Torn Shoulder Labrum: Everything You Need To Know (Diagnosis & Treatment)

Having a torn labrum in the shoulder can be very scary, as you’ll hear many people saying that you need surgery for this. But it’s possible to heal naturally without surgery, as long as you have a great understanding of how torn labrum in the shoulder work and what to do about them.

In this video, I’m going to explain everything that you need to know about torn shoulder labrum including the diagnosis, the treatment and the cause of a torn shoulder labrum. So let me first explain to you what a labrum is in the shoulder.

So you can understand that in the shoulder, it’s a ball and socket joints. And the socket is on the shoulder blade. It’s a tiny socket relative to the hip joint down low, the socket is much bigger, and it covers up the ball much better.

But in the shoulder, it’s really tiny. It’s, it’s more like think of like a tee, and a golf ball, the way a golf ball sits on a tee, it’s much the socket site is much smaller than in the hip. So what a labrum does is it surrounds the edge of the socket to make it deeper so that it has more contact with the ball.

Now there’s a tear in the labrum that just means that the edge the lip of cartilage, that’s what labor means in Latin, by the way, it means lip, it means that lip of cartilage has come off some way, there’s different types of tears, I won’t get into it on this video. But if it’s come off, then that means that the socket is now not normal.

And so the ball is going to move in the socket normal, you have bad mechanics or abnormal mechanics, you’re going to get abnormal forces going through the joint, it can shear it can move in ways that it’s not supposed to. And this is what causes the dull, achy pain that people get. I’ll tell you more about the symptoms coming up.

Now in order to diagnose a torn labrum in his shoulder, you’ll probably end up going to the doctor and they’ll be ordering an MRI very likely, an MRI will look at the soft tissues. In other words, everything else other than the bone and you can see bone on there. But you can also see cartilage and tendons.

They’ll also tell you if you have a torn rotator cuff because that can happen. Sometimes with a labrum tear, they may also order an x ray to get a good look at the bony edge of the socket because sometimes when the labrum tears, it can pull a piece of the bone off. And they have to take that into consideration.

And if they’re having trouble seeing the tear properly in a normal MRI, they may order an MRI where they inject contrast dye, they’ll inject your shoulder with a with something that they can see better on the MRI to be able to detect the tear better, then they’ll take the findings from their imaging the X ray the MRI, and put it together with the symptoms that you’re reporting.

And the common symptoms that go along with the shoulder labrum tear, they’re going to be popping and clicking it may or may not be painful, but there’s an increase in popping clicking or shifting sensations inside the joint.

In more extreme cases you might get catching that means that the shoulder joint gets stuck like you’re moving to do something and then it feels like he gets stuck, people usually end up holding their arm up like this and kind of have to shimmy it loose and then it starts to move normal again. And that’s typically painful. When it happens as the day goes on.

And somebody with a labrum tear in their shoulder, it gets more and more painful, more achy, and it can become very painful by the time they get to bed. This is why many people with labrum tears in their shoulder and having difficulty sleeping at night because of shoulder pain.

And it doesn’t always matter if they’re lying on the side that hurts even lying on the other side might be painful, because the tissue is a cartilage inside the labrum itself and other body parts inside the shoulder might just be irritated. And that night it can feel more intense. Now let me tell you what causes a labral tear.

Now there’s accidents that happen of course it can cause a labral tear right away like a car accident, motorcycle accident and bicycle accidents or even just having a bad fall where you fall into your arm, elbow hand or right directly under the shoulder that can jolt the shoulder and tear the labrum.

But more commonly, what we see is a non traumatic labeled labrum tear, meaning there was no accident it just started to hurt over time doing the normal everyday things that you do. And then it started to become very clicky painful at night all those symptoms that I just talked about when you have a non traumatic labral tear in the shoulder.

It’s usually due to a muscle imbalance that’s developed inside the shoulder that’s putting excessive stress on the on the labrum. I’ll tell you more about the muscle imbalance coming up in just a moment. If you’ve got that muscle imbalance then leading up to the labrum tear you may have had shoulder pain that comes on when doing exercises that involve your shoulders. Or if you do some heavy chores around the house like yard work.

