Frozen Shoulder in Menopause: 5 Steps to Treat It & Recover Faster | Dr. Vonda Wright

Dr. Vonda Wright (0:00)

If your shoulder suddenly hurts and you did nothing to it, you may have adhesive capsulitis, or commonly known as frozen shoulder. And today, I'm going to walk you through what it actually is, what is actually happening to your shoulder, and how I treat it in my clinic. Because three out of four people who get frozen shoulder are women in perimenopause, and that is not a coincidence. So, let me set the scene.

Out of nowhere, your shoulder hurts, you didn't bang it on the door, you didn't lift heavy.

It starts as that niggly feeling, and you're like, oh, my shoulder is a little sore. And then before you know it, you can no longer reach behind your back and hook your bra. I call it the hook your bra test. You can no longer do this. And what's worse, you can't even lift your arm up, but you think it's going to go away. You know you didn't hurt it. And so you wait, and you wait, and you wait because women are like that. You got a lot to do, and you're used to suffering. So as you're waiting, within a week or so, you can no longer raise your arm. Seriously, you walk into my office like this, you can no longer raise your arm. And when you go finally see your orthopedic, they say, oh yeah, you've got a frozen shoulder.

And you're like, I did nothing to it. Well, here's the news. You did nothing at all other than you lost your estrogen and you're highly inflamed. You didn't do anything. You're not falling apart, but you have changed from the inside out. Hi, I'm Dr. Vonda Wright. I'm your orthopedic sports surgeon and founder and creator of skeletal longevity. When my team wrote the paper on the musculoskeletal syndrome of menopause, frozen shoulder was the story that opened it. Because that is the shoulder that made 550,000 women recognize themselves. If your shoulder is talking to you, then this video is for you.

But let's set one thing straight.

You are not falling apart.

You are not going crazy. In all likelihood, your shoulder is not broken.

Your estrogen is walking out the door, and your joint capsule, the inside of your shoulder, is paying the price. But what is happening in your body? What is happening inside your shoulder?

Every joint in your body is wrapped in a capsule. I call it the inside skin. It's like shrink wrap around the joint, but it holds the fluid inside the joint. A healthy shoulder capsule is like a loose windbreaker. Plenty of room to move around. In a frozen shoulder, the capsule becomes like a web suit. It shrinks a couple sizes. It becomes inflamed, thickened, and contracted, and the joint literally cannot move inside. And when we try to, it's very painful.

The joint capsule has estrogen receptors all over it. And when you no longer have your estrogen, the loose capsule loses its lubrication and gains fibrosis or scar tissue. And that's what causes the shrinkage. The frozen shoulder has four phases, actually. The freezing phase, which is the part where you're like, I didn't do anything to my shoulder. Why is it so painful? That can be two to nine months. The frozen stage, whereas it's stiff and painful, can last another four months. Then there's a thawing stage, the recovery stage, that can last five to twelve months. And then there's the resolution, when your shoulder's back to normal. Have you added up all these months?

Frozen shoulder can take two years to thaw without treatment. Who can walk around without a shoulder moving like this? We need to take the right steps to shrink that timeline dramatically. If you get an MRI during this time, 41% of the time, there will be no structural problem, no cuff tear, no arthritis, just an inflamed, contracted capsule of menopause. So how do I treat this? Well, when I'm in my clinic and I'm looking in the hallway at who's coming to clinic today and it says 46-year-old woman with shoulder pain, 52-year-old woman with shoulder pain, I can almost predict what's going on. Frozen shoulder is a clinical diagnosis and you should probably go see an orthopedic surgeon or a sports medicine doctor.

You will lose internal rotation, meaning you can't get your arm behind your body to hook your bra. You will lose abduction, meaning you can't lift your arm to the side or forward flexion. Those are all signs of a frozen shoulder. Yes, your doctor will probably rule out rotator cuff, arthritis, a pinched nerve in your neck, but do not spend six months not knowing what's going on. You need to keep your shoulder moving. Either get to a clinician or get to physical therapy.