Repairing a small rotator cuff tear in an athlete is not always better than watchful waiting, especially if symptoms are due to inflammation.

“so in other words quarterback pitcher says uh you know what it's starting to hurt a little bit you see a very small tear in the cuff you're saying it's better to go in and repair that than let it become a bigger Terror yes and no it depends you you'd certainly watch it carefully right and you correlate the symptoms with and that's why you know you should sometimes it's not the tear it's just some inflammation that's related to it if you can cool that down the tear is not biomechanically significant yet”