Issue: Chronic neck pain
Solution: First, I had to palpate to figure out where the problem seemed to be. This client was a 66 year old man with torn rotator cuff tendons in both shoulders. He had already had surgery twice on the right shoulder, but no surgery had been performed on the left. The second surgery on the right was to repair the torn supraspinatus tendon, repair a torn labrum, an acromioplasty was done, and a partial claviculectomy. In other words, the supraspinatus tendon was repaired by placing anchors into the upper humerus, the torn labrum was repaired by excising the torn tissue, an acromioplasty is a shaving of the acromion process, and a partial claviculectomy is a removal of the distal portion of the clavicle. This procedure had left this man with a chronic imbalance in his first ribs. I taught his girlfriend how to rebalance the first ribs. But, this problem will not be solved any time soon. The problem exists in part because he has had surgery on the right and not on the left. However, even when he does have surgery on the left, the damage may be different, the surgery will almost certainly be performed differently, and how he rehabs will be different. This leads to a chronic misalignment of his first ribs. To be continued……..
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