Can A Rotator Cuff Tear Heal Naturally Without Surgery

Do you suspect that you might have a rotator cuff tear? Or maybe you know that you’ve got a rotator cuff tear, because you’ve seen a doctor and had an MRI, and they found that you have a rotator cuff tear? Are you having trouble picking up your arm all the way, and lying on that side whenever you go to sleep? Well if this is you, then the next question that you probably have is can a rotator cuff tear heal naturally without surgery?

Real quick, my name is Dr. David Middaugh. I’m a specialist physical therapist over at El Paso Manual Physical Therapy. I’ve been helping people with rotator cuff tear problems for years, mainly helping people avoid them.

Of course, we do see people here and there that have had a rotator cuff surgery because it’s necessary in some cases. But what we’ve found is that in about 9 out of 10 cases it is completely possible to avoid having a surgery and allow your rotator cuff tear to heal naturally and get back that full motion with your arm, the strength to pick up things again, lying on that shoulder without having to worry that you’re going to be waking up at night all the time.

This week has been packed with new patients, and three of the patients that we got this week have asked us some version of the same question. That is something like “Can a rotator cuff tear heal naturally without surgery?” And with each and every one of them, we emphatically said, “Yes, it can.”

And we see it happen here in the clinic all the time. We get people that have a diagnosed rotator cuff tear, they’ve got their MRI report that shows they’ve got some tear of some sort. And they’re considering having surgery for this because that’s what most people in the medical field push patients with rotator cuff tears to do. But they end up coming to us for a second opinion to see if it’s possible to avoid surgery, so that they can get their shoulder motion back again, and be able to sleep on that side and stop taking pain medications, avoid injections, get their shoulder back.

Now the cool thing about this is, there’s research evidence, there’s medical literature, medical research, and evidence out there that is supporting this. There’s more and more research coming out gradually over the years, where they’ve come. They’ve compared people that have had surgery and how they recover after the surgery, and people that have avoided surgery and gone through conservative treatment, which is physical therapy pretty much. And they found that six months and even up to a year later, they’re all improved about the same amount. So, this begs the question, is a surgery for rotator cuff tear even necessary?

We still have yet to find out exactly what type of rotator cuff tear, absolutely need surgery. As far as research goes with that, we don’t have a clear-cut example, or a clear-cut algorithm, or step by step process to figure out who really needs surgery and who doesn’t. And what the medical field at large has done is just kind of overestimated and said, well, you have a tear, go get operated on. But what we’re finding more and more in the research and in clinic experience is that many people can get better without it.

Let me tell you example of a patient that we had just this past summer, we had a client who came in who was scheduled to have a rotator cuff surgery. Two weeks out from when we saw her, of course she couldn’t pick up her arm it was hurting her. She said it felt like a toothache in her shoulder. If she moved in in just the right position, usually when she moved her hand outwards, or reached all the way out or she picked up something heavy.

In her case, she loves to garden and do active stuff out in the yard and at home, she takes care of her home quite a bit. And every time she had to go do something that involves some sort of strenuous force with her arm, she would feel that shoulder biter right away. I mean it was even down to when she was cutting vegetables, a harder vegetable like a carrot or something like that. If she had to push the knife down through a harder vegetable like that it would hurt and jolt her shoulder at times.

As we began treatment and saw her improve, she gradually began to get more emotions back, was able to hold more heavier things in her arm, able to use her arm more forceful ways. And part of her treatment required us to take her into even a weightlifting with that shoulder. We actually did overhead weight lifting that was what she needed to do. And we did it in such a way that was not aggravating the rotator cuff tear.

The timing is important as well. We can’t just start like that, we have to work up to being able to do overhead weightlifting, so it is completely possible. We see patients here all the time. That’s one example of many. I can think of another one we had in December, she was a crossfitter. And has done many exercises with their shoulders. She loved to row.

She was also scheduled for surgery and ended up postponing it in the hopes that we would help her out and we did so she ended up completely canceling her surgery for her rotator cuff tear. She was so happy about it, she was so glad that she could avoid it. And most importantly, we got her back to doing all the exercises that she was doing before with no shoulder problems.

If you are out there and you’ve got a rotator cuff tear, you think that you might have rotator cuff tear, because you’ve researched it, it sounds like you have one. You’re probably wondering, Well, what do I do next? How can I begin to solve this problem naturally without having surgery so that I can get back to doing everything I want? Well, let me tell you the next best three steps that you need to take right now.

Number one, go get a sling. Like the type of sling that you might get in a hospital or an urgent care clinic. If you hurt your shoulder, your arm. They sell them at Walmart at CVS and Walgreens. Even grocery stores have them. It’s the type of sling that you just put your elbow into. It’s got cloth that like a cloth sling that you put your elbow into and then it’s got a strap that comes around your shoulder over your neck and connects to the other end of the clasp by your hand.

What you want to do is tighten that up so that it shoves your shoulder up towards your head. You want it to be firmly pressed up there. Not too uncomfortable in cases its starting to hurt more, but it should feel like it’s pressed up against your body and up against your head decently well.

And the point of that is to take pressure off the ball and socket joint where the rotator cuff tear is, the rotator cuff muscles and tendons hold the ball up against the socket. So the weight of your arm just hanging with gravity, contention that tear. And so if you get that sling on and shove it all the way up, it takes that tension off the tear and can allow you to feel a little bit better in the short term, but also to begin the tendon healing.

