Frozen Shoulder: How Acupuncture Helps with Stiff Shoulders

It comes uninvited and stays for a long time: the stiff shoulder or frozen shoulder. If you want to get rid of them faster, you should try acupuncture.

It starts for no apparent reason: you put on your coat or take something from the top of the shelf – and suddenly pain shoots into your shoulder. Almost every everyday movement becomes a torture, the shoulder becomes stiff and feels like it’s frozen. Diagnosis: Adhesive capsulitis, better known as Frozen Shoulder, which describes quite well how you perceive such a frozen shoulder.

The success of many treatments is usually limited: It takes years before the arm can move normally again

Women over 40 are particularly often affected, and other risk factors include diabetes or lack of exercise. The fact that the symptoms will spontaneously improve by themselves at some point and the frozen shoulder will thaw out again is of little consolation, because in most cases it takes at least a year, sometimes even three years, for the arm to return to normal mobility.

In the meantime, physiotherapy can help; painkillers such as ibuprofen or ASS (in severe cases also stronger ones) are also used to be able to continue moving the arm in everyday life and to prevent further stiffening. Some doctors also inject painkillers or anti-inflammatory drugs directly into the joint to make the complaints more bearable. If nothing helps at all, in rare cases “releasing” surgical interventions against the frozen shoulder are also performed. However, the success of this method is often very limited.

A new study at the UKE in Hamburg shows Acupuncture reduces pain noticeably and immediately

Hope for a quicker and more effective solution is now being raised by a new study conducted by the University Hospital Hamburg-Eppendorf (UKE) – using acupuncture. Patients who were treated in the clinic using the usual methods were also given acupuncture treatment at the Centre for Traditional Chinese Medicine, which is also located at the UKE.

Initially, this was performed with special, very short needles that were stuck to the skin with small plasters. The researchers wanted to find out whether the needles could actually have an effect or whether only a placebo effect would occur. That is why half of the patients were given patches with needles and half patches without needles. Neither patients nor doctors could tell the difference. In fact, real acupuncture reduced the pain noticeably and immediately. In a second phase, patients who so wished received treatment with classical acupuncture needles ten times a week, for 20 minutes each time.

Acupuncture has decisive advantages over physiotherapy and painkillers

After one year, the complaints of the acupuncture group were compared with those of a control group that had only received physiotherapy and painkillers. The result was clear: Both groups were in about the same condition after one year – which is not surprising, since many patients begin to heal themselves within this period anyway. But acupuncture had a decisive advantage: the pain was proven to subside twice as quickly and significantly, on average after only 15 weeks. The only catch of the treatment: Acupuncture is not a usual health insurance benefit, a possible cost absorption must be clarified in advance for frozen shoulder.