All right, everybody, welcome back from another episode of the barbell therapy podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Brett Scott. And with me today is my colleague mentor. And there’s something we can add to the end of that pretty soon
Unknown Speaker 0:16
is remez Antoon. So Ramirez is the owner of neuro PDX. And he’s been on the podcast before. So we’re coming back. I’ve had a couple of people reach out that wanted to dis have us discuss a little more in depth of how we differentiate shoulder pain versus neck pain. And how do you know what to go after. So we see a lot of people in the clinic every day, which come in and have kind of failed treatment a little bit or just didn’t work for them where something was missing from either the history they gave, or the questions that were asked, and just maybe the treatment that happens. And, you know, if you have shoulder pain, and you’re continually doing everything under the sun, and it’s not getting better, we should think about taking a look at your neck and how you’re moving and what you’re feeling. And there’s a ton of stuff we have just from asking the right questions to lead us in the right path of this doesn’t smell like a shoulder. This smells like a neck that’s contributing to most of the pain. So me and Mazur gonna go through some of that. So, mez, welcome back to the show, here it, it just, there’s 14, well, you have even more training than me. But there’s about what 17 years of education in this room, and it just took us 45 minutes to figure out the microphones.
Unknown Speaker 1:39
Yeah, that’s about it sounds about right. So and Ramirez is such a nerd that he thought audio input was just like the motor sensory system, which he forgot that the computer is the central nervous system for this. So he had settings backwards for a bit. But anyways, we’re here now we figured it out after 45 minutes.
Unknown Speaker 2:00
And we’re going to talk a little bit about shoulder versus neck pain, and what could be coming from where and why. And a couple things you could do to kind of see for yourself if your shoulder pain might be neck pain, or vice versa, and some things you might be able to do about it. So remez take it away. What do you got for us?
Unknown Speaker 2:22
Thanks for the intro, Brett. So I mean, yeah, what you touched on, you know, a lot of people who go to physical therapy or chiropractic for short, quote unquote, shoulder pain, a lot of times failed treatment, in the subjective or in the history, a lot of times you can start to glean whether the shoulder was the primary issue. And we’ll get into a lot of that later on. But I think my mentor Martin helped me really
Unknown Speaker 2:52
screen that out from the subjective history. And then there’s some very simple things we can do in the objective testing that can actually confirm our hypothesis coming in to the objective exam from the subjective interview process, which unfortunately, I think a lot of times, we as clinicians coming out of school, we kind of glaze over the subjective history. But the more training that I had postgraduate, I realized that the subjective interviewer and actually listening to the patient and listening to their story is probably one of the most important starting points to actually help them get better. So yeah, I think from from there, we can kind of break down what to listen for or from a to really bring value to the audience what they should pay attention to, so that when they go to see a clinician or a provider, they can be a better detective and reporter as to what they’re feeling and what’s going on. I think that’s kind of probably one of the biggest things we can bring to the audience from from today’s podcast. Yeah, and even being able to tell your story. And if these things add up for you in lineup, like these are things, even if the clinician isn’t asking these questions, because a lot of times in the traditional medical model right now, there’s a lot of questions providers have to ask just to write down for insurance, and they’re not maybe relevant to actually, you know, getting you better. So thinking about these things, and being able to add these in to your subjective report are huge because, as Matt said, the investor is the one that taught me all about the subjective examine how important it is. It’s like now my, my clinical testing of putting you through all kinds of different movements just solidifies the evidence you already told us for the most part, and sometimes it brings us down different rabbit holes. But anyways, there’s plenty of times we see this and how would you like to to lead them into this from here as well? Well, I think a really good place to start would probably be teaching our listeners how to start to journal and write down some of the
Unknown Speaker 5:00
things that they’re experiencing, and maybe give them some categories to filter out what’s relevant and maybe irrelevant. So
Unknown Speaker 5:11
if we set this up with, Okay, someone is experiencing shoulder pain,
Unknown Speaker 5:16
what can they do to start writing down some of their triggers? And start to notice when their pain gets worse when their pain gets better? And is like, you’re saying, Is this even a shoulder situation? Or is this potentially referred pain from the neck?
