What is the Best Treatment for Frozen Shoulder?

Despite more and more people becoming afflicted with this very painful and debilitating condition, doctors and other health practitioners are still behind when it comes to prescribing effective treatments for frozen shoulder. Does your doctor know enough about the condition and your specific case to prescribe a treatment that’s right for you? What are the most common conventional treatments for frozen shoulder? Here are the Main 10 Conventional Frozen Shoulder Treatments.

Top 10 Frozen Shoulder Treatments

Last month we conducted an informal survey online as well as with our patients: “What frozen shoulder treatments have/had you tried? And if you still have frozen shoulder, what are you currently doing for it?”

Judging from the main 10 conventinal frozen shoulder treatments chart, the data is clear that physiotherapy/physical therapy is still the first treatment that’s prescribed. This corroborates what our patients tell us–they first tried physiotherapy. Many patients report a worsening of their frozen shoulder following aggressive physical therapy. Research studies also indicate that physiotherapy can make frozen shoulder worse.

So, although it’s often recommended by medical physicians, the clinical and research evidence points to the fact that physical therapy is CONTRAINDICATED for adhesive capsulitis frozen shoulder. Read full research article here. This is because adhesive capsulitis is an inflammatory mediated disease. And the shoulder and neck is thus highly reactive to treatment in which attempts are made to aggressively stretch the deep capsular adhesions. Research studies show that, depending on the phase of frozen shoulder a patient is in, physical therapy either does not help or worsens the condition.

There are other commonly prescribed treatments on the 10 main conventional frozen shoulder treatments list such as cortisone injections, massage, acupuncture, etc. with varying levels of effectiveness. Different treatments work for different people according to their particular case and underlying conditions. But for a lot of frozen shoulder sufferers, their frozen shoulder condition has progressed to the point that it is beyond the scope of conventional treatments.

The MCD (Manual Capsular Dissection) Procedure is a safe, non-surgical manual dissection of frozen shoulder adhesions. It has a very high success rate irrespective of how long or how severe the patient’s frozen shoulder condition is. That being said, not every patient qualifies for the procedure. One of the ways that we’ve maintained our very high success rate is our strict patient qualification process.

To learn more about various frozen shoulder treatments options and get information that’s specific to your case and your potential underlying conditions, speak with one of our educational directors for a free phone consultation.

Lastly, people are still emailing us with contributions to last month’s survey. Keep the contributions coming as the more data we have, the greater the statistical significance of the survey! If you are reading this and you’d like to tell us what treatments you’ve tried for frozen shoulder, you can do so by commenting on this blog post or by leaving a comment on this Facebook thread:

Categorised in: Blog - World Frozen Shoulder Clinic