Dr. Sean Rockett’s passive range exercises for rotator cuff repair.

Calcific tendinitis is a very common condition for shoulder pain. The pain can be sudden and dramatic, often debilitating. People usually experience severe pain in the front or down the side of the shoulder. Patients have trouble lifting their arm up and finding a comfortable position. There is usually no history of trauma and a cause for the calcium deposit is usually never found. There are some associated conditions in the literature but the...

Who gets pec tears? Looking at the numbers, men are much more likely to get pec tears because of the bulk of the muscle and the stiffness associated with muscular hypertrophy in this region. The decreased flexibility can then result in tearing of the muscle or tendon. Just as in most tendon tears people are between age 30 to 50. The most common mechanism is a heavy bench press where the tendon is stretched as the bar comes down to the chest....

So how do we get SLAP tears? One mechanism is falling onto our shoulders, another is traction that we talked about earlier and another is repetitive stress. People will complain of clicking in that shoulder that they do not have in the other shoulder. Others will feel like something is moving around in their shoulder. They will typically point to the front and top of their shoulder right at the AC joint or sometimes even the back upper half of...

We discussed what happened to the end of the biceps tendon if it completely tears off from the cup or the glenoid. Now what happens if you get a tear at the end of the biceps where it attaches to the glenoid via the labrum? Let’s look at the anatomy for a second and then we will discuss SLAP (Superior Labrum Anterior Posterior) tears. The end of the biceps attaches to the labrum which attaches to the glenoid as seen here. It serves as the...

The biceps is a great muscle with some intricacies that has provided decades of confusion for orthopedic surgeons. We finally think we have figured it out, but then again that’s what they said about VHS videotapes. First the anatomy of the biceps muscle. It is made up of two tendons that attach to the scapula in two different places. The short head of the biceps starts at the part of the scapula called the coracoid. This is a pressure point and...