Unknown Speaker 5:35
I think that would be a good place for us to start, discuss just some common classifications of of triggers and what
Unknown Speaker 5:44
what may what may feel like shoulder pain may not always be shoulder pain. So I think that would be a good place for us to start, how can how can they write in journals and things down so when they go into your provider, the their report is a little bit more organized, and less all over the place. Because sometimes shoulder pain can feel like it’s all over the place and feel like it doesn’t really make sense. And so having some organization to their report can can really help I think, yeah, so the big, the big three things we have that we need to look at with the cervical spine. In most times, if you have shoulder pain, there might be something upstream to with the neck or the thoracic spine, that aren’t working as optimally as we want. So the big things we need to keep in mind with the shoulder are load. So that could be gravity. That could be when you press a barbell overhead, you’re adding load to the cervical spine, so it’s even lifting your arms up in front of you is adding cervical load, because you’re compressing the muscles, which can,
Unknown Speaker 6:52
you know, mechanically is putting pressure through the spine or decreasing the amount of space between discs, which, if there’s some type of issue with the nerve or the disk, this can create some type of sensitivity. So that is one, the other is tension. So
Unknown Speaker 7:10
if you thought about your nervous system, and your nerves as cables, essentially your nerves run from your fingertip all the way up your arm into your brain, and your brainstem. And so we can have tension on these nerves to or pulling in certain areas or a lack of mobility in the way the nerve can behave for various reasons. And that can become a trigger, and is something that will contribute to shoulder pain, although it’s coming from the neck as well. The last is position. So as many of you know, our neck moves in all different directions. So we have flexion. So bring your head down. By extension, bring your head back rotation, side bending, all these play into
Unknown Speaker 7:58
essentially, especially looking at our day to day life. So if you sit at a computer all day, and maybe we don’t have the the best ergonomic setup where our computers too low, our keyboard is too far away. We don’t have armrests, or head support, we end up with this kind of forward head posture, which isn’t bad if we’re just there for a little bit. But if we spend eight to 12 hours a day here for a years, sometimes we end up in extension, and that can become sensitive, because
Unknown Speaker 8:27
there’s a host of reasons it becomes sensitive. But basically, the body could just be sick of that position, or there could be something else pathologically going on or structurally going on. So those are things we’re going to talk about here of those are basically our three pillars of what can happen at the neck that can create shoulder pain, anything else you want to add there mess. Now I think just summarizing, it would be helpful for our listeners. So load, position, nerve tension, and then sustained postures or position. So those are the four categories that we listen for in the in the subjective history. So when I’m listening to someone complaining of shoulder pain, and they tell me things like okay, well yeah, just sitting at my desk is painful or watching TV at night in my recliner, I start to get pain in my shoulder. And when I hear that, and I hear that their shoulder isn’t moving and they’re having aching, throbbing pain in their shoulder. One of the first things I think of is the neck, I just asked myself, could this be referred pain? Right? And as a practitioner, when I’m asking someone to lift their arm up and they say, Oh, I have pain, one of the first things that I do just to screen that is to just give the cervical spine a little bit of traction or decompression and see if the shoulder pain goes away and or they can move the shoulder a little bit better. Alright, so pain at rest is one of the first things that makes me think neck and
Unknown Speaker 10:01
Looking at shoulder movements in a loaded, aka sitting or standing versus an unloaded position could help me figure out okay, is this truly a neck situation? Or is this a shoulder situation? So when we take this back to journaling, for the people listening, if you’re experiencing pain at rest in your shoulder, at night, in a recliner sitting at your desk? The question, we can’t just assume that it’s the neck. But the question we need to ask is, is this truly a shoulder problem? And that’s the first thing we ask ourselves as clinicians. Right? So looking at low looking at position, so you mentioned I don’t know if you mentioned this earlier, or if you mentioned this in a previous conversation together. But you know, if the we’re looking at the position of the shoulder, is the shoulder painful when they’re going through shoulder movements, that is potentially shoulder pain. I know that sounds like common sense. But when there’s that differentiating factor, like, oh, I move my shoulder, I’m okay. But at rest, I feel shoulder pain. That’s another thing that makes us think, Hmm, could this be a neck, right. And then another thing that is interesting is, if the person is doing a few movements overhead, and they’re fine, but when they report doing sustained movements overhead, and then they start to experience a shoulder pain that could be a shoulder could be a neck, but a lot of times in my experience, sustained overhead movements.
