Comment by jader201

One thing that bodybuilding taught me is to never underestimate how significantly you can change how your body works through weight training, mobility work and physical therapy.

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.

Single anecdata here.

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.

The question you want to ask is what is the long-term outcome. In 10-20 years time will you have better usage of the shoulder with or without the surgery?

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.

Anecdote: My dad has had two shoulder surgeries, one to repair his rotator cuff +15 years ago on his right arm, one back in March of this year on his other shoulder. I couldn’t tell you what specifically was wrong with it this time.

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.

Go see a specialist sports doctor. They deal with lots of these types of injuries. My physio sent me to one when I did my shoulder in a motorcycle accident and for my case, the data showed that it was better not to operate.

Read the Substack of Howard Luks, he's an orthopedic surgeon who has a lot of experience.

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.

For all such things, my advice is to get an opinion from an orthopedic doctor and also an opinion from a good physical therapist. You may or may not get the same answer from both. In my case, the doctor was at a teaching hospital and coached a resident through doing a gauntlet of gauntlet of pushing, pulling and poking tests, and they both agreed that PT was the right answer. YMMV, of course.

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.

I had a remplessage in February and I’m probably at 80% mobility now.

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

I’ve had two shoulder surgeries (one on each side) and they have been life-changing. On one side I’ve gone from extremely restricted movement and severe pain to complete freedom of movement and no pain. On the other side I now have total freedom of movement and some pain returned after 5 or so years so but whereas the pain before was more or less constant and completely unbearable now it aches a little sometimes when I have a bad day.

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).

Since you asked for anecdotes, I fixed my shoulder pain doing PT at home based off a plan cobbled together from Gemini and YouTube. I think the key is determining if it’s shoulder impingement or rotator cuff tear (there are YT videos to help diagnose). For me it was shoulder impingement and I just did the same exercises multiple times a day for a month. Pull-up bar hangs and doorway stretches with my hand above and to the side ended up being the most effective. If you don’t want to roll your own, maybe talk to a physical therapist.

Related to posture or something else? It took me about a year to fix my posture but I no longer have back/neck pain. It basically meant being aware of it all day and consciously adjusting, but now I feel a lot better. It's hard to undo a decade of potato in chair.

It depends on your injury, but I had great experience with physical therapy for healing my shoulder issues (imaging diagnosed it as shoulder impingement).

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.

Obviously, don't take medical advice on HN too seriously, but my uncle had shoulder surgery and was happy with the results. I have heard many more complaints about back surgeries making things worse than shoulders.

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

exercises that place the arm above the head become difficult if not impossible after some shoulder surgeries. these exercises position the shoulder in a comfortable locked in position. training in this position (eg. pull-ups) serves to strengthen muscles like the lats, which in turn support the shoulder in its resting position. i cant say avoiding surgery is fool proof - there is a markedly higher risk of dislocating, and many exercises (eg. bench press) become impossible with a loose shoulder joint. but personally i dont care, my destroyed shoulder becomes fixed after consistent pull-up training, do not see a need to lose half a year in recovery atm.

As a someone living with a person suffering from shoulder issues, im offering no advice, best wishes and a hug. Hope you'll be good soon.

Shoulder surgery was the best thing I ever did. I regretted wasting a year seeking opinions for what ended up being a minor fix. No more pain

> As someone who's going to the doctor next week to discuss potential shoulder surgery, this is timely.

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.

Strength training is good as mentioned already. Something else I’ve learned is that everything is connected, so if i have neck pain maybe it’s due to tightness somewhere else, like my back for example.

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.