Shoulder Injury From Lateral Raises Still Not Healed After 6 Months
About 6 months ago, I injured my shoulder while doing lateral raise (side raise) with my right hand at the gym. Since then, my shoulder has never fully healed and the issue has become chronic.
At first, I stopped going to the gym and gave it time to recover naturally, but the pain never really went away.
I went to my first doctor, who diagnosed it as frozen shoulder. He prescribed physiotherapy with TENS and ultrasound therapy, but it didn’t help at all.
Then I visited another doctor. He gave me medications along with some shoulder exercises, but the exercises were extremely painful to do and I didn’t notice any improvement. After that, he gave me a cortisone cocktail injection in the shoulder and said this should finally fix it. The pain reduced for a while, but once the injection wore off, everything came back again.
He then asked me to get an X-ray and MRI done. The X-ray came back normal, but the MRI showed multiple issues related to impingement/inflammation. After seeing the MRI, he prescribed more medicines, including painkillers and steroids, and told me to wait another 10 days. He also mentioned that if things still don’t improve, surgery might be the next option.
At this point, over the last 6 months I’ve tried:
- Rest
- Stopping gym completely
- Physiotherapy
- TENS and ultrasound
- Exercises
- Painkillers
- Steroids
- Injection
- Multiple doctor opinions
Nothing has properly fixed it.
Has anyone here dealt with a long-term shoulder impingement or gym injury like this before? Especially one caused by lateral raises or shoulder exercises?
Were there any exercises, rehab methods, or treatments that actually helped without causing pain? Did anyone recover without surgery?
Would really appreciate hearing experiences from people who went through something similar because mentally this has been exhausting.