Which is Worse: Shoulder Replacement or Rotator Cuff

What’s worse, shoulder replacement or rotator cuff surgery?

I don’t like to think of it as being worse. I’m a surgeon, so maybe I’m biased, but they differ. They’re both excellent surgeries that have excellent outcomes. In our practice, we specialize in shoulders and track everyone, a 95% success rate with each, but they’re different.

With a rotator cuff repair, you’re reattaching a torn tendon back down the bone, and you have to wait for that to heal before you do a lot of activity. That just takes more time. With a shoulder replacement, you’re putting in a new ball and socket made of metal and plastic, so you can move it much quicker.

People getting shoulder replacements tend to have a much worse shoulder, so they’re going from worse to better quickly after the operation, so they tend to have a little less pain early on. Rotator cuff repairs tend to be a bit more sore early in recovery, but if you look at both patients at six months, the outcomes are almost identical in pain relief function, etc.

So they’re great procedures, I wouldn’t say one’s worse than the other, it’s just they’re a little bit different in the recovery period.