Manage Your Back Pain And Improve Your Spinal Health At The Spine And Rehab Group
Acid reflux can cause chest and back pain, but its better to consult your doctor for a proper diagnosis. Even if you have regular episodes of heartburn and history of GERD, any significant or different back pain should be checked so you can rule out any serious complications.
At the Spine And Rehab Group, we have extensive experience in the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of any spinal-related injuries or back pain. As one of the leading providers of spinal care in New York, we pride ourselves on our commitment to excellent customer service and effective solutions. To learn more about our services and what we can do for your back pain, visit one of our clinics today.
When To Call Your Doctor Or 911
Some of the causes of pain between the shoulder blades are serious and can be life-threatening.
If your symptoms are accompanied by shortness of breath, chest pain, lightheadedness, or even if you just have a “gut feeling” that something bad is happening in your body, call 911 right away. Don’t wait. Many of the serious causes of pain between the shoulders require urgent medical treatment.
Stretches For Shoulder Blade Pain
Here are some tips, stretches, and exercises you can perform in order to help shoulder blade pain.
Improve your work station: Ensure feet are flat on the ground and knees are bent at a 90-degree angle, back is straight, arms are bent at the elbow at 90 degrees, monitor is at eye level, and your mouse is close to your keyboard.
Correct your posture: Ear, shoulder, and hip joint should be aligned when sitting with good posture. Shoulders should not be slouched and your head should not be tilted.
Massage the area: Lay your shoulder on the massage ball and roll on it with the weight of your body.
Stretch the shoulders: Intertwine your fingers together, lean back, and hunch your upper body as far back as possible, push your hands as far away from you as possible, while looking down. In this position, you can move around to feel other areas of the upper back become stretched.
Stretch the thoracic spine: Have a foam roller underneath your shoulders and lay on it. Keep your ribs downward, but dont arch your back too much. Keep your hands behind your head in order to support it. Roll gently on the roller.
Do a chest stretch: Stand in the middle of a doorway with each hand forward flat on the side of the door frame. Gently lean into the door frame and feel your chest opening up.
After completing any type of exercise, apply heat packs to the area to further relax the muscle.
Related: Infographic Shoulder Blade Pain Stretches
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Upper Back Pain Causes
There are plenty of reasons why your upper back may be bothering you, and not all of them are obvious. Taking a hit or clumsily backing into something can bruise you, but sometimes the body gives us aches and pains that are a little bit harder to explain, especially when its hard to see the area in question.
Interscapular pain, or pain originating from between the shoulder blades, usually comes from a muscle strain of some kind. However, if the pain is acute and excruciating, you should never hesitate to go to urgent/emergency care or call your doctor about it.
If the pain is less intense, or comes and goes depending on the day, we have good news you may be able to ease those aches with simple fixes from fixing your posture to just getting better sleep.
If You Do Just One Thing With Breathing: Slow Down Your Exhalations
It doesnt have to be an exercise: just pausing for an extra beat or two at the end of a handful of breaths is a good start. Literally just hold your breath for a count of 1 or 2 at the end of breaths that are completely normal otherwise.
Breathing regularity and overall slowness is a good start, but extending exhalation is even better for a specific biological reason: exhalation is literally more relaxing than inhalation. That is how we are wired.
Whenever you inhale, you turn on the sympathetic nervous system slightly, minutely speeding up your heart. And when you exhale, the parasympathetic half turns on, activating your vagus nerve in order to slow things down .
Robert M Sapolsky, Why Zebras Dont Get Ulcers, 2004, p. 48.
You could make a simple change to the box breathing method described above: instead of holding after inhalation, you can distribute the breaths around the sides of the box like this: breathe in, breathe out, breathe out, hold it out.
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Anatomy Of The Shoulder Blade
Your shoulder blade, or scapula, connects to the clavicle and to the humerus .
This triangular-shaped bone also attaches to several muscles, including those of the rotator cuff. The rotator cuff muscles include four musclesthe teres minor, subscapularis, supraspinatus, and infraspinatus.
These are the muscles that help your shoulder abduct, like when you lift your arm, and internally and externally rotate the shoulder.
Also, around the shoulder blade, you’ll find muscles that support shoulder stability, including the levator scapulae, trapezius, rhomboids, and serratus anterior .
Treatment For Pain Between Shoulder Blade And Spine
Treatment of your pain will depend on the underlying reason for your symptoms. In order to get rid of pain you are experiencing between you carry blades, its extremely crucial to first figure out the exact cause.
When pain in between the shoulder blades is because of muscular causes it can be challenging to deal with, but various kinds of nerve obstructs done under ultrasound guidance have actually revealed considerable promise recently.
