On the X-ray, the top of the man's upper arm bone was simply gone. Where a rounded ball should have sat snugly in the shoulder socket, the shaft of the bone appeared to hang in space, disconnected from the joint above it.
The striking image of a 45-year-old man with a painful, swollen right shoulder was published July 30, 2026, in the New England Journal of Medicine by doctors from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore and Hacettepe University in Ankara, Turkey. His diagnosis was Milwaukee shoulder syndrome, a rare, destructive joint disorder linked to tiny calcium-containing crystals.
