 3 months it remained the same in severity (did not get worse, may have gotten better slightly or else I started learning to live with it). The subsequent six months the pain started abating. Over the next 6 months the pain went away almost totally. Now, 8 years later, I don't feel any pain at all.
Of course, I am diabetic, so make of that what you will. When the first surgeon checked my scans (MRI, Xrays and something else - ultrasound, maybe), and said they are not sure if surgery would fix it, I went to a second surgeon with the same scans, got told the same thing. When the third surgeon said the same thing, I decided to wait and see.
Good thing I did; surgery doesn't always turn out well.