When summer begins to wind down, many folks ditch the pool floaties and look forward to their winter sport of choice – skiing, snowboarding, sledding, skating, or even just getting into a good old-fashioned snowball fight.
As anyone who’s ever had their feet swept out from under them on an ice rink can attest, winter sports are not all tinsel and mistletoe. One moment you could be carving up the ski slope like a phantom, and the next you could be facedown in a patch of snow with your skis criss-crossed and ski poles stuck twenty feet up the mountain.
When we contemplate how injuries occur, most of us think about a single moment of trauma or forceful impact. However, many injuries are caused by overuse – the accumulation of repeated “micro-impacts” that can eventually lead to larger tears or fractures in bone and the surrounding tissues.
If you’re dealing with chronic pain or pain from sudden trauma – be it in your shoulder, elbow, neck, back, or lower body – the question many fixate on is this: do I need surgery? Despite technological advancements in orthopedic surgery that make it safer and minimally invasive (such as arthroscopic surgery that uses a miniature camera to view injuries), depending on the diagnosis and the severity of the pain, surgery is often not necessary, and is often seen as a last resort for treatment.
Rotator cuff tendons are not always reparable, when they are they called irreparable rotator cuff tears. This can be the case with either chronic tears or massively retracted tears. A chronic tear is most commonly defined as a tear that is older than six months.
