BACKGROUND: At present, the treatment of rotator cuff injury is still an emphasis and hotspot in orthopedics clinical research. Although the therapies of rotator cuff injury are constantly innovating and improving, there is still a lack of unified standards and understanding, and each treatment has different strengths, weaknesses and indications. OBJECTIVE: To provide more ideas for orthopedic clinicians to treat rotator cuff injury by summarizing the indications of different therapies of rotator cuff injury. METHODS: A computer-based online research of PubMed, Embase, The Cochrane Library and ClinicalKey databases was performed for relevant articles published from 1990 to 2019 with the keywords of “rotator cuff tear, rotator cuff injury, therapeutic, treatment and therapies”. The unrepresentative and over-dated articles and studies that did not meet the inclusion criteria were excluded, and finally 77 eligible articles were included for analysis and summary. RESULTS AND CONCLUSION: (1) The treatments of rotator cuff injury can be divided into conservative treatments and surgical treatments, in which surgical treatments mainly include rotator cuff debridement, superior articular capsule reconstruction, reverse shoulder arthroplasty, and subacromial balloon spacer. In the choice of these treatments, different types of rotator cuff injury have different indications. (2) It is worth noting that massive rotator cuff injury is still a challenge in clinical treatment due to the high surgical failure rate and postoperative retear rate. However, with the rapid development of material science and tissue engineering, the new adjuvant therapy technologies have been gradually applied in clinical practice, and have become the focus in the field of rotator cuff injury. © 2020, Journal of Clinical Rehabilitative Tissue Engineering Research. All rights reserved.