In 2010, I had a 360 labral tear (8 anchors) repaired successfully.

Now, according to an MRI, I have a labrum tear in my other shoulder. I have had pain on and off and finally had an MRI with Arthogram. With this shoulder, I am pain free but once in a while I flare it up and I have pain / spasms in my shoulder and upper trap / neck area that last for a few weeks. I have to be really carefull what I do not to flare it up.

I think I will get the tear repaired, however, I want to wait about a year due to schedule conflicts, is it ok to wait or will it get worse and the chance of a successful surgery will decrease with time?

Will deep tissue massage and or acupuncture work to relieve pain when I flare it up? Right now I just use ICE and ibuprofin (up to 1800 MG a day) to remove the inflammation for the flare up. Any advice on what else to do?

Thanks.

Hi!

If it's not so bad I would try with PT. I was told I should do surgery. But for me PT works really well.

Probably you should also be careful not to do the things that makes it flare up. I now believe that it is possible to come back to 100 %.

If you can't find a good PT and/or is interested I would be happy to help share some of the excersices I get from mine.
Just be careful with the combination of PT and plain killers. You don't want to do things that would have been plainful in case you didn't take the pain killers.

Waiting for a while also gives you time to see whether you can actually get better without surgery. One reason I didn't go for surgery straight away was also that I just couldn't do it right now for personal reasons. And in the end I am now very confident that I will not do the surgery. Not only because I can adjust my life so that I can live with the problem. But I actually believe in getting back to 100 % again.

I almost sold / gave away my climbing gear about 4 weeks ago. And yesterday evening I was bouldering quite close to my best ever level.

I guess your surgent should know what waiting does to the chances of a successful surgery? The impression I got from mine was that there is not really any rush with doing the surgery.