Unknown Speaker 11:37
You mentioned earlier, some of that scapular thoracic or the shoulder, the muscles that travel from the neck to the shoulder, when they’re active quite a bit, they add a lot of compressive load to the spine, just because they crossed the segments of the spine. So looking at talking about like the upper traps, for example, if I’m doing a lot of overhead movements in a sustained position. So like electricians, for example, or painters, for example, they’re doing a lot of hours on end, their arms are overhead, right? I’m in my mind when they’re saying that to me, I’m thinking shoulder, but then I’m also thinking back in my mind, could this be an irritable neck? Could this be some nerve tension, irritability from that sustained, repetitive movement? Right? So some things to take note of, if you are a patient with this experience, what do you write down, these are some really good bullet points to write down when you report to the clinician or to the provider that you’re seeing.
Unknown Speaker 12:36
And then
Unknown Speaker 12:38
sustained positions was one of the other categories. So if pain is irritating at night, if pain is waking you up at night, if pain is worse, first thing in the morning, we are in our system, we’re very
Unknown Speaker 12:51
keen on looking at how the neck is positioned at night, and the pillows and the mattress situation and sleep position. Right. So looking at those things are critical, and can outweigh a lot of manual therapy or quote unquote, corrective exercise fixes,
Unknown Speaker 13:09
in the in those situations.
Unknown Speaker 13:12
So yeah, I would really, really look at the categories of load position, nerve tension and sustained positions, in that, in that sense. Yeah, so I think next, we should just kind of go through this list.
Unknown Speaker 13:27
We have that is more related to cervical spine and more, which could be related to shoulder.
Unknown Speaker 13:35
And we’ll keep summarizing for our audience so that we give them the bullet points to take home. So you take it away, but Alright, so for for anything that comes from the cervical spine, as Mina said, and for a lot of you guys out there that are active.
Unknown Speaker 13:53
Could we have a a bag that has both, you know, cervical and shoulder findings? Yes, absolutely. Again, depending on how mobile you are through different segments, the demands of what you’re doing or your sport you’re partaking in. So we can’t ever rule one out and just say it’s the other but for the most part is miss that. So what we see is, you know, if you can work out for a two hour period and you don’t feel pain and you feel better, but then you sit at your computer for eight hours and then by the end of your workday, you’re feeling shoulder pain that lasts you know up until you go to bed. That is something that’s load is a load sensitivity that could be irritating your symptoms. Another thing we see more with the neck pain, besides like you mentioned as being someone that’s been overhead all day, so we’ll see that sometimes have I got this really bad shoulder pain, the day after painting, you know, I was fine all day painting and then I woke up and my arm was dead. I couldn’t move my arm red, tingling and numbness down my arm. That’s another one where
Unknown Speaker 15:00
Are we just, you know, we did too much, and we get this bout of an inflammatory process. And
Unknown Speaker 15:08
that can cause some issues to the nerve of the nerve root and causes some some pain down our arm. And that could cause lack of strength too. And sometimes it’s very temporary, and it could last a couple of days and get better, sometimes it could be longer.
Unknown Speaker 15:20
The other thing we see a lot, or I see a lot is
Unknown Speaker 15:24
this, these people you guys will come in, it’s like, the pain doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t correlate with anything I’m doing, I could do all these different workouts and nothing really seems to bother it. You can’t locate the pain, you’re like, you’ll be in my office, like, it’s almost like you guys have fleas. And you’re like chasing yourself around trying to scratch your back and point out that pain is very vague. It’s very vague. And the thing with that too, is those symptoms might change, the pain might be moving around one day, it might be you know, in your upper trap, the other you know, in the next day, it might be in the front of your shoulder or the back of your shoulder. And it’s just really hard to locate.
