Can I Heal My Torn Rotator Cuff, Science Shows Positive Results Without Surgery, MUST See!

bob and brad the two most famous physical therapists on the internet hello friends I'm bob schrupp physical therapist brad heineck physical therapist we are the most famous physical therapist on the internet in our opinion of course bob can I

heal

my

rotator

cuff

tear? We mean you, oh I thought you were asking me, so let's go through the answers for this, but by the way, if you're new to our channel, please take a second to subscribe. We offer videos on how to stay

heal

thy. painless and we go up every day also go to bob and brad.com because we are always giving away something what we are giving away I don't know go to bob and brad.com go to the giveaways section because it's a future video, it's a future video, right yes you will also find it on facebook if you enter it it will be pinned to the top of the contest page go to instagram twitter or tick tock if you want a 60 second version of bob and brad one day pain in the right

rotator

cuff

shoulder a lot of very common people very common and this question can be do I need

surgery

or can it be cured with exercises and some treatment so we did some research and found out the answer uh first of all we want to clear this up though if your rotator cuff is injured the vast majority of the time it's a tendon, the supraspinatus tendon, the vast majority of surgeries are performed on that and we'll show you that first before.

We show you how to get to the answer and at the end, like Bob said, we'll show you some exercises. I didn't even say that, but yeah, at the end we'll show you some exercises that you'll want. wait until the end because in case you have a

torn

rotator cuff we're going to show you ways that can help you correct things that we actually use with our patients so here we look at the shoulder where they got the humerus and the scapula or the shoulder blade uh and the tendon of the supraspinatus muscle that is affected and causes all the problem and we have it pink right here, we have a little piece of pink kinesio tape on top of it and the abdominal muscle is actually back up here there, its job is to help place the ball of the humerus in the right place for it to function properly, if it doesn't function properly all sorts of problems can go wrong and that's where it all comes down to and it can certainly result in impingement. where, oh yeah, something gets pinched, I'll go ahead and put Brad down, go ahead and bring, oh yeah, here we go, so it'll eventually wear it down, yeah, and eventually it'll cause a tear, that's why you shouldn't ignore the impact, exactly what you can have. and uh, like if you fell and you could, you could get hurt that way too, but a lot of times they come from overuse, overuse, exactly sam, out of the way, we have better things to do with you, okay, so you got some studies , brad.

Yeah, let's sit down, Bob, let's talk about this, I'm going to get serious, uh, so these are the studies that I've found that we're looking at, do you want us to tip this one or two? okay, we got it, it's not blurry, okay, journal of orthopedic

science

in 2013. This was a literature review, so they went through numerous studies that I always think of the big studies, I mean, it's good to do that because it doesn't. You're looking at just one, I chose. one that they cited, but there were several others that I found there that had similar

results

, but this is exactly what one hundred and five shoulder patients had with full thickness tears in the shoulders and they were all fully diagnosed. the path through the tendons, between 44 and 80 years old, so they were not young athletic people, but people who had shoulder problems due to overuse, usually six months of physical therapy exercises and then came back between 12 years and 48 months. or 12 months, from one year to four months or four years, boy are we ready here?

One year to four years, so we're looking at a span of how this recovered from your exercises, if we look at the pain level, just the pain, how? Do they result in pain? 50 of them reported no shoulder pain, which is good, yes, so 50 percent and another 40 reported only mild pain that did not need painkillers, so 90 yes, with pretty good

results

, right , uh, now it's better than

surgery

. Could they work? use it uh and these are this was taken subjectively 75 of them stated that they had no daily limitations in other words, they couldn't, I guess these people probably weren't like drywall hangers where they were above their heads all the time, but you know that they could reach in the closet, they could function daily without problems, sure, that's pretty strong, very good, very good, let's move on to the next study done by etel in 2010, this was just a study, it was in the review, they had 396 , so it's pretty good, the popular full thickness tears once again and they had physical therapy treatment and six weeks of that, sure, six weeks later, 90 of them reported improvements, ten percent chose to have surgery, everything It went well and then they came back two years later, 84 percent of them. continued to have improvements, right, they didn't have surgery, another 10 percent liked to have surgery, so it's still pretty close between the two studies, so that's a very good sign to say that you may be getting better a little bit, you know?

The thing is, if you decide to take conservative therapy treatment and it doesn't work, surgery is always a right option and the stronger your shoulder is before surgery, the better the results will be afterwards, so you might want to talk to your doctor. doctor about it to confirm that each case is different. Yes, yes, absolutely. Now you may be saying what the exercises are. We will show you some of them. There are many, many different exercises and it depends on the therapist. you know it varies depending on the individual patient we're going to show you some of the ones that we really like and that are very successful so let's start with one that involves the bouilla stick or do you want to start? with the statue of liberty wow, what did you want to start with?

