Shoulder pain can have many different causes. If the shoulder pain is non-specific, meaning it just showed up without a seeming direct cause or an injury, it could come from different areas in the body including:
16 muscles attach to the arm bone, collar bone, and shoulder blade, which are the three bones that make up the shoulder joint...as you can guess, the shoulder is a very complicated joint! Deep tension or a trigger point in any one of these 16 muscles can cause pain in the shoulder joint. The pain may feel dull and achy or it may be an alarming feeling that your shoulder is going to come out of joint. Tension in these muscles can also cause loss of function, muscle weakness, numbness or radiating pain down your arm, and clicking or popping of the arm bone as it moves within the joint.
Four of those 16 muscles are known as the "rotator cuff," so called because they are the main rotators of your arm bone. They can get tight from overuse, prolonged odd positioning, catching yourself during a fall, driving, or performing other tasks with your arms in front of your body, out to your sides or above your head.
Massage therapy combined with stretching and strengthening exercises will assist your shoulders to heal by:
increasing flexibilty of muscles and connective tissue;
aligning scar tissue and making scar tissue more mobile;
reducing clicking and popping from friction within the joint;
increasing range of motion;
increasing muscle strength and balance; and
decreasing numbness and tingling through releasing impingements.