Rotator cuff injuries in a Virtual Reality world

My recent case is a young player from Drummoyne who had previously presented with lower back pain from hours spent in the chair playing virtual reality games. Last week this patient booked back in and said, “I’ve done it again; my shoulder is aching from this new game I’m playing”.  It turns out that this game involves a lot of overhead activities like climbing ladders and interaction where your arms are up.  After about three months of playing, he noticed a pain in the front of his shoulder when his arms exceeded his shoulder height.  He played on without thinking much of it and figured the pain would disappear.  It did not, and he ended up in front of us.  By the time he presented to us, he had been in pain for quite a while.  To treat the injury correctly, we ordered an ultrasound of the shoulder.  The results showed supraspinatus tendinopathy and bursitis in the shoulder.  

Bursitis generally begins from overuse of the shoulder joint, from my experience with a tendon or rotator cuff muscle injury.  Rotator cuff injuries are commonplace and something we treat a lot of.  Trade jobs are a common cause of this type of injury because often, people have to work in awkward positions or are repetitively performing the same action.  Returning to my patient from Drummoyne, the repetitive action of performing overhead activity even with a lightweight caused the shoulder injury.  Often we find in such cases; the patient is not correctly using the shoulder, which places increased stress on the tendons, muscles and bursa.  This was the case here.