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.

Frozen shoulder could easily be the most difficult complaint we treat in our clinic. Perhaps along with the worst cases of back pain that have been left for far too long before seeking treatment. So if it’s that stubborn, the first question is, ‘can frozen shoulder be treated’?. And the answer is yes. One of the good pieces of news about frozen shoulder treatment is that, more or less, every case self-resolves eventually. The question is, how long are we willing to wait for your frozen shoulder to resolve itself, and how much can we speed up the process. So if we acknowledge that frozen shoulder can be treated successfully, then the next thing most people want to know is how long it’s going to take. As you may have guessed, this leads to the proverbial piece of string factor. Thankfully, there is a little more certainty about the treatment needed for frozen shoulder when compared to the length of a piece of string, because there is undoubtedly far less variation.

Frozen Shoulder and Treatment

Frozen shoulders that receive treatment tend to resolve on average about 90% faster than their untreated frozen shoulder counterparts. Almost all frozen shoulders will resolve within two years, even if they don’t receive treatment. Most people being frozen shoulder don’t get any proper rehab in the first year or so, due to a lack of options at the DHB level. In a typical frozen shoulder scenario the patient who has no treatment may find that in the first year of their onset of frozen shoulder, they may only experience a 10% improvement. Then later, when they do finally find a treatment that works for them, they can make another 50% improvement in a couple of months and then move up to about an 80% improvement in another couple of months—leaving them the remaining 20% to work through over six months. In total, there’s a 10% average improvement in the first year with no treatment, followed by a further 90% improvement in the second year with treatment. Of course, if they had found the successful treatment in the first year, the whole process would have taken half as long, or even 10% as long as the entire process with no treatment.