Unknown Speaker 16:05
One point right there, but when when it’s not clear in those situations, that’s another time where I really urge people to take notes, and journal. What it is that they’re doing day to day, at a very basic basic level, like what exercises did you do if you’re not following a strict program? You know, what activities were you doing? And so that you can start to actually, when you look back at the last three or four days, rather than just being like, I have no idea, you can start to gather and see a pattern potentially, like, Oh, when I go to yoga on Wednesdays, I usually I’m in pain on Thursday and Fridays. Okay, what positions are you doing in this yoga class? On Wednesdays, let’s break that down. Let’s look at what you’re doing. Let’s look at the yoga flow. For example, let’s see what positions are putting because it might not be the position it may might it might be the position and the sustained
Unknown Speaker 17:04
position itself, right. So it’s like if you’re in and out of that position for a second fine, but some yoga instructors make people hold positions for long periods of time. And that could be the issue there. So like, knowing those categories, and knowing how they interplay together can really help us become better detectives. So yeah, good point. Yeah.
Unknown Speaker 17:25
And I find a lot of times to with that is the people that have shoulder pain, that is really neck pain. A lot of times they’ll feel better working out if they’re not doing anything like crazy overhead. They’re doing like a nice backward or whatever, they’ll move around. It’s the days they’re not working out where they’re sitting at their computer and working a long day, that they might find their pain is worse. Yeah, they say, Well, I didn’t do anything, quote unquote, right. Yeah, that that could be the problem. Yeah, that’s the same. It’s the sustained posture. And so that’s the other thing is looking at, and this is where people don’t take enough notes. And every time I ask them, this question that I’ll get back to you on that is, is, when is it best, and when is it worse? What is the pattern of it, so a lot of times, with, with something that’s an irritant of the spine,
Unknown Speaker 18:15
we could notice that, you know, maybe you wake up stiff, and maybe we don’t have our pillow in the best position. And we have been irritated all night. And typically, that might loosen up a little bit. But then three, four o’clock, you’ve been sitting in your chair all day. And then from three o’clock to when you go to bed, you have this nagging pain that that doesn’t go away, and you don’t know what you did
Unknown Speaker 18:40
have and having a sedentary job in itself can be something that’s we’ll have this onset of,
Unknown Speaker 18:47
you know, we don’t see any increase in activity, you know, your workout hasn’t changed. None of this makes sense. And so a lot of times, and we saw this a lot with COVID, too, is nothing changed about anyone’s workout schedule for some people did, but for many, you know, nothing changed about their activity outside of work. But then we all went home and went to this horrible, you know, everyone’s sitting at the kitchen table or the kitchen counter or on the couch. And all of a sudden that’s you I saw a huge spike in cervical cases there because
Unknown Speaker 19:22
no one had the right ergonomic setup and they were spending
Unknown Speaker 19:27
so much time in front of electronics and at their computer that it just that is the thing that people didn’t see or didn’t put together.
Unknown Speaker 19:39
Let me just double let me just double click on that term you used, right ergonomic setup for our for our listeners.
Unknown Speaker 19:47
We are now classifying right, ergonomic setup as you have variable ergonomic positions, because there’s a lot of people out there these days that are kind of trapped in this dichotomy.
Unknown Speaker 20:00
To me of right versus wrong ergonomics. And the evidence is very clear at this point that it’s more about the variability than it is about the correct posture. So that’s another piece which kind of falls back to the fourth category of the categories we gave, which is sustained posture, if you can try to really break up and find as many productive postures as possible, that can really help take a lot of the issues that we’re seeing off the table. So I just wanted to add that piece in terms of right ergonomics because a lot of people get really a lot of anxiety about those my ergonomics, right or not. And it’s like, if you have variable productive postures, you’re right. Yeah. Right. Yeah, it’s the right, the right ergonomic setup for you. And a lot of times, I’ve seen people that are hyperactive about having the right ergonomic setup, the right ergonomic setup. And it’s almost like they’re trying too hard to be in a certain posture. And maybe that posture isn’t for them. And that’s actually what sensitizing them, a lot of people will think they need to sit upright with their, you know, shoulders back in their head up tall. And sometimes, sometimes we need to get out of that posture, because we’ve just spent too much time and the body needs to do something else. And just mix it up. Absolutely.
