Shoulder Pain

Cole Gibbens

Shoulders are brilliant… until they’re not. When they go wrong, they don’t just whisper about it-they make sure you know. Suddenly you can’t reach overhead, sleep comfortably, or even grab something out of the back seat without questioning your life choices.

The thing with shoulders is they’re complicated. It’s the most mobile joint in the body, which is great for performance, but it also means there’s a lot that has to work together properly. You’ve got the shoulder joint itself, the shoulder blade, the collarbone, the upper back-if one part isn’t pulling its weight, something else ends up picking up the slack.

From an osteopathic perspective, shoulder pain is rarely just a “shoulder problem.” I’ll always be looking at how the shoulder blade moves, what the upper back is doing, how the neck is contributing, and even how your ribcage is behaving. If your thoracic spine is stiff, your shoulder has to work harder. If your shoulder blade isn’t moving well, the joint gets overloaded. It’s all connected.

Treatment-wise, this is where I enjoy the structural side of things. Getting joints moving again, freeing up the upper back, working through tight muscles, and-when appropriate-using more direct techniques like HVTs to give things a reset. It’s about creating space for the shoulder to actually do its job properly again.

But here’s the key: you can’t just treat it and hope for the best. Shoulders love stability as much as they love movement. So once things are moving better, we build strength and control to keep it that way. Otherwise, you’re just waiting for round two.

Shoulder injuries can be stubborn, but they’re rarely random. There’s usually a reason it’s happened-and if you address that properly, you’re not just getting out of pain, you’re building a shoulder that can actually handle what you ask of it.