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How To Adjust Your Posture
For starters, sit actively, not passively, says Louw. By sitting forward on your seat and staying upright, youll avoid relaxing into a poor posture. Make sure youre sitting on your two butt bones and are actively using your core to sit up straight, chest tall, with shoulders rolled down and back, away from your ears. Also, keep your head over your shoulders, not in front of them, Louw says.
Improving your work setup to make it more ergonomic will also help adjust your posture. According to Dr. Baxi, your computer screen should be at eye level and your keyboard close enough that you dont have to reach for it. Your elbows should flex about 120 degrees.
Anatomy Of The Scapula
In medicine, it is called the scapula, the scapula which simply means shoulder in Latin. For the record, the word scapula comes from the Greek omos for shoulder and platè for flat object. The scapula is therefore a flat bone from the back of the shoulder. It is triangular and asymmetrical in shape. It is part of the shoulder complex which is formed by the meeting of the collarbone in front, the humerus on the side and the scapula behind.
The scapula is pressed against the ribs, it articulates with the humerus on its external part and forward with the clavicle. The scapula slides over the rib cage but does not articulate with the ribs or with the vertebrae. This great freedom allows the shoulder and our arm to be particularly mobile!
The scapula is marked in its upper part by four anatomical elements:
- the The glenoid cavity, located in the lateral angle, articulates with the head of the humerus. These two bones form the scapulo-humeral joint which allows great amplitude movements.
- The scapula therefore allows the insertion of many muscles and ligaments of the arm, neck and thorax. It is thus understood that the causes of pain in this region are of various origins.
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Maximize Outlets For Frustration And Aggression
What exactly is an outlet for frustration? Literally the same activity can be a stress or an outlet, in much the same way that something be exciting or terrifying, depending on your perspective.
Let a rat run voluntarily in a running wheel, and it makes it feel great. Force a rat to do the same amount of exercise and it gets a massive stress-response.
Robert M Sapolsky, Why Zebras Dont Get Ulcers, 2004, p. 261
Maximizing frustration outlets is one of the basics of anxiety control, along with maximizing control and predictability. But while maximizing control and predictability are in the easier-said-than-done category for the people who would benefit the most, finding outlets for frustration is almost easy.
An outlet for frustration is basically anything that constitutes voluntary intensity. Its about choosing to do something challenging rather than having no choice. Its about breaking free of the constraints that prevent expression of frustration like screaming into a pillow, or violently beating an old mattress with a bat. Anyone can do this kind of thing at almost any time.
But almost anyone can still go in a bathroom and scream into a jacket for 10 seconds.
What Are In Between Shoulder Blades And Spine
When thinking about pain in any region of the body, its handy to think of the structures that depend on that area. Structures in between the shoulder blades consist of:
- Skin
- Muscles: The muscles present in the region in between the shoulder blades consist of the rhomboids and middle and lower trapezius muscles. These muscles play a key function in keeping your shoulder blades back and down.
- The thoracic spine
- The thoracic aorta (the thoracic part of the largest blood vessel which brings blood from the heart to the remainder of the body.
- Part of the esophagus
- Part of the heart
- A part of the lungs
Pain that takes place in between the shoulder blades might start in any of these structures or instead might occur in areas some range from the area due to the method that nerves transfer pain signals.
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Herniated Or Bulging Discs
Degenerative disc disease in the cervical spine or thoracic spine can cause pain between the shoulders due to nerve or spine irritation or pressure.
Other symptoms may include numbness, tingling, and/or pain in one or both arms. Sometimes pain that’s caused by disc disease in the neck is positional, and it may improve or get worse when you flex or extend your neck.
How Stress Increases Neck And Shoulder Pain
Stress isnt always the cause of neck and shoulder pain, but it can certainly make even the smallest existing pain much worse. Heres how it affects your neck and shoulders.
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Enlarges the blood vessels in your large muscle groups to allow faster oxygen delivery
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Causes you to clench and tighten muscles in the neck, jaw and shoulders
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Increases tension in the trapezius muscles that run across the top of the back
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Restricts neck and shoulder movement
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Heightens your perception of pain and makes existing pain feel worse
When you experience mental or physical stress again and again, your body is constantly prepared for battle but is never allowed to release that tension. Eventually this irritates your muscles and nerves, causing pain that can be difficult to manage because its difficult to pinpoint or remove your stress triggers.
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How Does Stress And Anxiety Cause Tension In Your Neck And Shoulders
When you experience a stressful event or a bout of anxiety, your muscles contract, sometimes forcefully. This is an automatic or reflex reaction. Its known as a stress response or fight or flight response.
