How To Treat A Dislocated Shoulder Video

A dislocated shoulder results when the head of the humerus pops out of the socket joint. Learn how to treat a dislocated shoulder and stay fit in this sports medicine video.

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Muscles can tighten and prevent easy relocation
Dislocations tear connective tissue
Strengthens muscles around rotator cuff
May require surgery

About this Author

Russ Paine is a well-known physical therapist with the Roger Clemens Institute at Memorial Hospital. After getting his degree in physical therapy from Texas Women's University, he trained for several years under David Drez, MD, a renowned surgeon and sports medicine specialist. He has been a rehab consultant for the Houston Rockets, Houston Astros and NASA. He has given hundreds of presentations in his career in the US and abroad, and has published many chapters in text books and papers in peer review journals.

RUSS PAINE: Today, we are talking about how to treat a shoulder dislocation. Obviously, this is a traumatic event. It is not a gradual thing that happens. But on the X-ray here, you can see the humeral head is not in the socket. The humeral head is supposed to be here. It is in this position. Many times after a shoulder dislocation occurs, the muscles go into sort of a tetanic contraction and they go into muscle splinting, so it's hard to put the shoulder back in. Sometimes, patients have to be taken to the emergency room to have medicine so that they can relax their muscles. Once the shoulder is back in, then we work on strengthening the shoulder. Again, when you dislocate your shoulder, the ball comes completely out of the socket. Anterior dislocations are the most common. Probably 80% of the dislocations are anterior. And what it does is it tears these capsular ligamentous structures here, and they don't heal back. Once they are torn, they are torn. But the difference between a shoulder and the knee is that you can survive without some of your ligaments attached. Because the rotator cuff is so important to the stability in the shoulder joint, strengthening of the rotator cuff is very, very important. So the motion to avoid, if you have a shoulder dislocation, is this motion, up and back. Okay? This position is what is going to cause your shoulder to re-dislocate, so we avoid that motion. Coming across your chest is typically not a problem, but this up-and-back position is what we want to avoid with a shoulder dislocation. Now, the other thing we do is we work on strengthening the rotator cuff. The muscles in the back and the front of the rotator cuff are the most important because the resultant force of these forces is compression. So everything we do in strengthening for a dislocated shoulder is designed to compress the ball into the socket so when you lift your arm, it stays put. Otherwise, it will slide around and cause you to have problems. If you are a throwing athlete, overhead athlete, you may have to have surgery to fix this problem, to tighten up the capsule in the front. Because that's such a violent maneuver, rotator cuff strengthening may not be able to resolve your problem.

How to Treat a Dislocated Shoulder Video

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