The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Never waste a good crisis.
Dislocated my shoulder my last week. 2nd time and non-traumatic. Ortho says I should get surgery while it is still minor. All things said and done, it is not that bad. Minimally invasive and I will be back to 100% within a couple of months.
It's got me motivated to control the things I can control. Been cooking daily so calorie counts stay low. Started cycling now that the weather is nice. Neither tasks take high motivation. Hoping I can keep it up in the medium term.
Dude, avoid surgery for that sort of injury at all costs. They are often not better than placebo, and orthos and PTs have huge incentives to push them. Seriously, surgery is probably not worth it 95% of the time from my research.
Yeah. It’s best to avoid surgery when it’s possible to do so. I’ve only had one surgery in my entire life, but a lot of the time people say after you get one, you’re never the same way again; even after the recovery.
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Surgery is very much optional in your case from the sound of it, though orthos will almost always recommend it (I was lucky enough to go to a university hospital that was very bullish on rehab as opposed to surgery in general). I'd make the call for yourself on when you'd like to take the time one-armed - I will probably get it eventually when I have a lot of downtime and don't mind losing gains. I would strongly recommend prehab exercises before surgery as possible, and take your physio very seriously during recovery. Also worth considering that this is in the long run an opportunity to make yoga or some other joint health practice a continuing part of your life, in that respect my dislocations were a huge boon.
That's good to hear. I am weighing both options and haven't set a date for the surgery yet. But am leaning surgery. Might get a 2nd opinion just to be safe though.
Claude, the Doctor and Chat GPT all agreed on the condition & surgery after looking at my MRI. The Ortho recommended surgery primarily because I want to keep playing soccer and climbing.
Oh yeah if you're doing activities with a high risk of re-injury that's a different matter. I just lift weights and do yoga. Climbing you're often loading your shoulder in the weakest position possible for the labrum (that damned L-shape), and soccer you never know how you'll fall. But, for people reading, surgery is definitely not medically necessary just because the guidelines almost always say so (because they care about maximizing the outcomes doctors are rightfully sworn to maximize, whereas you also have to decide about things like the recovery time's impact on your life, playing the sports you love, your guess that surgery methods will improve in the future, etc.). My advice is the same in either case: get the best physio you can find, follow his recommendations religiously, and take up a practice afterwards that will specifically work on joint health. Yoga is great, Pilates is better as a workout in many ways but harder to do as regularly, supplement with face pulls every time you're in the gym. In the case of surgery, find a surgeon who's done it a million times, it's a routine surgery. Someone who works with athletes if you can, not someone who only does grandmas.
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How did you dislocate your shoulder?
Embarrassing. I was stretching mid-yawn after a long day at work.
The first one, the traumatic one happened last year when I was a surfing and a wave crashed on top of me. Churned me like I was in a washing machine and spat me out with my shoulder out of place. Bizarre experience.
This changes my assessment, but not recommendations, a little - your shoulder joint is clearly jacked up in ways that surgery alone won't fix. To dislocate like that, it can't just be the persistent damage from the traumatic dislocation, but also that your joint and muscles are jacked up around it such that it was ready to pop out under the tension (probably, like all of us here, from computer posture). The surgery will provide a lot of trauma resistance in the shoulder, but it'll also atrophy your muscles and exacerbate imbalances. Definitely go hard on strengthening and releasing the joint, and your body in general, and consider it one of your new good routines going forward once you can.
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