Shoulder Arthritis: Drive Pain-Free Off the Tee

Shoulder Arthritis: Drive Pain-Free Off the Tee

Jay Peterson, PA-C: If shoulder pain is affecting your golf game, there is a chance that you may have shoulder arthritis. The glenohumeral joint or shoulder joint is made up of a ball and a socket. With this ball and socket, you have a larger ball and a smaller socket, similar to a golf ball on a tee.

Sometimes, this can be unstable or potentially through injuries, you can have damage to the cartilage that lines both the ball and the socket of the shoulder joint. This can lead to glenohumeral or shoulder arthritis. This is when the surfaces become very rough and can even change shape a little bit. Sometimes, this is described as having sandpaper inside your shoulder or, when shoulder arthritis gets very severe, as having a block in a socket instead of a ball in a socket. This can cause considerable pain. It can also make the shoulder become very stiff.

If you are having a lot of shoulder pain and a lot of stiffness, along with creaking or crunching inside your shoulder, there is a chance it is shoulder arthritis. When this happens, you may go and see a health care provider who will likely get x-rays.

Here are some sample x-rays of a shoulder with arthritis. Here, what we see is the ball and the socket are actually very close together. They have been rubbing up against each other, so we see that there is no space between the ball and the socket. We also see a bone spur, as you can see here. This is when the bone has started to change shape because there is no cartilage softening the connection between the ball and the socket in the shoulder.

When you meet with your health care provider after having a full physical examination and x-rays like we showed on a previous screen, if glenohumeral arthritis or shoulder arthritis is the problem, they may recommend injections inside your shoulder, potentially physical therapy, and certainly some activity modifications. Do not do the things that are causing a lot of pain.

If this is concerning for you and the surgeon is recommending having a total shoulder replacement or replacing the ball in the socket joint that has arthritis, recognize that there are a lot of different options out there. Again, this could actually be overwhelming to you as the patient.

The surgeon themselves are not just going into their golf bag and picking out a random ball or random shoulder replacement, they will pick a very specific for the patient themselves. We will go through reasons to pick the anatomic versus a reverse shoulder arthroplasty or shoulder replacement in just a minute.

They picked the shiny one for anatomic total shoulder arthroplasty or anatomic total shoulder replacement. This is an anatomic total shoulder replacement and this is what is called a reverse total shoulder replacement. We will go through each of these individually and highlight the differences in just a second.

With an anatomic total shoulder replacement, we have the wearing away of the ball in the socket. We are going to replace the ball in the socket with metal.