Arm Fractures: Do You Have Lingering Shoulder or Neck Pain?
The theme for this week …
What happens with your bones directly affects the muscles as well. When bones are immobilized for healing, the muscles tend to go offline impacting your ability to be active.
This week we look at how breaking your arm may be haunting you years later. Read on …
Arm broken? The after-effects can be complicated
Broken arm bones account for nearly 50% of all broken bones for adults. For children, arm fractures are only second in number to collarbone breaks. Source
How the arm bones ended up broken is important — from falling, or from a direct force, commonly airbags in auto accidents. It’s the forgotten part of the trauma that also needs consideration.
The common treatment for fractured arm bones is to immobilize via cast or brace for 4-6 weeks and then go on with life.
But …
For kids there are three unique considerations to development
When the arm is immobilized at a young age, there are distinct implications to fine motor skills, and even visual-motor skills. Why?
The cast puts the small muscles of the hand and forearm into hibernation. Removing the cast does not ensure these muscles wake-up. Nor does exercise.
What is side-lined by this hibernation? The discrete skills affected include:
- Visual-motor skill refinement: In our childhood, we go through many stages of increasingly complex integration of how the eyes and fingers coordinate. A cast for weeks hijacks a phase of this.
- Fine motor strength and accuracy: Silverware use is a common issue after a hand and wrist were in a cast. Recruiting enough stability in the arm to cut with a knife is one part of the equation. Fine motor skills involve nuanced muscle coordination and strength activation which is hard to recover by finger exercises alone.
- Postural Compensations: The weight of a cast pulls the shoulder girdle off-center for enough time that the tension of neck, shoulders and back muscles becomes unbalanced. Unaddressed, this tension difference remains through the adult years causing neck and upper body stress or pain.
For adults … there are two common concerns
After an arm fracture in an adult, there is often pain around the fracture site and also pain from compensation, commonly at the neck and shoulders.
At The Bridging® Institute we find two primary causes for this:
- The weight and awkward positioning of the cast/brace: A common complaint is shoulder pain from the cast continually pulling downward. Shoulder and neck pain are common from the position of the cast pulling the arm around to the front for weeks.
- The other body trauma related to the event: Because the fracture is the result of other trauma, it is common to find other aspects of the event creating postural and functional shifts elsewhere in the body. Falling often involves impact to the lower body, and an auto accident often has other core and shoulder impact.
Yes, Bridging® can identify and reset these relationships!
The good news is that these all change with the Bridging® Technique. Bridging® rebuilds the structural relationships within the arm and its interconnections with the hand and shoulder for strength, dexterity and coordination.
You, or your child, can once again move with ease and confidence!
Insight of the week from Cara
We all can relate to broken arms from various times in our lives, whether it was our own or someone else’s.
As a child, I was envious of the cast my friend had; as we all got to write and draw on it. But I also remember the icky, peeling skin when the cast came off, and how she struggled to do homework with the cast on.
My son, Dan, broke his wrist twice. Both times were from his scooter catching on the sidewalk crack. His brother likely remembers the terror of him having a built in weapon for several weeks. Coincidently the arm broken is the one he still has strength issues with many years later. (This was pre-Bridging when he broke them so I wasn’t able to help then.)
And my mother-in-law fell, breaking her wrist. The cast held her hand and arm still, but her shoulder and neck were painful from the weight of the cast, and the cast presented challenges with sleeping. She never regained full strength in her arm afterward. (This was also in my pre-Bridging days.)
Broken arms happen at pretty much every stage of life. Each stage has different implications to our functional well-being.
How did Bridging® help my son?
The forearm fractures occurred before I had figured out the finesse of Bridging® so there was no help in the short term. Luckily it was his non-dominant hand.
Years later using Bridging®, I was able to reintegrate his hand, wrist, forearm, and upper arm function with his shoulder, and core. The confounding factor was his multiple mini-traumas of IVs and blood draws while undergoing three years of medical treatment for Leukemia from age 6-10.
(If you wonder why I hadn’t worked with it much before, there is something about our kids wanting to handle things in their own way!?)
His function now is great, and he works with his hands daily as an aviation technician. (One of those guys you love to see when you’re waiting for your plane to be cleared to leave.)
When working out, Dan still noticed an inability to activate specific upper arm muscles. I recently caught him for an hour to do Bridging® to restore more complex rotational transitions in his arms. His shoulder and neck stress calmed down too!