The great TV classic ER helps teach armchair physicians to become amateur diagnosticians. He’s in shock! She’s got kidney stones! Rule-out pheochromocytoma!

But sometimes a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing!

You have learned somewhere – on the network news, in the Science section of The New York Times, or in a CPR class at your job – that shoulder pain can mean you’re having a heart attack. Now, seemingly out of the blue, your shoulder begins to ache and throb. Very concerned, you rush to the local emergency room.

The resident’s first question, of course, is “where does it hurt”? You point to your right shoulder and blurt out, “Am I having a heart attack?” The resident smiles, gently reassuring. “A heart attack might give you pain in your left shoulder,” she says. “Have you been to the gym lately? This could be a rotator cuff strain.”

The resident knows that heart attack symptoms usually involve chest pain (in two-thirds of cases), and may include faintness, shortness of breath, sweating, and a feeling of impending doom.1 Chest pain may spread to the back, jaw, and arms. Left arm pain may radiate to the inside of the forearm and the ring and little fingers. Shoulder pain by itself probably doesnt suggest a heart attack.

The resident orders an MRI which shows mild damage to the right rotator cuff. What’s going on? What exactly is the rotator cuff?

The rotator cuff is a muscular sheath that surrounds the head of the arm bone (the humerus) and the entire shoulder joint (really, two joints – the acromioclavicular and glenohumeral joints). The four muscles that comprise the rotator cuff help to raise the arm to the front and the side and help turn the shoulder inward and outward.

If you are a sports fan, you know that rotator cuff injuries affect baseball pitchers, tennis players, swimmers, and football players. Such injuries are due to repetitive motion, and may also result from falling on the shoulder or arm or lifting heavy weights.

Rotator cuff injuries may also be slowly developing and chronic, related to arthritic and degenerative changes in the rotator cuff tendon and the two shoulder joints. Low-grade pain may develop, and the pain may become aching, throbbing, and chronic. Raising the arm may cause pain and there may be loss of mobility.2

In the above-40 population, lack of exercise and chronically poor posture may contribute to rotator cuff problems. Sitting at a desk all day, with your neck jutting forward and slumped shoulders, places long-term mechanical stress on the rotator cuff.

Chiropractic treatment may be very useful in helping to rehabilitate chronic rotator cuff injuries. The chiropractic physician is expert in evaluating postural problems and associated spinal conditions. By providing effective treatment, postural corrections, and rehabilitative exercise, chiropractors offer a comprehensive therapeutic program to reduce pain, improve shoulder mobility, and regain function.

1Source: Cedars-Sinai www.cedars-sinai.edu 2Baring T, et al: Management of rotator cuff disease. Best Pract Res Clin Rheumatol 21(2):279-294, 2007.

Heart Attack Or Rotator Cuff Injury? is a post from the Vegetarian Vitamins Guide blog where you can find suggestions and advice from vegetarians and vegans on vegetarian diets, supplements, vitamins and overall nutrition.

Many people go through life in chronic low level pain. Many of them have lived with it so long that they do not even notice it. TV ads blame bad mattresses and want you to buy their better (and more expensive) mattresses, some claim it is due to stress or pollutants in the environment and some people simply find themselves on a steady stream of over the counter pain killers to take the edge off. This constant pain can be at its worst when it is in the lower back as that makes it hard to even move around let alone pick anything up or otherwise go about your daily routine.

Chiropractic just may be the answer you’re looking for to help with your low back pain, whether your condition is recent or of a more chronic nature. Many times your low back pain can be caused by the back muscles pulling unevenly on either side of your spine. This results in soreness, aches and pains, or even a “pinched nerve.” Another possibility is that your problems are from the bones of the spine, in which case a chiropractor should be considered since they deal specifically with the back.

Not all chiropractors are created equally or think the same way, however. In chiropractic healthcare, there seem to be two general schools of thought. The first is that chiropractics deals exclusively with physical issues of the spine and back, and its alignment. Practitioners of this traditional form of chiropractic will use only their hands and sometimes the help of diagnostic testing or radiographic images before they make corrections to the alignment of the spine and give relief for low back pain.

The other involves something called a subluxation, which is a single misaligned vertebra putting pressure on the nervous system, which may hamper blood or energy flow up and down the spine. Some subluxation based doctors believe they can solve nearly every bodily ill by correcting and preventing these misalignments with a constant regimen of maintenance, and may offer themselves as general practitioners as well.

For this reason it is important to look for a chiropractor with experience in sports medicine or who specializes in back pain. They will be able to either identify and fix the problem in your back that is causing you pain, or be able to identify if it is something more serious which spinal manipulation may actually make worse. The spine is a delicate area and one wrong move can leave a person paralyzed or worse. It is important to treat it with care and precision, but with the right chiropractor your lower back pain is in good hands.

Low Back Pain? Try Chiropractic! is a post from the Vegetarian Vitamins Guide blog where you can find suggestions and advice from vegetarians and vegans on vegetarian diets, supplements, vitamins and overall nutrition.