Last night, I had a breakthrough with one of my clients. She had been coming to me for around six months with this problem in your shoulder: she presented nerve pain from her brachial plexus distally to her wrist, and she couldn’t medially rotate her arm into “handcuff position” without considerable pain. I’d been trying various ways of opening her shoulder up without much success, and I could tell she was becoming frustrated with the slow pace of progress.
Part of the problem was that I wasn’t digging down deep enough to discover the exact pattern of referred pain, and I had conflated the two pains. The nerve pain and the deep scapular pain were really from two separate groups of trigger points, and that was causing me a bit of vexation. But last night, she described the nerve pain differently than we had discussed in the past, and a light bulb went on. That lead me to her scalene muscles, and some palpation on them triggered the pain sensations she had been experiencing. Digging into them with vaulted fingers and thumbwork deactivated her trigger points there, and there was immediate relief.
With that solved, I went back to basics on her medial rotation problem. The main muscle of medial rotation is the subscapularis, which is where she was feeling her pain, so I decided to check it’s primary antagonist, the infraspinatus. Started out with some softening, friction circles, and then when she was softened – bingo! – I felt it; a tiny trigger point about the size of a glass-headed pin. Soon as I put pressure on it, she said, “That’s it!” and we went in to some deep direct pressure, trying to crush the TrP against the scapula to get it to release. Over the course of about 10 minutes, that darned trigger point slowly, so slowly, released and let go. I wanted to test it out that I had gotten all of it, so I took her arm and slowly put it into medial rotation, with no pain. Gradually, I was able to move her arm painlessly through its full range of motion in that aspect.
You should have heard us whooping and hollering!
This is exactly why I love this work so much. Every day I get to help people, and then we have this particularly exhilirating moments like this. I am humbled and ecstatic to be able to be of such service to others.
