Dr. Jocelyn Wittstein

And really the only men who get frozen shoulder are men with diabetes and usually poorly controlled diabetes.

So, you know, another inflammatory state.

So frozen shoulder is a condition that for many decades was described as idiopathic, which is a fancy word for we don't know what causes this.

I hate the word idiopathic.

Because you're an idiot.

Yeah.

But, you know, something cannot be idiopathic that almost entirely affects women.

Women, but not men, and almost entirely affects women between the age of 40 and 60.

That's the typical time frame.

But what frozen shoulder is, and it's also called atesic capsulitis, if you see that term, but it's typically a non-traumatic or sometimes minimally traumatic condition.

situation where you didn't have a big injury, but your shoulder becomes very painful and then subsequently very stiff.

It's a process where the lining of the shoulder joint, you may hear the term capsule or synovium.

Think of just sort of the lining around the whole ball and socket joint of your shoulder becomes inflamed and thick and fibrotic.

And our phases, one of my friends, Johanna Phan, who is in the forum with me, the Women's First Medicine Group, has described this very well over the years, including, you know, looking at the actual, you know, pathophysiology in the capsular tissue.

But there is an inflammatory phase where the shoulder becomes very, very painful, you know, like pain at end range of motion, just like, okay, with the mid-range, we get the end range and ow, like super painful, leads to guarding.

Then a frozen phase where it becomes not so painful, but just really stiff with the women can have extreme lack of motion.

I mean, I've had women come in who cannot rotate their arm out to the side or lift it up at all.

And I just don't know how they can brush their hair.

Oh, yeah.

Common things are I can't shave under my opposite armpit, cannot tuck in a shirt or fasten a bra.