This is one topic I know a lot about, having both experienced it in both shoulders and treated a lot of patients with it.

The above information doesn't clarify that there are two separate kinds of frozen shoulder, which require very different treatment. One kind develops after injury - the person doesn't move their shoulder because it hurts and if you don't use it, you lose it, (movement, that is). The other is called idiopathic, meaning we don't know what causes it.

If someone comes in with the first kind, we go straight to work to get the movement and strength back with fairly strong (as tolerated) stretches, joint mobilization (sliding stretches done by the therapist), exercises, etc. It usually takes about 3-4 months of 2-3 visits a week and a lot of self exercise to get most of the movement back.

The idiopathic frozen shoulder doesn't respond to that kind of treatment until you're well into the thawing phase. If you try it in the first two phases, it's extremely painful and doesn't help. You just have to wait it out, control the pain and try to get enough sleep, and eventually, according to the textbooks, you'll recover. It may take 12 to 24 months to go through all phases, and I don't think the shoulder gets back good movement unless you really work at it in the thawing phase. It took me a year of regular therapy to get back about 90% of my movement. When my family dr. discovered that I'd gone through it, he was very upset that I hadn't taken large doses of anti-inflammatories and had a cortisone injection into my shoulders, but he couldn't provide me with any evidence that it would help at all. I'd done enough research to know that it wouldn't.

Two things that happened during my recovery made me wonder just what the heck was really going on. When I was pretty much over the pain with movement, but was still very limited in movement, I went back to my PT, and with one technique (a myofascial unwinding) I regained about 50% of my forward movement in one movement. And while I was at a Mulligan course, the instructor did a certain sliding stretch on my shoulder and I went from 45 - 180 degrees of sideways movement. I hadn't been able to move my shoulder much for about 6 or 7 months by then. If it was a true tightening of the capsule with adhesion formation, that shouldn't have been possible.

There are therapists of varying kinds who claim to be able to stop this from developing, but there doesn't seem to be any published evidence.