Unknown Speaker 21:19
The next one we have here is not specific to any movement. So again, just working out, you know, no specific movement seems to irritate it, you know, if you can work out, and you don’t feel pain,
Unknown Speaker 21:34
I’ve been told and what one of my other mentors says is, you know, if you’re not feeling pain within two hours after your workout, it’s likely not your workout that’s causing your pain, it’s probably something else. Is it the way you’re recovering? You know, are you going home and I had one patient a while ago that had some neck pain going on. And then we found out that he worked every night on his computer monitor, after he worked out with his head turned 45 degrees to the left.
Unknown Speaker 21:59
And we put it back to the center, and magically, his pain started to get better.
Unknown Speaker 22:04
Another one here is some things we’ll find too. And you can try to do this yourself as well. But does your pain or mobility get better when you go from a seated position or standing position to lying on your back that takes some load off of the spine? So do you feel like you know, you get a pinching sensation when you’re trying to bring your arm overhead versus if you lay flat on your back, there’s no tension on there, does your shoulder pain improve? That’s an indicator that maybe there is something to do with the cervical spine.
Unknown Speaker 22:36
And
Unknown Speaker 22:39
if we’re testing a shoulder, and people can do this themselves, too, is if you put your shoulder in a certain position, whether it be out in front of you, you turn it whatever. And
Unknown Speaker 22:52
even if you hold your arm out in front of you, where you sometimes notice some pain, like if you’re doing front shoulder raises or something. And if you can recreate or provoke that pain even worse by typically bending your head backwards and looking towards the ceiling, or flexing your head down or to the side. There might be some type of cervical involvement there too. So it’s just another way for you to self kind of diagnose and see. Is there something going on there.
Unknown Speaker 23:18
And as we said, with ergonomics, the biggest things I tend to see in people that have some type of cervical pain is they’re working at a desk setup where they don’t have an option to rest their head back on their chair at all. And they likely don’t have armrests. And if they do have armrests the armrests don’t fit them. So they’re constantly using their traps and their cervical erectors to hold their head and their arms up all day. When wouldn’t it be nice if we just let those things relax a little bit so that the body knows that it can go into a state of relaxation?
Unknown Speaker 23:56
Yeah, that goes back to our point of variability Right? Like, can you relax back on a supportive backrest neck rest armrests? Can you recline back and be productive? Can you come forward and be productive? Can you can you alleviate your shoulder pain when sitting at your desk when you rest your arms on the armrest or when you completely scooch all the way back will have your whole back contacting the backrest and recline. If you say that if you stay there for a couple of minutes and then you feel like your shoulder pain is getting a little bit better. Now we’re starting to smell the neck coming into play a little bit. Right. So yeah, those are all very, very, very valid points and I think really helpful things to make note if people are sitting there journaling, what is their triggers? What makes it better what makes it worse? Yeah, anything else you have to add there for the spine?
Unknown Speaker 24:52
Yeah, the comment that you made earlier about if you don’t feel pain two hours after your workout
Unknown Speaker 25:00
I don’t know that I completely agree with that, because I’ve had some, some interesting like cervical radiculopathy, these that presented with that very thing. And at first, the first few years out of school, that was my my logic, but when do it when getting better at screening and assessing this stuff.
Unknown Speaker 25:23
And I had people journal what they did for workouts, we actually started to pick out a few things within their workouts. And when we remove those things, or created variations of those things, they, they improved, so I wouldn’t take that comment for face value. I would maybe, in general, it makes sense. But there’s like, I would say 25 to 30% of people where they might have more delayed onset of irritability later in the day, if it’s a, I’m not talking about like a really acute, irritated neck, I’m talking about more of those very vague sub acute
Unknown Speaker 26:05
issues, right. So it’s just something to keep in the back of your mind, if you’re getting pain towards the end of the day, it’s, I would, I would audit the entire rest of your day, the the dire previous part of the day and the day before, which really comes back down to journaling and making sure you’re making note of these things rather than just taking that as face value. Because I have seen some cases where that wasn’t the case. And when we really double clicked into that, we were able to close the case, if you will, what, what types of things were they doing that were irritating them, remember?