Well, I'm fine with that, but we have to get this out of the way quickly, quickly, bob, quickly, these people are waiting, go, run, bob, work like an old man. let's get this out I wanted to get this out of the way here we go so here we go now this one I actually started it I don't know if I invented it but you didn't invent it but it came from someone else uh an An orthopedic surgeon has a book written on rotator cuff treatment and how to hang hangers straight. Dr. Kirsch, yes, yes, he's actually from Wisconsin, yes, he lived 30 or 30 miles from my hometown, where he lives now, but he has a whole book written about him.

We'll talk about this a little bit later, so this is based on that treatment, if you take a pull or a stick, uh, or a broomstick, it would even work, a broomstick would work. I've had people use this is the booyah stick, they really work. Well, because they are easy to grab and now you raise your arm. The arm cannot be very sore. This has to be where you can reach it. It may be a little painful, but not that bad. Well, you can reach for it to start. as far as you can and then start doing a little bit forward so you can start doing this.

This is not yes, the real hanging is that you can do it in the range of motion of the floor and then you know if you create a sharp pain with this. too soon, it's not ready for you, yes you need to heal a little more, but as you rise or can get to a place where you can go higher with less pain, but it's not functional yet, this will create that gap that will affect that. The tendon is no longer affected and you simply lean forward but do not let your hands slide down. Keep your hand gripped and that booyah stick really works well.

That's why I have it glued to the chair so it doesn't slide. You have to have a little rubber cap there or something on the surface, lean forward and stretch and what I'm doing is distracting that and I think again it should be painless and you'll hold it for five to ten seconds. and go and the thing is you want to do this all day. I would like to see you doing this six to eight times a day. I'm sure you know that. And it only takes a few minutes, so it's something you can certainly include. there and you can work your way up, you know, you start lower because maybe your arm only goes so far to the right and I mean, we've had people with arthritis who have done this well and they started very low and when they get to it, come back next time. be very proud because you are very high, you are ascending, so with good judgment don't go too fast again, it shouldn't create a sharp pain or hurt you, that means you overdid it, you have to take it. take a break for a few days, sure, the next thing I'm going to show you is a foundation that is based on the same principle as dr. kirsch about hanging, now you can hang from a pull up bar, brad, and I wanted to find a way that you could hang it at home in a way that isn't as intrusive, so we have the wall anchors, so we sell a kit that in You actually have two wall anchors and two handles and the handles to secure the anchors to a stud, right?

I have to place them correctly and then we have instructions on that right and these hang there. I love them because not only do they work my shoulders but they also decompress my back and help with your posture yeah so what I do is I actually use take this take a break like every 20 minutes or so when I'm working on the computer sure and I just hang now I'm tall but I'm still putting a lot of pressure on my shoulder yeah and I'm actually Kidding, I lift my feet all the way up when I do that I just spread my legs out in front of me yeah and I relax them in the floor like this, yeah, yeah, you can do it that way, I prefer that way, sure, whatever works well.

I actually make some of these too, Brad. In fact, I retract my shoulders a little. I'm sure I'm doing this just to work on my shoulder, uh, retraction, which is good for the rotator cuff. Yes, yes, now again, you can't if you have I have a pull-up bar at home. You can use it and it works. You can hang it on a branch. You can hang it on anything that works. If you have some beams, you can. We have the book. Not a very expensive Dr. Cush book damn right, sorry, again, what's so good about this?

I have this right next to my office and I could just walk out and do it. You know, if it's so convenient, you'll do a lot better and it'll give you You have more possibilities for you, I wanted to show you these, yeah, now some other more traditional exercises that, at least for Bob and me, before we knew about these, others newer ones, is that you need a resistance band of some kind. If you're going to use the wall anchor a lot of times, you're going to see people on videos or therapists telling you to wrap it around a doorknob, which is fine, yeah, yeah, this works great because you can easily take them off and we.

We're going to start with the scapular retraction bob, you want to show the main emphasis, so what we're doing here is strengthening the muscles that hold the shoulder blade in place, which is really key because the shoulder blade has to be in place. for the shoulder to function properly, if it's not in place it's going to have exactly that impingement, so this is going to make sure that it doesn't make things worse because you might have a partial tear, you might have a full tear, but you could still tear it to the point where it actually retracts, the muscle retracts and releases the bone, yes that is a problem then surgery will probably be right around the corner for you, you can also show external rotation, yes this is very This is kind of like the usual exercise or rotator cuff and impingement problems where you keep your elbow at your side, you move your arm now, this is something you wouldn't do, probably right away, no, yeah, this is something what do you know.

You have to be able to do it well without pain and you have to be able to do it. uh, being able to do it, I mean, good. If you are too weak to do it, it is too early and that depends on the ban. I have a red band, you can start with a yellow band, uh, reps of these, you'll do 10 to 15 of these and then you'll go ahead and do 10 to 15 of these, and that might be enough for the first time after one or two weeks. Do two sets of ten and I have my patients work up to three sets of ten as they get stronger, maybe over a few weeks.

Yes, these are small muscles, so we start with a little resistance and you usually don't end up hitting that. a lot of resistance on these because again they are small muscles and we have videos on more exercises to strengthen the rotator cuff just google Bob and Brad but gosh we have videos on everything just a couple thousand just a couple thousand okay take care of yourself thank you for seeing you