Shoulder Pain After Gallbladder Surgery

Stones present in the gallbladder do not cause problems for everyone, but if they decide to move, they may cause a blockage of the bile duck. This leads to, what is commonly referred to as, a “gallbladder attack.” In this case one of the presenting signs might be pain between the shoulder blades or pain under the right shoulder. Other signs and symptoms include right side abdominal pain, nausea, vomiting and fever. Often these symptoms start after consuming fatty meals, or in the middle of the night. A trip to the ER quickly follows and, in most cases, the gallbladder will be removed.

What frustrates many patients and doctors is that the pain in the right shoulder returns and stays even after the gallbladder has been removed and surgery scars have healed. Treatment for this pain usually involves painkillers, which do not work for everyone.

So what can you do?

Positive effects on reducing all kinds of pain with the use of acupuncture have been well publicized. Both patients and doctors recommend acupuncture because it’s safe, non-invasive and does not produce negative side effects. But there is another reason why acupuncture can be very effective in eliminating the pain that occurs after the gallbladder has been removed.

Diagnosis during your acupuncture visit includes palpation and examination of the abdomen as well as specific acupuncture channels to find “weaknesses” in the body that may have contributed to the gallstone formation in the first place. Gallstones and a gallbladder attack are both presenting symptoms, but the goal of an acupuncturist is to find the root of the problem. By observing individual patterns in each patient, we can determine and treat that root cause and therefore eliminate the leftover symptoms – like shoulder pain.

To make it easier for you to visualize how acupuncture works to diagnose and treat the problem, here is my favorite analogy. If you see that a tree in your garden has dry leaves, at first, you may pull off the dry leaves and that’s it. But if you notice that more dead leaves keep showing up without a reason, you will probably check the water supply and look for evidence of bugs or disease somewhere else on the tree. By doing this, you are trying to determine the root of the problem because you intuitively know that the whole tree is connected. That’s the goal of acupuncture – find the true cause of the problem, beyond just the symptoms that are most obvious.

Treating each patient on individual basis helps to create a treatment protocol that is specifically catered to their own needs. For one patient that might be a combination of points “A”, B” and D” while others will get better results with “Z”, “F” and “Q”. This approach not only relieves the pain, it also produces results that last.