Unknown Speaker 26:44
Um, so I’m talking about the, I’m talking about some martial artists, and I’m talking about some people who are really into weightlifting. So a lot of a lot of bag work, a lot of, you know, punching, striking, blocking, a lot of overhead lifts, a lot of pull ups, push ups, any repetitive
Unknown Speaker 27:06
upper body, whether it’s horizontal push pull, or vertical push pull movements,
Unknown Speaker 27:11
and really looking into the the loads and volumes that they’re doing. And just like kind of stepping into my strength coach shoes and look and asking him about the set rep schemes, and then kind of following that pattern through along with the orthopedic screens and testing and the subjective and then really starting to think figured out, they weren’t red flags, there were yellow flags. And when we kept following those yellow flags, we started seeing, like,
Unknown Speaker 27:33
the days that you’re actually having pain, like later in the day, and even into the next day, we go back and we look at the previous workout and we audit the program, we find some we found some of these exercises that were it wasn’t necessarily the exercise itself, it was more the volumes and loads that we had to adjust. That really helped us kind of take their case to the to the next level in terms of just
Unknown Speaker 27:57
recovery, if you will. Yeah, you have done a very good job of explaining this to me.
Unknown Speaker 28:05
Can you just explain for people? Why some of the why behind? Why would that occur? Like, why can I do these things during a workout? And I’m, I’m fine. But why is it the next day? What is happening there? Hmm, that’s a really good question.
Unknown Speaker 28:23
It’s
Unknown Speaker 28:27
I was gonna
Unknown Speaker 28:29
go ahead, are you gonna go through like action potential thresholds here, I’m not going to use those terms, I’m going to try to use analogies to maybe help people understand it a little bit better.
Unknown Speaker 28:39
Thinking of it as a bucket of water, right? You can keep filling the bucket of water and it doesn’t overflow. But eventually it reaches a point where it water starts overflowing the bucket, right? So these exercises that I was just talking about that seem to be the triggers.
Unknown Speaker 29:00
The amount of volume and low that they were using, were just we’re just starting to overflow the bucket. And they were they were so sensitive that eventually those
Unknown Speaker 29:16
those like non provoking inputs, they built on each other to the point where now they are a input that’s very sensitive and causing pain. Right. So it’s, and that’s that’s the tricky part about these cases where you it’s not a clear cut picture, right? It’s like there’s such a delayed onset, and it’s the inputs build on one another and in the technical term is called summation. There, there are these sub threshold inputs, they build on each other, and then you add that to a ergonomic setup that doesn’t have enough variability. You add that to a person who is doesn’t really know how to unload
Unknown Speaker 30:00
their spine throughout their day, or just is very stressed out all the time, right. And all of these stress inputs build on one another. And then by the end of the day, they have this overflowing effect that they can’t control. Right. And so that’s the way I like to look at it. It’s like a bucket overflowing. And if you don’t know how to empty the bucket throughout the day, and you just keep adding water, adding water, adding water, eventually you’re gonna have a mess to clean up.
Unknown Speaker 30:26
It’s
Unknown Speaker 30:28
so we could go, we could we could go down the action potential threshold thing, but I don’t know if our listeners would appreciate that. No, we’ll save that for your podcast.
Unknown Speaker 30:37
The other thing, and you kind of said this up, too, it’s almost like, when mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy if mom’s been at work all day, and her boss is yelling at her and her co worker says something that annoys her. And then she gets a text from someone. And then you know, you remember being a kid and you like, ask what’s for dinner, and she just unloads on you. She didn’t unload enough during the day.
Unknown Speaker 31:00
I haven’t read this book. But this, the person who described this book, to me explains this really well. It’s called the body keeps score.
Unknown Speaker 31:10
And, you know, when you just keep adding stress on top of stress on top of stress, and you don’t add recovery of some sort, eventually, the body or the nervous system flips you the bird and says enough is enough, right? And so it’s all the inputs previously, were no big deal. But after they accumulate, eventually the nervous system is going to talk to you. And sometimes it’s just going to give you a nudge, and sometimes it’s going to scream.
