Clinical trial to assess shoulder pain treatments
Nitin Jain, M.D., MSPH, associate professor of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation and Orthopaedics, has been awarded a $7.5 million contract to determine whether surgery or non-operative therapy works better for a common age-related injury that costs the health care systems billions of dollars — rotator cuff tears.
“More likely than not, each one of us knows someone who has either had a rotator cuff tear, causing shoulder pain, or has actually had surgery,” Jain said. “That’s what led us to this work. This is a question patients were asking, that doctors were asking. ‘If a patient comes into my clinic with a rotator cuff tear, what should I do for that? Should I offer them surgery or should I offer them physical therapy?’ This is one of the most common reasons patients go to see their doctors — not just specialists, but any doctor. It’s an important public health issue.”