What is the Most Painful Type of Shoulder Surgery?

My practice is purely shoulder surgery, and I perform shoulder replacement, rotator cuff repair, and instability surgery.

Number one, surgery is cuff repair. That’s the one that tends to have the most discomfort after surgery and takes the longest to get better. Now, that being said, we’re radically better than we used to be. Contemporary shoulder surgery is much different from shoulder surgery in the past.

In my practice, we allow people to move their arms right away. We use a multimodal pain approach that decreases pain levels. Our rehabilitation techniques and surgical techniques, such as minimally invasive arthroscopic surgery, little poke holes, smaller anchors in the bone, and different techniques, even within the surgery, have accelerated the resolution of people’s pain.

When you look at pain curves, even after cuff surgery, when we measure people at six weeks, they have less pain than before. At three months less, six months less. And it just keeps going down.