[Health Column] Find the Cause Behind Shoulder Pain!

Director Park Yong-seok

[Asia Economy] The perspective of a pain specialist looking at pain is similar to that of a police officer observing a beggar boy. A passerby might feel simple sympathy for the beggar boy, but the police officer would suspect that there might be someone behind controlling the boy. In that case, the police officer would start the investigation by observing the people the beggar boy meets.

The same applies to pain specialists. Patients who visit the hospital talk about the phenomenon of the "painful area." Then, the doctor carefully examines not only the symptoms the patient complains about but also the "hidden causes" that may lie behind the symptoms. The painful area and the cause may coincide, but often they do not. Doctors and patients must cooperate closely, even if it is troublesome, to find the "hidden cause" of the pain. If the cause is elsewhere, treating only the painful area makes fundamental treatment difficult.

Let’s look at some cases.

# A 35-year-old male patient who suffers from pain every time he raises his shoulder. There was tenderness at the point the patient indicated, and focusing treatment on that area improved the symptoms.

# A middle-aged female patient who suffers from shoulder pain every time she sleeps. There is no particular abnormality in her usual shoulder movement, but when she moves her neck in a certain direction, the shoulder pain worsens. The diagnosis was a cervical disc herniation. After several treatments for the cervical disc, the patient’s shoulder pain disappeared.

As in the cases above, even if patients visit with the same shoulder pain, some need shoulder treatment while others need neck treatment. The 35-year-old male patient’s pain was due to a shoulder tendon issue, so the shoulder was treated, while the middle-aged female patient’s shoulder pain was caused by a cervical nerve problem, so cervical disc treatment was performed.

Finding the possible hidden causes of pain is not easy. It is convenient and easy to look only at the painful area and diagnose using machines. "There is no abnormality in the bone." "The tendon is weakened." "There is a disc herniation." Nevertheless, doctors try to find various possible causes through multiple routes. Simply treating the pain is only a temporary measure, and guessing the cause and treating it may cause suffering to the patient. Sometimes doctors even face complaints from patients: "I have muscle pain." "Just give me an injection here." "Why are you treating unnecessary areas?"

The field of "pain" in modern medicine is still uncharted territory. Pain specialists are therefore working even harder. They believe that accumulating such cases can minimize patient discomfort. This is not just to be called a "famous doctor." Seeing the wrinkles of elderly patients who worry about hospital expenses to save the allowance they received from their children makes it hard to ignore the hidden causes of pain. Even if sometimes misunderstood and troubled, the desire is to find the hidden causes of pain and cure them cleanly.

Park Yongseok, Director of Haengbok Anesthesia and Pain Medicine Clinic

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.