Unknown Speaker 31:37
Yeah.
Unknown Speaker 31:39
Alright, so I think that about sums up what we have for cervical and neck related pain and meds, let’s have you talk a little bit about what shoulder pain truly would be that we can use to solidify our evidence that maybe we don’t have anything going on with the neck.
Unknown Speaker 32:01
Yeah, so this is where things make a little bit more sense. I would say, you know, the person comes in like, man, every time I take my shirt off, it hurts. Every time I’m in the shower, I’m washing my hair, it hurts, I can’t reach behind my back, it hurts. I’m sitting in my car, trying to put on a seatbelt, trying to take my arm across my body, it hurts, I can’t reach in the back seat, it hurts, right? These activities that either make us cross midline, go behind my back, reach overhead. And it’s very,
Unknown Speaker 32:30
it’s very classic, right is every time I do this, it hurts versus that vague pattern that we described earlier. So I think shoulder pain is a lot more true shoulder pains a lot more of like what we learned in school and a lot more of like, what people will experience every time they go to do something like I just described, they’ll cringe a little bit, you know, they’ll feel a pinch, they’ll feel they’ll feel a stab sometimes it’ll it’ll kind of shoot down into their bicep into their, into their upper arm. Right?
Unknown Speaker 33:01
Yeah, it’s just a,
Unknown Speaker 33:03
it’s just a classic. When I move my shoulder, it hurts. And when I just when I and when I’m not moving my shoulder, it’s fine.
Unknown Speaker 33:10
You know, it’s, it’s pretty, it’s pretty straightforward in that regard. And so when you hear that in the subjective history, it’s just like, Okay, I’m thinking, I’m thinking shoulder, but most of the time, we’re still we’re still screening the neck, we’re still looking at neck movements, right. But the subjective history will sometimes really tell a very clear picture. And it’s important for our listeners to understand that if you’re dealing with a good clinician, they’re not jumping to conclusions too soon, right. It’s like, I have my suspicions when I’m listening to the patient’s story. And I have my hypotheses going into my objective examination and my physical examination.
Unknown Speaker 33:51
But I’m never jumping too soon into off, it’s definitely this right as one of the biggest things that I’ve learned from my residencies and my mentor ships is like, it’s your, you have a hypothesis. Okay, now, let’s test. Let’s see if the testing in the in the history makes sense. Okay, let’s intervene, Let’s retest. And then let’s continue to refine our thought process versus getting too down in the weeds of like, oh, this is it and let’s, let’s just keep going with this route.
Unknown Speaker 34:23
Yeah, absolutely. And I think the other piece too, is just a lot of times if it is truly a shoulder at least with the population I see typically,
Unknown Speaker 34:36
it could be I was doing a snatch or I was bench pressing and I felt a pop or I felt like something was gonna rip. It’s more acute, like you’ll, it’ll be more in the moment of knowing something happened.
Unknown Speaker 34:54
That you will feel some type of local pain, you know, and it will be local. You’ll be
Unknown Speaker 35:00
be able to point it out. It’s not going to travel down your arm typically or radiate or give us zinging. numbness, tingling, anything like that. And typically, if it’s really bad, it might this Yeah. Like, then like in some serious situations, but again, if you’re feeling someone, when something like really goes when you’re bench pressing or something like that, and we’re dealing with something that’s a potential structural issue, sometimes sometimes that can happen. But people, people will know if that’s the case, because they won’t be able to lift their arm and pain shooting down the arm. Yes, that’s different situation. Yeah, like if you truly tear a muscle and you have bruising, and the muscle belly rolls up, and you have a bunch of swelling. Yeah, you could feel nerve pain.
Unknown Speaker 35:44
But that’s the maybe 20 to 30% of injuries that at least I see. This isn’t even medical advice, because it took us 45 minutes to set up a microphone. So we don’t know what we’re talking about. Well, luckily, luckily, mics are not medicine. Thank God. Yeah.