The tendon sometimes isn’t fully tear. It’s just a partial tear. And if you ever have an MRI, they’ll talk about that a full thickness tear, partial thickness tear. You can get into all those details. But what you want is to bring those edges of the tear together so that they have a chance at healing. So that sling is a big deal.

Just because you’re in a sling doesn’t mean you have to be in it all the time. You’re looking at getting into it when you’re most active. So whenever you’re doing chores around the house, or maybe if your workplaces kind of busy, you want to put it on there. Obviously, if you have a very, very active job you need your arm for just about everything you might not be working right now. But you want to have that sling on.

Also, just for other people to know that you’re not able to do things because if you’re not wearing a sling, and you have rotator cuff tear, you usually can do things with your arm nearby that don’t require a whole lot of force. But if you go to do something more strenuous, then you’ll hurt that shoulder and you don’t want to be aggravating that soldier constantly because you can make that tear worse.

So if you have that sling on, it communicates to people around you immediately that you can do certain things with that arm. So they are going to be more inclined to help you and you’ll kind of get away with not using your arm more.

Now, that being said, think of the second tip that I’m going to give you here. You need to use your arm in ways that don’t hurt it. You don’t want to completely stop using your arm just because you’re in a sling now. And by the way, you don’t have that sling on all the time. Just put it on at times when you feel like you need it. But do use your arm.

If you can brush your teeth with your arm do that. If you can reach your head, do your hair, do that, in the shower, clean yourself up. Do small things around the house, like cooking, cleaning your laundry, do things that you can do without your shoulder hurting, you’re going to have to slow down. You’re going to have to pay attention.

And you really, really want to avoid aggravating it because every time you do, it’s kind of like picking at a scab, you know, if you cut your skin on your hand, and over time you develop a scab, well it’s going to be tender if you press on it, of course, but if you go start picking it that scab and peel it off, it’s going to start bleeding and you have to go through that healing process all over again.

You don’t get a scab in your shoulder, but a similar healing process happens and whenever you go to do something that just kind of is on the edge of pain, it’s kind of like pressing on a scab, you’re not going to set yourself back, but you found where it hurts. But if you do something that just forces your way through some pain, and it hurts for some time afterwards. I mean, you’re hurting for days afterwards because of that thing that you did you pick up that that real heavy thing.

We had one client that came in this week that said that he you felt the tear when he went into the back of his truck to pick up the heavy toolbox up over the tailgate, just like so. And that’s when he felt a rip and pain that lasted for several weeks afterwards. And so that’s probably where he tore his rotator cuff.

Obviously, you don’t want to do something like that. So you want to do the light things, but the movement is important because then you allow the muscles around your shoulder to work and to stay healthy, and to not fully weaken as much as they can if you don’t do anything. You want to maintain easy, simple movements that are not bothering you and not flaring you up for long periods of time.

The third thing that you need to do is go find specialist help. Rotator cuff tears are no joke, they can easily go bad. And the last thing you want is to fully tear it, and really make it so bad that you have to have surgery because it’s just a long recovery and a lot of times people end up having another rotator cuff tear later on.

But if you get some specialist help somebody who can help you heal this rotator cuff problem naturally, then you’re going to be in great shape because they’ll make sure that you’re guided in your exercises or that you’re guided in your routines. They know how to adjust your daily routine, your workplace, your ergonomics at home at work so that your shoulder isn’t bothering you day to day and that it’s getting better day to day.

That is priceless because then you can have that confidence and that peace of mind that your shoulder is going to heal and you’re not going to have to go under a surgeon’s knife to make that happen. And I want you to know that it is possible, and 9 out of 10 cases from what we’ve seen here in the clinic, to get back to doing everything you were doing before. I mean, push-ups, lifting weight up overhead, being able to do all the yard work, you’ll been able to pick up heavy things. Your shoulder should be able to heal. The body is super resilient. Tendons are excellent at healing given the right environment. other tissues in the area are really good in healing.

As a specialist physical therapist, we help people out like this, I can tell you, we’ve got to find the root problems, which the rotator cuff tear itself is never the root problem. There’s always some shoulder blade issue, some neck issue, some muscle imbalance problem that needs to be addressed in order to set up the rotator cuff tear to heal fully.

And that’s just not something that surgeons do or that physicians do. Their specialty is in medicines and in surgery, which is fantastic if you need it, of course. But if you were looking to fix the root problem of a rotator cuff tear, so that it won’t happen to you again, you’re not having to rely on surgery, medications injections, and talking to a specialist physical therapist that can treat the root of the problem is what you need to do next.

If you thought this video was helpful for you, and you’re considering hiring us to help you with your rotator cuff tear problem, we’re happy to help. All you have to do is go up to the top of our website here and find the button that says cost and availability click on that. And what you’ll find is a place where you can open up a forum and put in all your details, fill in all the details there just takes less than a minute. And one of my staff will call you back as fast as they can.

When my staff calls, you want to hear all about your shoulder problem to make sure it’s the type of rotator cuff problem that we can effectively help here in the clinic. If we can, they will tell you the next steps and if we can’t, then we’ll make sure to send you to the right person so that you can make sure to take care of this rotator cuff problem as fast as possible. You can also call our clinic at 915-503-1314 and just talk to us over the phone.

We hope to be a part of your success story real soon.