A broken collarbone is a traumatic injury. Learn how to diagnose and treat a broken collarbone in this medical video.
Look for swelling and pain
Check for gross deformity
Take x-rays of clavicle
Immobilize the bone
William Jones, M.D. is a physician for the Andrews Institute. The Andrews Institute is a world class institute for orthopedic and sports medicine. It is lead by world renowned surgeon James Andrews and is one of the most well known and highly regarded institutes for musculoskeletal research and treatments.
DR. WILLIAM JONES: A broken collar bone otherwise known as a clavicle fracture is an injury that's sustained to the clavicle. Generally, it's going to be a traumatic injury. Now, your clavicle is that front bone in your shoulder that connects your shoulder to really to the rest of your body, and particularly it connects it right here to your sternum or your thorax along there. There are three potential areas where you can break your collar bone. You can break it on the outside along here. You can break it in the middle here or you can break it more what we call proximally or the inner part of the collar bone. It's this middle section here that generally tends to get broken. This is a very common injury for kids and for athletes who do a lot of contact sports. What basically happens they either fall with their hand outstretch or they have a direct blow to that collar bone itself. Now, typically when someone when breaks their collar bone, they have a lot of swelling and pain in the area of the clavicle where they had been hit or where the injury occurs. Also, you will notice there is a gross deformity of that collar bone where the bone sometimes will be sitting up higher in relation to the other parts of the bone as well. A lot of times, they will have severe shoulder pain and they won't be able to move their shoulder. Now, when you go to your physician, they are going to get X-rays of that clavicle because they need to see what the fracture looks like. Fortunately, these fractures a lot of time will not require surgery. Treatments include immobilization either in a sling or a figure-of-eight brace. And your physician will decide which immobilization technique will be better for you. So generally, recovery time for a clavicle fracture if it's treated without a surgery is up to eight weeks. You're generally in the sling for about four to six weeks time and then you will do therapy afterwards. If it requires surgery, the recovery time will really depend on the extent of the surgery.
