But there are many reasons you can suffer with shoulder pain and we tend to separate them into traumatic or degenerative. The traumatic reasons could be if you've injured your shoulder playing sports or it could be at work. The degenerative reasons could be that you've got an underlying weakness or the joint's a bit stiff, or you have imbalances somewhere else in the body. So it could be neck or coming from your back. Exercises and keeping active can help manage shoulder pain because it keeps your joints supple and it keeps your muscles strong. The shoulder joint, particularly, requires a lot of strength to stabilize the joint. So it's really important to stay active and lead a healthy lifestyle.

You would want to seek help for your shoulder pain if the symptoms appear to be getting worse after two weeks because this is the period where structures become inflamed and it takes two weeks for them to kind of settle back down through just self-management techniques such as taking pain relief, anti-inflammatories, putting ice on the area and just generally trying to not aggravate the shoulder. Otherwise, if the shoulder pain's been going on for six weeks, then it will be beneficial to seek help from your GP, physiotherapist, or consultant for them to give you professional advice on how to manage the pain.

At your first physiotherapy appointment, you'll have an initial assessment of an hour where we would assess the problem, give you an idea of what's going on and how we're gonna manage it. We then treat you for as long as you need to, to get back to your goals. That could be hanging up the washing, that could be playing sports. Once you've achieved your goals, we will tell you how to manage it from then on and prevent it from coming back in the future. If conservative management hasn't helped in physiotherapy, then we tend to refer the patient onto the consultant for further investigations and for a surgical opinion.