Rotator Cuff Injury Health Video

Common football and baseball pitcher's injury. The rotator cuff is a band of four muscles which support the shoulder joint. Learn about the cause and treatment of a rotator cuff injury in this medical treatment video.

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Known as rotor cup tear
Happens when land on outstretched arm
Pain when raising arms
Surgery required
Shoulder strength & flexibility may prevent

About this Author

Prior to joining Memorial Hermann, Dr. Adickes completed his sports medicine fellowship under the tutelage of Dr. Richard Steadman of the Steadman Hawkins Clinic in Vail, Colo. Dr. Adickes completed his residency in orthopedic surgery at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. In 2000, he earned his medical degree from Harvard Medical School in Boston, Mass.Dr. Adickes' career in medicine follows a remarkable decade-long career in the National Football League, during which he was a member of the 1991 Super Bowl Championship Washington Redskins Team. An alumnus of Baylor University, Dr. Adickes was inducted into the Baylor Sports Hall of Fame in 1998. Dr. Adickes serves as team physician for the Houston Rockets, U.S. Ski Team, Houston Livestock Show & Rodeo and St. Thomas University.

DR. MARK ADDICKES: Hi, I would be telling you a little bit about rotator cuff injuries. You hear a lot about people injuring their rotor cuff which is the same thing as the rotator cuff. And the shoulder is a ball and socket joint, and it works very much like a seal with a ball on its nose. The seal is your shoulder blade and the ball is the head of your humerus. And the rotator cuff, the purpose of that muscle is to hold the ball into the socket. There are actually four rotator cuff muscles and very often these are injured when you land on your outstretched arm and that takes your rotator cuff and it pinches it between the ball and the bony roof of the shoulder called the acromion. And then when the rotator cuff is torn, you have a lot of pain, particularly with doing overhead activities, and you find it very difficult to raise your arm. Here, we have an MRI that shows the rotator cuff muscle coming out and attaching to the ball of the humerus, and that's what allows you to raise your arm. It gives you the strength to move your arm out and back in, and a very common injury. We see it in cycling. We see it in all contact sports as well as in skiers. And when it's badly injured, when it's torn completely as it is in this MRI, what you need to do is you need to have surgery to have that fixed or else the muscle atrophies and goes away and you lose the strength and the ability to raise your arm. In order to prevent this kind of injury, you have to do a couple of different things. One, you want to have some decent shoulder strength; but secondly, you need to have flexibility, and I think that that's the one thing that a lot of people neglect. And so you want to work on your upper body flexibility by working your arm across and stretching it out but also by stretching it back. And there are also ways in the weight room to work your rotator cuff. And in most gyms nowadays, there are machines that will allow you to strengthen your rotator cuff muscles and that's important as well. So hopefully, everyone can avoid these types of injuries in the future by working on a little bit of flexibility and strengthening, and you won't need to come see your orthopedic surgeon and have a surgery performed.