How To Tell If You’ve Got A Rotator Cuff Tear

Do you think that you might have a rotator cuff tear? In this video today, I’m going to cover with you three things that you can check on yourself to tell if you’ve got a rotator cuff tear. Now, just a disclaimer, this is not a substitute for a medical diagnosis. If you feel like you need to, you should go see a health care professional to get an individualized customized diagnosis for your specific shoulder problem. But if you want to get a good idea, if you’ve got a rotator cuff tear, I’m going to tell you how to check it right now.

Real quick, my name is Dr. David Middaugh. And I’m a specialist physical therapist here at El Paso manual physical therapy. This channel is focused on helping people stay active, healthy and mobile, while avoiding unnecessary surgery, injections and medications, please subscribe to our channel and turn on your notifications. so you don’t miss any of the helpful videos that we put out every week. So let’s get to it.

Here’s the first thing you need to check if you’ve got a rotator cuff tear. Number one difficulty raising your arm. And I mean, it’s just hard challenging, it can feel like you don’t have the strength to get up there, it can feel painful, it can feel like it’s just blocked in some cases as well. So if you’re going to raise that arm that’s hurting, and you just feel like it starts to get real uncomfortable, especially in this zone, when your shoulders about 90 degrees from your body.

That’s when you’re using your rotator cuff muscles the most. So if you’ve got a tear, it can get pretty painful, you might feel like you need to support it with the other hand to go any higher. And oftentimes when you do that people are like oh, better, I can go up.

And it just doesn’t move very well up there that if you’ve got that first sign, then that’s a sign towards you possibly having a rotator cuff tear, there could be other things going on simultaneously like arthritis, and impingement, tendonitis. But if you have the rest of the size of it to tell you about then it’s even more likely that you’ve got rotator cuff tear.

The second side that you got to look for is reaching behind your back. So if you just reach your hand behind your back to get like you got to scratch an itch or you’re a lady reaching for a bra or your belt loop and the on the pants in the back and you’re trying to thread a belt through the loops. If that motion reaching back there is difficult for you, some people can’t even do it. If they’ve got a rotator cuff tear, they can barely even get to their pocket on the back. That is a sign that your rotator cuff might be torn or nearly torn.

The most common places to get pain with reaching up and reaching behind the back are up here in the ball and socket joint maybe in the front, it could be in the back. It can also go down the arm ribbon, sometimes on the backside of the arm or right on the side of the arm. And occasionally they can be symptoms all the way down into the elbow and pass the elbow into the hand. That’s a sign of nerve problems.

And it usually is a result of the rotator cuff being torn and the joint not being in its normal position because they’ve lost stability of from the rotator cuff muscles to the nerves get a little aggravated when that happens. So in case you’ve got the numbness tingling, the nervy sensations that go way down the arm.Not to worry too much yet, you might have a bigger problem with your rotator cuff right now.

The third sign is tenderness at the corner of your shoulder on the side, that hurts, so I’m going to get my skill to oversee, you can see what I mean by corner of the shoulder. Here on the skeleton, you’ve got the ball and socket joint right here and right above is this part of the shoulder blade that hangs over it’s called the acromion. And that’s the bone that forms a corner of the shoulder.

The rotator cuff muscles that commonly get involved are right under that area right there. They’re kind of on the ball and socket on the ball of the ball and socket joint right below this part of the bone right here.

So on yourself, reach your shoulder and right where you feel like the bone ends right here. Not quite on the ball and socket, but above it, where it gets soft, just fall off where it’s where it’s where it’s hard to where you feel some softness.

If you have tenderness right along that area. And you don’t have to be real specific, you can just kind of poke in the general area. That’s your rotator cuff right there, you have to kind of poke hard, and you can compare it to the other side. If your other side isn’t really that tender, then likely you’ve got a rotator cuff tear on that side.

Now there’s a chance that you could have rotator cuff tears on both sides, both sides can be tender, but put it together with those other two signs that I said if you’ve got trouble reaching up you need that help, you can’t really reach back behind you and there’s a high likelihood that you’ve got a rotator cuff tear some sort of involved with a rotator cuff.

Now keep in mind, the only there’s only two ways to diagnose a rotator cuff tear. Number one is visualizing the rotator cuff, which means you have to have a surgery so they have to go in there with a camera for that to open you up to be able to look at the rotator cuff and tell you that it is or is not torn.

Of course that’s very invasive. And there’s a whole lot of complications with doing that just to check a rotator cuff tear. So the next best step that is coming to us and there’s errors with this of course, is an MRI. You might need to go get an MRI and then the radio ologists will interpret the readings from your MRI and tell you if you’ve got a rotator cuff tear. And even then there’s mistakes that are made sometimes because it’s an image from the outside, trying to look at the inside of the body.

If you’ve ever seen an MRI image, it just it’s hard to tell what’s, what’s there and what’s not there. And of course, radiologists are trained in this, but even they make mistakes, because you just can’t, it’s not theirs. It’s nothing like looking at the body when you open it up on the inside. But these signs, these tests that I gave you here today are pretty darn accurate, as long as you’re feeling the right areas and checking the right motions.

But keep in mind, there’s always a chance there can be something else in addition to your rotator cuff tear that’s complicating the situation, a secret fourth test that you can use. And you know, I wouldn’t really call it a test, it’s more of a it’s a trial and error thing, really start treatment to fix your rotator cuff tear, and see if it helps.

And if it does, you probably had a rotator cuff tear, we’re about to get one, we’ve got a video covering how to treat your rotator cuff injury at home, it’s linked here in the description below, click on that video and start the treatment that I talked about in there.

And if it is helping you out, then that’s a huge sign that’s confirmation that you probably had a rotator cuff tear because the exercises that I put in those in that video is designed to fix a rotator cuff tear. So that’s confirmation that you probably have a rotator cuff tear. And the cool thing about it is that you don’t have to see a doctor if that worked out for you anyway, and if you didn’t have any complications within which I talked about in the video, and you’re getting better, so that’s a win win.

Anyways, I hope that this video was helpful for you please give us a like if you learned about how to test your rotator cuff tear. If you thought this video was helpful for you give us a like here give us a thumbs up. And please don’t forget to subscribe and turn on your notifications so that you don’t miss any of the helpful videos we put out each week. Drop a comment as well and let us know if you have any questions. have the best day.