I have a grade 3.5 AC separation, right shoulder, since May 2006. Have not had surgery but I've always had the option. I did initially schedule myself for surgery and cancelled that after I received IMT (Integrated Manual Therapy - centerimt.com) IMT is great for lots of stuff including this, and I've always gotten along with the injury, but in the past few months I started to hit a wall with my fiddle playing, and started to get more chronic pain right behind the right shoulder blade - "winging" of the shoulder blade. Been recently working with a PT to work on that - using taping and some exercises to strengthen the serratis (sp?) muscle - it's helping. I also did 3 Feldenkreis appointments in the past 2 weeks which is also very helpful - learning correct positioning and working on how to engage the back muscles between and under the shoulder blades, will probably do more appointments for that.
What I've been told by docs and the other professionals is that surgery would "fix" some of my problems, but may also give me new problems... so I've tried to manage without. I think I finally have a good solution with the PT and Feldenkreis. I wish I had done some of this PT from the start, but didn't really pursue it - one of the IMT practitioners I saw right after the injury was a PT and she gave me some PT exercises to do, but I've since realized that different PTs seem to have different specialties (for instance, not all are familiar with taping, and there are a number of taping methods) which would have been good to know.
Also fyi - you might want to ask around about the "with 6 weeks" recommendation for surgery for this. My second ortho doc (and I think the first one too) said that surgery right away wasn't necessarily better, and in fact he thought waiting until all the swelling went down (which would probably take 6 weeks, or more) would be better because the surgery is more difficult with swelling, and it's already a tricky surgery to do.
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What I've been told by docs and the other professionals is that surgery would "fix" some of my problems, but may also give me new problems... so I've tried to manage without. I think I finally have a good solution with the PT and Feldenkreis. I wish I had done some of this PT from the start, but didn't really pursue it - one of the IMT practitioners I saw right after the injury was a PT and she gave me some PT exercises to do, but I've since realized that different PTs seem to have different specialties (for instance, not all are familiar with taping, and there are a number of taping methods) which would have been good to know.
Also fyi - you might want to ask around about the "with 6 weeks" recommendation for surgery for this. My second ortho doc (and I think the first one too) said that surgery right away wasn't necessarily better, and in fact he thought waiting until all the swelling went down (which would probably take 6 weeks, or more) would be better because the surgery is more difficult with swelling, and it's already a tricky surgery to do.