I’ve used an AC with all my animals, and have occasionally shared something I learned with the vet. Only the first couple times did the vet look at me like I was crazy. I always prefaced the request with, “I think there are a lot of things we don’t yet understand”. That’s certainly true.
The AC odds of being right are 50/50.
Those are excellent odds it may be right … or wrong.
We can play those games ourselves without needing to consult ACs.
Just ask your vet to go over the shoulder, again if it already did? 
I think you can tell your vet exactly what you said here, and they will probably understand and be perfectly willing to “indulge” you. There’s a big difference between what you’ve said here, and being a “crazy” client.
Look at it this way - It is better to be the client the vet talks about back at the office because you want to do more diagnostics because an AC suggested an area to look at, than be the client that is talked about because they are refusing to do anything for their horse.
Disclaimer - I do not work at a vets office and I have no idea if these conversations actually take place.
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You could block the shoulder joint.
The vets already think we are all crazy. There is little we could do that would even get a raised eyebrow from an experienced vet. 
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I have used an animal communicator to successfully identify problems with horses and dogs. I will never tell the vets I do this, I just find some way to say “it looks like…”. But after doing this for several years, I do consider an animal communicator to be an important member of my animal health care team. I work in science, so I was reluctant to trust it at first, but I cannot deny what I have observed.
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I had trouble with a mystery lameness that I ended up having to get a bone scan to identify (and it did, thankfully). One vet also thought it was a shoulder but it was a coffin bruise. The nerve blocking wasn’t working well because my mare was anticipating pain during certain movements and the lameness was only noticeable under saddle.
Anyway it’s a whole lot pricier than an AC but I wish I’d tried it sooner when I was struggling for answers for months.
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I’ve done a bone scan already with no definitive answer. She had a lot of areas that lit up in the bone scan, but when they went to do further investigation on the areas that lit up, nothing really aligned with clinical presentation and they still weren’t able to see her lameness improve after any blocks.
But it’s an interesting concept that your horse anticipated the pain despite a block… I had never heard of that before. We were always looking for the nerve block to “fix” a lameness before diagnosis, now I wonder if we may have missed something.
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Yeah she did it again recently with a saddle fit issue - took her two weeks to trust me again without resisting the movements that bothered her, like she develops the defensive behavior and then needs to be convinced again it won’t hurt even when the issue is fixed. Just very slowly and carefully push her through it and then the behavior luckily is gone.
This anticipatory stuff really didn’t make finding her ouchy spot any easier though. It’s only while riding that she anticipates.