Its your bodys way of gearing up to face a perceived physical threat that youll need to fight off or run away from. Along with muscle tension, you may also notice other physical symptoms when youre stressed or anxious, such as:
- a fast heart rate
- cold skin
- sweating
Although your bodys stress response is designed to help you deal with physical threats, your body responds in the same way when the threat isnt physical. Your muscles may tighten up when youre stuck in traffic, dealing with pressure at work, or watching the news.
According to the American Psychological Association , your muscles and other organs may only relax again once the perceived threat has passed.
If stress is ongoing meaning the stressful situation doesnt seem to have a clear end your body may stay in a heightened state of readiness to face a threat. As a result, your muscles may stay tense and tight for much longer than they need to.
According to the APA, ongoing muscle tension in your neck and shoulders can lead to more serious issues like back and shoulder pain, body aches, and migraine and tension headaches.
These Steps Can Help Prevent Shoulder Blade Pain:
- Adopt healthy habits: make sure to eat whole foods, get seven to eight hours of sleep every night, and work out at least three days per week: A healthy lifestyle can help you feel more energetic and rested, which may help you handle pain.
- Do not lift heavy things: Heavy lifting may result in injuries, which might cause pain between shoulder blades. For example, avoid carrying heavy bags on one shoulder. Should you need to lift something, make sure you flex your knees and try not to place too much strain on your spine.
- Practice decent posture: Attempt to stand and sit and prevent slouching. In addition, you might choose to obtain an ergonomic seat or a particular pillow to assist with neck and spinal alignment.
- Do not sit too long: It might help keep muscles loose. You may even try with a desk. But, again, there are numerous alternatives to choose from on Amazon.
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If Anxiety Causes Pain Does That Mean The Pain Is All In Your Head
Of course not. Psychosocial factors refers to the dizzying array of stresses in our lives, all the possible reasons we get anxious, which can also independently lead to pain in many ways .
So, is that just an elaborate way of saying the pain is all in your head? No that phrase implies mental illness or faking it. What were talking about here is about stress/anxiety creating fertile ground for a crop of chronic pain. This may occur in so many ways that its impossible to say exactly how it happens, just like we cant possibly know which climate factors lead to a specific storm.
Psychosocial factors in pain are a completely different thing from all in your head.
And yet, sadly, some health care professionals may not understand this, and some of them may equate psychosocial factors with mental illness and malingering all the same thing in their heads. We know many healthcare professionals will take pain less seriously if theres no obvious biological source of pain to treat, even when there is evidence of serious psychosocial factors.40 For instance, physiotherapists may stigmatize psychosocial factors in back pain, feel unprepared to deal with psychosocial factors, and prefer to grapple with the more mechanical aspects of back pain.41
Why Is My Shoulder Hurting For No Reason
Wondering to yourself, why does my neck and shoulder hurt? If youre experiencing shoulder pain, but you cant recall doing anything to trigger a nerve, and you arent feeling regular bouts of stress, there may be something internally irritating the shoulder that youre not aware of. Common conditions include:
- Rotator cuff tendonitis and bursitis a swelling of the tissues and tendons that connect the muscles and bones in the shoulder
- Rotator cuff tear a tear in the tissues that connect the muscle to the bone and tendons around the shoulder joint
- Arthritis inflammation that causes chronic pain and tightness in the shoulder
- Frozen shoulder stiffness and pain in the shoulder joint that typically worsens over time
- Tendon tear a tear in the tissues connecting the muscle to the bone around the shoulder joint
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Fighting Flighting Tending And Befriending
The famous fight-or-flight response is a biological response to acute threats, and is more common in anxious people but not synonymous with anxiety. The stress response to threats to life and limb the biology of panix predates anxiety in homo sapiens by about a billion years. But that same response, which evolved to deal with threats like being eaten alive, can be triggered by someone cutting in front of you in traffic. If your brain is complicated enough, it can trigger the stress response with completely abstract threats or even imaginary ones.
But exactly how we respond to stresses whether it’s the threat of disembowelment or failing a driver’s test is as complicated as personality.
Someone suffering from chronic and excessive feelings of worry, nervousness, or unease is not necessarily in a panic. The anxious person is more likely to spend more time in this mode, either because they actually face more threats, or because they perceive more threats than there really are. But we can also worry about threats without ever actually experiencing one. Or reacting as if theres one. My own childhood was a textbook case of that.25
There are other ways to respond to acute stress. We arent limited to fighting and flighting. There is also the much less famous tend-and-befriend response, for instance, a different behavioural strategy in which threats are dealt with more socially: tending to children, or seeking out the safety of the group and befriending people.
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