What to expect after a shoulder joint injection:
Some shoulder pain may not respond to conservative treatments alone and in this case may benefit from an injection. This usually is carried out to allow the sensitive tissues in the joint that are causing pain to settle down. In turn this reduction in pain allows a ‘treatment window’ where your physiotherapist can guide you on how to get your shoulder moving freely again.
What should i do after getting my injection?
Once you’ve had your injection to help reduce the pain to manageable levels or, even better again, completely, you then attend one of our shoulder physiotherapists to get you started with corrective exercises.
What are all these exercise about and why should I do them if the pain is gone?
Good question. You see pain does funny things to muscles and how they function. Typically pain can cause a muscle to tighten, stop working correctly or weaken them. Any combination of these can have knock on effects to the rest of the shoulder, the shoulder blade (scapula) and even the neck and back resulting in what people call compensatory movements.
These new movements are learned by your body to avoid or deal with the pain in some way, any way that allowed you to get by. The thing is that these compensatory movements are quite often unhelpful and despite the fact that you are now in less pain or free from pain you will still have to get your shoulder checked out to help correct the faulty patterns.
You will be advised to do the most effective exercises particular to your shoulder and will also receive a exercise programme to be completed a few times per week or daily as recommended by our physiotherapists depending on the nature of your shoulder problem.
Sometime people may require a second injection or an X-ray or Ultrasound guided injection to accurately target the affected tissues.
Lastly one must be aware that some shoulder issue do not respond to injection therapy and may need other interventions, again these will depend on several factors and you will already have discussed these with your physio and possibly your shoulder specialist at this stage.