Unknown Speaker 36:03
So again, these are just things to keep in mind. This doesn’t mean exactly what we’re saying is exactly what you’re going to be dealing with. And you shouldn’t use this to self diagnose yourself, either. But it can give yourself a better idea of, maybe it’s not your shoulder, you should keep going after maybe it’s some thoracic mobility, maybe there’s some stabilization exercises, or just changing your posture. Looking at your pillow, looking at your workstation. Seeing starting to note like Mitch said, the differences of another one I am thinking of now to is, do you feel better on the weekends, a lot of people you know, walking to can typically help any type of cervical or lumbar pain. So if you’re up and moving in, you know, you’re not stuck at your desk all weekends, or you’re not just looking at your electronics all weekend, and you’re doing errands, driving around whatever, and you don’t have as much pain on the weekends. That’s another insight that maybe there’s a pattern to this that has to do with the spine or doesn’t have to do with the spine. So really getting into, like we said, taking a look at your desk setup. Have you tried working somewhere else? Does it feel better when you’re working in a certain place than another place? Have you tried a different pillow or a different pillow setup? Have you slept on a different bed?
Unknown Speaker 37:24
Other things people should could could or should consider
Unknown Speaker 37:29
all things to write down in a journal to really help
Unknown Speaker 37:34
with pattern recognition for for when you go see a provider? For sure. Kind of just kind of going all the way back to what we said in the beginning? How do you start making sense of these things? How do you know what to write down? How do you know what, what to even say when you go see a provider? Because sometimes it can be so overwhelming when you go see someone in a healthcare setting. Right?
Unknown Speaker 37:57
Yeah, and it will definitely help them and and typically, even though it might not make sense to you, as someone that just straining and maybe you’ve done some research online, there’s typically some pattern or trend of something that’s going to aggravate it. And unless and it’s a severe case, typically there’ll be some type of position or posture, or maybe even exercise or movement that might feel at least, maybe not better, but less bad.
Unknown Speaker 38:27
Right? Yes. Yes. So.
Unknown Speaker 38:31
So that’s really that. If you guys have any more questions, feel free to reach out. You can find me at barbell dot therapy on Instagram, barbell therapy performance.com, or at ARCHITEC fitness.
Unknown Speaker 38:46
Our Instagram is at a RKIT eect fitness and meze where can people find you?
Unknown Speaker 38:55
So our Instagram handle is neuro PDX. That’s neuro any you are Oh PDX PE D ICs. And you can email me at remez at neuro pdx pt.com. And I respond to all my email. So very responsive there. So any questions or concerns about anything? Shoot me shoot me an email. Yeah. And for those of you that are still listening here, mez as a brilliant teacher, and he’s taught me most of what I know to this point now and has made me this really good detective at figuring out the subjective and how to assess people. And he has a really cool mentorship program as well where he teaches clinicians how to be better at what they do, how to better assess how to ask better questions, communicate, and he really helped me become, you know, way better at really finding what I need to ask him the right questions and just it’s made my practice so much more successful. So thank you for that meze. And appreciate that. Any PTS out there looking to get better and put all these systems together.
Unknown Speaker 40:00
and make sense of everything, especially these complex cases, please reach out to us because he’s your man for that. So thank you, Brett. Appreciate that. Welcome. So,
Unknown Speaker 40:11
yeah, again, we’ll have a couple more episodes. And is there anything you’d want to talk about next time?
Unknown Speaker 40:18
Anything we’d like to talk about next time? Why don’t we open it up to our listeners and see what what they want to learn more about in terms of maybe doing another thing like this for another part of the body?
Unknown Speaker 40:30
help them become
Unknown Speaker 40:33
detectives, you know how to how to be investigators have their own triggers and alleviating factors, I think that that can be really helpful because the better informed they are coming into a subjective history, the better off a provider can help them. Figure out the root cause. So yeah, let’s open up to the listeners. And let’s see what they what they want to hear from us. Yeah, so I’ll put out a poll and you guys can let me know. And for any clinicians listening, me and Matt will probably do a clinical version of this on his podcast. And we can nerd out a little bit more because that’s what we’d like to do. Give us just give us an hour to set up the microphone. For real.
Unknown Speaker 41:13
Well, thank you all for listening, and stay tuned for our next episodes coming up shortly. Thanks.
