Bill: Shoulder problem advice?

[BjsAust]

Hi, hopefully Bill or someone can give some advice here.

I finally got tired of my sore shoulder. I've been working around the pain, but I realised if someone else told me they had what I've got I'd have told them to see someone so figured I should take my own advice.

About 3 years ago I went swimming (I'm not that good) and tried to go far and fast and came out of it with a sore shoulder. Since then basically any time I move my upper arm past parellel (either way) and most rotations have hurt, and it often clicks. Cuban press being the worst, with the pain as I pass my forearms past parellel with the ground. Shoulder press I can do, but it hurts getting into position, and I generally dont lower all the way down.

Anyway I went and saw a sports specialist doctor and filled him in on all that, he did a lot of movements with my arm, got me to press against his resistance in various positions/etc, and said that basically he believed (I might get some of this a bit wrong, its been a few days) the tendon of one of my rotator cuff muscles is getting caught under the bone. He recommended x-ray and ultra-sound scans to confirm, and said that if the scans showed a 'spur' then I'd need a cortisone shot to get rid of it. I have the referral here:

Referal/Requests for: Xray and US Scan of R shoulder. +/- corticosteriod injection into R subacromial space.

Clinical details: 30 year old man with longstanding R shoulder pain, likely subacromial impingment. Please inject if signs consistent with tendonitis/bursitis.


Now I have to wait a while till I can get the scans done, in the meantime I've seen mention that the injection can really just fix a symptom but not the underlying problem. Then again since it was a single event made my shoulder bad (as far as I'm aware) maybe thats all I need.

Is it possible to fix something like this with exercise/stretching instead? Is there enough info there for you to help me out? The doctor never even mentioned whether it was possible to do anything other than the injection, the way he spoke I figured that was the only option, but then since then others have said its not always neccessary and might be better not to. So I'm confused :p. To make it worse I've switched jobs and its a real pain in the ass to go back and see the same doctor to talk about it more. Bad timing on my part.