If you were having chronic pain in your shoulder, it might be from a variety of different injuries. It might be a myofascial injury. You might have gotten it because you worked out too hard at the gym. You might be a musician. Maybe you work on a keyboard all day long or you’re working in a warehouse or you’re a camera man and you have your neck in an awkward position all day long, holding something heavy on your shoulder. Any of those things can give you chronic shoulder pain.
What is Myofascial Pain?
And so what happens is, most often in shoulder pain, it’s something called myofascial pain. Now, I went to medical school for four years and was out in practice for a few years before I ever heard the term myofascial pain. And when I did first hear it, it was actually because I had an injury myself. And I was actually shocked to find out when I started doing a reading, that it’s the most common cause of pain.
So, myo means muscle. Fascia is the connective tissue that connects all of our tissues together. I was never taught about muscles and fascia as being potentially a cause of pain and that if you treat that system, that you could actually make pain better. And this still isn’t really well-taught in most medical schools. In the osteopathic medical schools in the United States, this is well-taught, but in the conventional medical schools, they still do not teach very much about myofascial pain.
So, muscles and connective tissue is a key factor in pain even if you have other things going on like a herniated disc, like arthritis, like injuries, and broken bones. You can still have muscles and connective tissue that needs treatment and that can improve your function and reduce your pain.
