Esben had a baby some months ago and, if you are parents yourself, you might have noticed that it is very often that we use one arm to carry the baby and the other one to do the rest.
We also find this situation on people working 8 hours a day with computer (the mouse syndrom) or manual workers (drilling, painting...)
As we overuse more a side than another, we might tense up muscle groups unevenly and we quickly feel the result: pain or discomfort.
As well, this tension brings our skeletal system out of balance and discs, ligaments, articulations starts suffering.
On this first photo, we can clearly see that the left shoulder has moved anteriorly because of the over activation of the anterior left shoulder and neck muscles.
This shoulder "lesion" will pull on the left scapula (shoulder blade) giving some potential middle back pains (pull of the rhomboid muscles, trapeze, ribs and thoracic vertebras)
and with some descriptions...
Despite Esben comes for a left shoulder pain, it is going to be very important to assess and treat him globally (cervico-thoracic and scapulo-humeral regions).
During this first session we did some corrections on the thoracic and cervico-thoracic spine, the left shoulder blade and scapulo-thoracic muscles but also, we corrected the anterior position of the humerus by manipulations and released the biceps, pectoral major left and cervical muscles.
After 45 minutes of treatment, we got a very good reduction of the left shoulder's anteriority:
Osteopathy, with its manipulations but also facial (connective tissues) and muscles releases technics, can modify the body structure very rapidly. But it would be lying to say that this will hold without a few exercises and advises to the patients.
We all have habits and no one has a morphology which is 100% symmetric so the body will tend to go back into the lesions (in this case: the left shoulder moving anteriorly).
It is therefore important that the osteopath advises the patient about how to keep the corrections aligned as long as possible.
The shoulder (left or right) moving anteriorly is something that we see very often as osteopath. Indeed, every one has a favorite side which will be more used than the other one. This will induce asymmetry within the thorax region which can cause, in the long term, pain or discomfort in different places.
Depending of the severity of the symptoms, I usually offer my patients some follow up treatments (every 1 to 3 months), to keep the system balanced so it can recover from pain.
Feel free to submit me your questions if you have some... :)
And thanks for reading!
Have a nice week.