Muscloskeletal Diagnostic Ultrasound helps reduce the guesswork in diagnosing soft tissue injuries!
Clinical examination/testing is a good starting point with any assessment of an injury, but the body is an integrated machine and so no one test is accurate in diagnosing a specific injury.
An example of this was a 67-year-old female patient with grumbling shoulder pain of no apparent reason which was getting worse over an eight-month period.
On examination elevating the arm was painful as was resisted tests for the rotator cuff. Whilst distracting the shoulder the patient was able to resist with no pain and had power. On this basis one would suspect that the subacromial bursa was involved as distracting the shoulder takes the pressure of the subacromial space and the tendon must engage to resist the test so no pain would deduct the bursa causing the impingement.
An ultrasound scan was performed, and no bursal fluid was seen but the supraspinatus tendon was thickened compared to the opposite. So, the ultrasound showed that the tendon was tendinopathic and so a course of shockwave therapy on the tendon reduced the symptoms and restored normal function to the shoulder.