You may have achiness in your shoulders or discomfort that that doesn’t last too long but enough to notice it. And this may have been going on for months or even years where it comes and goes comes and goes. But now it’s developed to where it’s more consistent and it hurts you at night and it’s more painful than it ever was before.

That kind of bit presentation is consistent with a non traumatic labels err on the shoulder. Now let me tell you about the common treatments that are done for labrum tears in the shoulder, you go to the doctor, they’re going to tell you first to rest it to not do anything to stress it out, they may even tell you to put ice or heat on it, and they may recommend over the counter pain medications.

If that doesn’t work, then they’ll recommend prescription strength pain medications to control the pain in the shoulder. And they may even recommend injections like cortisone injections to get some more relief from the shoulder pain. Now all of these treatments are short term pain relief, even the injection it’s still short term because it’s not truly fixing the root problem. It’s merely just pain relief, but it’s injected directly into the joint.

So it’s going to last slightly longer. Sometimes you may be recommended to have surgery and the surgery these days is actually pretty good for shoulder labor repairs. Now there is rehabilitation that happens afterwards, meaning you have to go to physical therapy and take it easy, it’s a process to recover and heal from the Labor repair.

But in some cases, they may even tell you to go to physical therapy before you do surgery to see if you can get better with that. Now beware when going to physical therapy for a labral tear that you haven’t had surgery on because most physical therapists are trained to rehabilitate people after they’ve had surgery and fixing a shoulder labrum tear non surgically.

In other words, you’re not going to have surgery, you’re going to try to fix it without going to the surgeon. If you’re getting help from a physical therapist, they may not be specialists in helping you out before having surgery. So be sure to do your research to find out the right kind of person to help you out.

One thing in particular, that’s really stressful for the for the labrum is shoulder stretches like where you push your arm across all the way this way, or some people like to get on a wall and turn this way. There’s other exercises that are not well understood by general physical therapists that love and are great at healing people after they’ve had surgery.

And so doing those same exercises that you might do, if you’ve had surgery could actually be damaging to you if you’re trying to prevent a labrum repair surgery. Now let’s talk about the root problem of a non traumatic labrum tear, the muscle imbalance that is present in people that have these tears is one that causes the ball right here to drift forward on the socket.

So in somebody’s shoulder, it may seem that their shoulders are more rounded forward, you might check this on yourself, look at yourself from the side view in a mirror or have somebody take a picture of you that way, you’re not turning your head and throwing off the reading. But it’s usually pretty obvious that their shoulders are kind of rounded forward.

And one telltale sign that I love to spot you can spot it a mile away, once you become aware of this is if you look at people’s hands from behind. If they’re walking in their head, your hands should be at your side. So your palms should be facing towards your body.

But if your palms are rotated backwards, when your arms are dangling, that means that your whole arm and shoulder is rotated this way, and it’s causing your hands will rotate backwards. So if you’re walking with your hands, the palms of your hands swinging behind you, then that’s a sign that all the way up here and your shoulder you might be internally or inward rotated, which means the ball is going to be forward on the socket and that’s going to stress the labrum.

If you’ve been like this for years, then it’s highly likely that you have this root muscle imbalance that needs to be addressed. And even if you have a labor repair surgery, it’s not going to fix the muscle imbalance that needs to be addressed separately so that you don’t end up re injuring your labrum that usually it takes strengthening certain rotator cuff muscles like a subscapularis.

As well as shrugging muscles up in the neck the ones that raise your shoulders up and this has to be done in a process so that you can get the right mechanics at the ball and socket joint so that the ball moves properly on the socket and doesn’t overstress the labrum which allows it to heal and behave naturally.

If you want to learn more about labrum tears check out the link in the description below to a playlist of all our videos for shoulder labrum tears is also linked there to all our shoulder pain videos in case you have other issues like rotator cuff problems or shoulder impingement syndrome.

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