General Damages for Shoulder Injuries

General damages for shoulder injuries turn on range of motion. The shoulder is the most mobile joint in the body, and an injury that costs a person the top of their reach changes dressing, driving, sleeping and every overhead task at work. This chapter states how courts value that loss, and the other joints are covered through the general damages guide.

Rotator Cuff and Labral Tears Are the Common Findings

A seatbelt loading the shoulder in a collision, or a hand put out to break a fall, tears the cuff tendons or the cartilage rim around the socket often enough that both appear routinely in injury files. The defence argument is almost always degeneration, because cuff tears are found on scans of uninjured people over forty. What answers it is the before and after: a person who was working overhead without complaint until the day of the crash.

Surgery Helps the Case and Does Not Always Help the Shoulder

Arthroscopic repair improves many shoulders and leaves others stiff and painful. Courts award more where the repair failed, where a second operation was needed, or where the surgeon says the remaining restriction is permanent. Recovery from cuff repair takes months of immobilisation and physiotherapy, and that period of dependence is itself part of what general damages compensate.

Frozen Shoulder Often Follows the Original Injury

Adhesive capsulitis develops when a painful shoulder is held still, and it can leave more lasting restriction than the injury that caused it. It is compensable as a consequence of the collision. Courts have accepted it as a foreseeable result of the immobilisation the injury forced, so a defendant does not escape it by pointing to the secondary diagnosis.

General Damages for Shoulder Injuries Move with the Dominant Side

An injury to the writing and lifting arm costs more than the same injury on the other side, and a shoulder that cannot go overhead ends careers in trades and in nursing. Awards for permanent shoulder restriction with surgery sit well above those for a shoulder that recovered within a year. Where pain persists after the structure is repaired, the analysis moves to the chapter on chronic pain. Shoulder injury frequently accompanies neck injury from the same impact, covered in the neck chapter, and the elbow and upper arm are dealt with in the arm chapter. These injuries are common in the firm’s bicycle accident files, and the reported decisions are searchable on CanLII.