Shoulder Pain Can Be A Sign Of Cancer Or Heart Attack

The commonly found syndrome nowadays is joint pain. Among joint pains are neck pain, shoulder pain and back pain which are found in all age groups, with no exceptions. You guessed it right! the technology is majorly responsible for it. Everywhere, be it a public or a private place, you will find people with their personal gadgets like mobile phone, desktop or tablets in their hands. They don’t know since how long they have been sitting and staring on those screens with a bad posture. These permanent sitting positions with not much movement lead to these chronic pains. The educational institutes have also started using these gadgets for the students instead of using books & notebooks. This is further increasing the strain on the neck muscles, spinal cord, tendons, nerves etc. Are these pains actually are restricted to these reasons only! Let’s find out.

The most fatal names in medicine now days are cancer or heart failure. Nobody can imagine these diseases can start with a sign like shoulder pain. This has been proven by medical researchers now. Of course this is not the only sign for these illnesses. However shoulder pain can be there during the course of these diseases at any phase, sometimes it is the first sign of in case of both cancer and heart diseases. Starting with Cancer’s association with shoulder pain, according to a research published in Chest Journal (Official Publication of the American College of Chest Physicians) the origin of pain is tumor in the lung.

There is a pressure on a nerve which is there in the lung but the brain tells us its coming from the shoulder. In approximately 40% cases the cancer is spread to the bones from the lungs and first reaches near shoulder tissues. Therefore shoulder pain in such cases can be confused with Arthritis symptoms. Because these tumors are almost invisible in chest X-rays. There can be one more type of cancer which can be associated with it, is breast cancer. The weakest part of shoulder is its rotating part which is called rotator cuff. It is highly prone to degeneration by various diseases. Even in case of breast cancer the chances of spreading it to the bone are very high. Therefore this shoulder tissue is the first one to get a hit from it.

Now we will take up the risks involved with heart problems in case of a shoulder pain. According to an in-depth research done by the Journal of Occupation and Environmental Medicine, there is a strong association between shoulder pain and heart attack risks. They conducted a study on around 1226 laborers who were working in a manufacturing unit. They were doing highly strenuous physical work. Comparing the group of those with shoulder pain, with the one not having any such pain, they found out that the risk of heart diseases is three times more in the individuals with the pain. The point here is how to recognize the pain is actually going to be associated with heart risk or not. Not all shoulder related aches lead to heart failure. If you have slept in a wrong posture or you are an active sports person then it can just be a muscle strain as well.

If you have already taken all the necessary tests to clarify that you are not suffering from any such fatal disease, even then your shoulder pain is recurring. Then there can be some solutions to it without taking any medication. One of those techniques is consulting a Chiropractor. Is it a new term for you ! But this therapy is very old. It is an alternative medicine method which is used in diagnosing and treating musculoskeletal disorders as stated by Wikipedia. It mostly uses manual therapy on joints, muscles and spinal cord. Other than shoulder pain, joint pains like back pain, spine related issues and neck pain are the most commonly treated disorders by chiropractors. So next time you or any of your known person suffer from such pain in their shoulder, do look for all the symptoms and then go ahead for its treatment.