Posts Tagged ‘Injuries’
Shoulder Pain and Rotator Cuff Injuries: Getting More Info
May 22nd, 2010
When you go into your physician with complaints of longstanding shoulder pain, he may or may not recommend imaging of the shoulder. The fact of the matter is much of shoulder pain can be diagnosed without the use of any imaging technologies. However, if the physician is interested in finding more information, the specific technology that he uses depends upon his own diagnosis and the questions he is trying to answer.
It is because of the different results that will come from each type of imaging technology that physicians can simply go through a process to decide which tool to use – a process of elimination according to what each reveals.
Plain x-rays – the old fashioned x-rays – will give you good information about the bones. Is there any arthritis? Are there any bone fractures? In deed, in one of the fairly common problems called calcific tendonitis, one of the tendons becomes calcified and essentially starts to turn to bone – this is a phenomenon that can be picked up on x-rays. Certainly cancer, tumors, all these things, if they involve the bone, can be picked up on plain x-rays as well. However, the ability of an x-ray to reveal cancer is restricted because if it is not within the bone, than cancerous bodies escape the attention of the basic x-ray film.