Test for Shoulder Instability

A common question people ask is, what are the tests for shoulder instability? 

One of the most common ones is the apprehension test. You raise your arm shoulder level, and the practitioner will take your arm abduct, externally rotate, and drive it to the back. You’ll either feel pain or your shoulder will come out of the socket. That’s the apprehension test for anterior instability. It’s coming up the front. 

The second one is called the Kim test. You bring your arm level to the front of your chest, and then they try to push the arm out the back of your shoulder. You’re trying to drive the shoulder out the back to see if it’s unstable. 

The third one I use is the O’Brien test, which involves putting arms across the body and then driving them down. This exposes some posterior instability and some slap lesions. 

So my three main ones are apprehension, Kim or posterior drawer, where you’re driving out the back, and then O’Brien’s, where you’re across the body and driving into the ceiling.

Those three things are my three main tests to determine whether the shoulder is unstable or if instability is part of the problem.