It's all connected!

My first patient today has a very common pattern, one I see all the time. She has had lost range of motion and pain on movement of the L shoulder for at least several years. There was no specific big shoulder injury in her history. We have worked on restoring balance in the rotator cuff muscles, as well as regaining stability in the acromio-clavicular joint, with some improvement. She complained of some lingering discomfort though. With manual muscle testing, today I found L side shoulder muscles, as well as L side glutes and hamstring muscles all weak, actually turned off. I saw slight pronation in the L foot, so I had her stand on arch support for 15 seconds. All the weak muscles immediately strengthened. What this means is that her weak L foot was causing dysfunction even in the shoulder, keeping it from getting better. A combination of custom arch support, specific daily exercises, and massage of certain muscles, along with some chiropractic adjustments, will help the L shoulder improve as much as possible.

Left alone, patterns like this cause discomfort, lost range of motion, pain, and eventually osteoarthritis. For example, the inhibition of her hamstring muscles is an extremely common pattern, and left alone will often lead to the need for a knee and or hip replacement. In my experience, this is usually entirely avoidable. The key is finding the original cause of the imbalance, weakness, instability, etc. Often it's an old injury of some sort, in her case probably an old long forgotten ankle sprain decades ago, that is still unstable. When a bone is broken, the body repairs it stronger than before the break. This doesn't happen with sprains, though. Instability persists, whether in the ankle, pelvic joints, shoulder, etc. and causes big patterns of muscle imbalances throughout the body. Once identified, though, these can be fixed.

Anyone with an old nagging problem that keeps coming back, or is there chronically, should be checked for these patterns with the diagnostic muscle testing used in Applied Kinesiology.

Dr. Steve Tag