Frozen shoulder is a horrendously disabling, painful and frustrating complaint. Most people who experience frozen shoulder have been extremely healthy and active their whole lives and suddenly, out of the blue, get the bitter taste of what it’s like to live with an actual disability. No fun at all. The only positive you can take from the pain and disability that frozen shoulder brings is that it makes you highly motivated to get well. This is lucky because frozen shoulder takes a fair amount of tenacity and skill to resolve successfully in a satisfactory timeframe. When the rubber hits the road, and you’ve decided to get treatment for your frozen shoulder, what matters is making sure you are getting the right treatments and not the wrong ones. So, what are treatments that work for frozen shoulder?

Shockwave Therapy for Frozen Shoulder

Shockwave therapy is an excellent research-based way to treat the symptoms of frozen shoulder and dramatically speed up frozen shoulder recovery. Shockwave therapy was developed originally for the treatment of kidney stones. Amazingly, once this treatment was established, it became apparent to researchers that in addition to dissolving kidney stones, patients were also experiencing spontaneous resolution of stubborn pains. 

There is a wide range of applications for shockwave therapy in pain management; it can be used for anything from tendinitis in your thumb right through to resolving stress fractures. In the instance of frozen shoulder, shockwave therapy helps dissolve the fibrous thickening in the joint capsule, much the same way it resolves the stones in kidney stones and the way that it dissolves calcification and shoulder tendons with calcific tendinitis. A few (if any) treatments can accelerate recovery from frozen shoulder as quickly and consistently as shockwave therapy.

Rehabilitation For Frozen Shoulder

The word rehabilitation is used here to refer to our actions in the long term to ensure the frozen shoulder doesn’t come back. So we are talking about relieving frozen shoulder and preventing future attacks of frozen shoulder. Rehabilitation for frozen shoulder is essentially the same as rehabilitation of posture. One of the primary underlying causes of frozen shoulder is the combination of sedentary work at a desk, usually combined with postural weakness (and also stress, FYI).

So in the long term, rehabilitating frozen shoulder is about strengthening the postural muscles and ensuring that you’re more upright over time. In nitty-gritty practical terms, this means spending 10 minutes a day doing strength exercises for your upper back. These can be done at the gym, but they can also be done at home quite quickly with some essential equipment, and ultimately, they are no more trouble than you already take to look after your teeth. This takes the pressure off the shoulder joint capsule, making you less susceptible to repeat cases of frozen shoulder.