alt Hacker NewsI've seen a lot of friends and family members almost immediately get offered surgery for shoulder pain. It's just often the default for people that do surgeries for a living.
I also had a pretty painful shoulder issue at one point, where the pain just wasn't subsiding for months. I tried massages and acupuncture as I didn't want to do surgery, but it wasn't helping at all. The thing that fixed it for me was just really focusing on doing pull-ups. I couldn't do them at all when I started, so I began with dead hangs and scapular pull-ups, eventually progressing to regular pull-ups, and then training with a "grease-the-groove" method once I could get a few per set. I stopped the training schedule once I was getting in around 17 pull-ups per set, and now just do 6 sets of about 7-8 pullups 3x per week spaced throughout the day. I'll also do some shoulder mobility drills [1].
Whenever I get lazy about keeping up with them inevitably discomfort will start arising again, but it goes away once I get back to strengthening.
On the flip side, when I had rotator cuff issues, the surgeon recommended months of physiotherapy before resorting to the knife. And it worked. And by weight training regularly with a focus on correct shoulder movement, the pain stays away.
It really seems like if you, as a patient, go looking for a quick fix, that’s what you’ll be offered. And if you educate yourself a bit and then go t for the best fix for you, you usually get they.