How Long Am I Going to Be in Pain After Shoulder Surgery?

A common question people ask is, how long am I going to be in pain after shoulder surgery?

Most of our patients are having shoulder surgery because they’re in pain. And I tell people, there’s a timeline. So we’re in the beginning, and let’s go to six months. And what happens is your pain drops down each week for six months for the majority of people.

Some people experience a spike right after surgery. For some, it doesn’t change. Some go down dramatically. But in general, the trend is that pain drops down at two weeks, six weeks, and three months.

The majority of our patients, you know, are out of the phase of pain where they need to take strong narcotics within a week or two. They’re just controlled with either no medicine or just over-the-counter medicine.

But you’ll see the pain will just gradually decrease over time to where the vast majority of our patients for the operations we do. When we reach that three to six months, the pain scores are around zero to none.