Rotator cuff tears sound scary. They get scarier when someone tells you that if you don’t fix it now, the tear will grow and the shoulder will wear out. A JAMA (pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/4169…) study MRI’d both shoulders in several hundred adults aged 45 to 75, nearly 1200 scans. Abnormalities were in 96% of pain-free shoulders and 98% of painful ones. Full-thickness tears were in about 7% of shoulders that didn’t hurt. Turns out a lot of “abnormalities” are actually just aging. What actually matters is function. Do you have weaknesses? Does it hurt when you move it? Does it wreck your sleep or your sport? If the answers are no, you definitely do not need an operation for a finding that is part of aging.