Abstract
Purpose: Frozen shoulder, an excruciatingly painful condition known medically as adhesive capsulitis, affects two million people in Britain. Diabetics and women aged 40–60 are particularly at risk. The current treatment for frozen shoulder includes painkillers, physiotherapy, or surgery. The above presents their own problems, including recurrence of symptoms, failure of therapy, and for surgery: recovery period, anaesthetic and surgical operative risks. In contrast, the therapy involving hydrodilatation injections into the shoulder takes just ten minutes and allows patients to go home immediately. Hydrodilatation had fallen out of favour as a means of treating frozen shoulders until the recent publications specifically the King’s Lynn study (Quraishi et al) in 2007. Our objective is to see if we can reproduce these results that the King’s Lynn study shows.
Method: Our study is a cohort study, prospectively evaluating the outcome of hydrodilatation as treatments for adhesive capsulitis. 24 patients were treated with hydrodilatation, and had Oxford scores done before injection; 2 months and 6 months after injection. The overall scores were recorded as was the range of movement.
Results: The overall scores for the study showed a significant improvement and increased ROM of patients’ shoulders.
Conclusion: We believe our study shows that hydrodilatation is an effective means of treating frozen shoulders. We believe our study demonstrates the need for hydrodilatation to be more widely practiced. Other therapy such as painkillers and physiotherapy has shown not to be effective, and surgery has its respective complications. Therefore hydrodilatation offers a minimally invasive, cheap, low risk alternative.
Correspondence should be addressed to: COA, 4150 Ste. Catherine St. West Suite 360, Westmount, QC H3Z 2Y5, Canada. Email: meetings@canorth.org
