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LETTER FROM LONDON |
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'Frozen Shoulder' Syndrome |
 "Doc, my whole shoulder and arm feel as though they're frozen. Do you think somebody put me in the freezer while I was sleeping?" |
When 'frozen shoulder'
isn’t something to eat
By MICHAEL JOHNSON
of TheColumnists.com
I love reading about medical fads that con hypochondriacs out of their insurance money, but finally I have found one that affects me. I realized it a couple of years ago when I tried to reach something private that I keep on a top shelf, way back in the shadows of a dark room. My right arm screeched with pain when I tried to raise it. I never did retrieve that stuff. My heirs will have to deal with it after I go.
In some pain, I consulted an actual scientifically trained person who told me I probably had nothing worse than “frozen shoulder.” To me, that sounded like something to eat, but he was serious. He ordered me to watch as he stood up and flapped his elbows like a chicken, then asked me to pretend I was pointing a gun at him. He raised both arms and said “Reach for the sky!”
“Bet you can’t do that,” he said mysteriously.
And he was right, I couldn’t, for I do indeed have frozen shoulder, he explained. It seems I have become a contender for what Americans are calling the most popular outpatient surgery since tennis elbow and cauliflower ear. The healthcare business is doing very well on this one.
As always, things are different in London. My doctor, a National Health Service person, tersely advised me to take a couple of aspirin daily for a week and I would probably be fine. He stopped flapping, lowered his arms and I was out on the street within the requisite seven minutes of consultation, still buttoning my shirt.
You have frozen shoulder if one of your arms produces a sharp pain as you raise it. Some people say it feels like getting struck by a bolt of lightning. Others merely wince. I’ve lived with this for some time without realizing how popular it has become.
Now I learn that between 5 and 10 per cent of the U.S. population between the ages of 40 and 60 suffer from it. That’s a rather wide spread by scientific data standards--a gap of 8 million potential fee-paying customers. But never mind. These figures may be conservative. When I asked a group of people I was addressing recently in London to raise their right hand about 20 percent of them said something like, “I would if I could.”
Here’s what it does to you. In serious cases, you feel a small ache in the ball-and-socket joint. A few days later you can’t reach above your head. A week later your arm works only from the elbow. Another week and it is hanging loose. The shoulder capsule becomes inflamed, reducing mobility in the arm. Women over 40 are particularly prone, and it takes about two years for the pain to abate unless various treatments are undertaken.
Some doctors profess to be puzzled by the apparent increase in incidence of this problem. Others assert that the culprit comes in two forms: we over-40s are staying more active than our bodies were built for, and we are carrying a lot of weighty stuff over our shoulder--backpacks, laptops, soft luggage--or schlepping around heavy things such as briefcases full of work we shouldn’t be taking home in the first place.
In my case, I figure that two weeks on the road around Asia, an old laptop on my shoulder, did me in. I felt like I had been playing football without the pads.
There is no doubt the disorder is catching on. Resorting to every researcher’s shortcut, I asked Google about frozen shoulder and found 365,000 sites trying to explain it or lure you in for a checkup. Numerous support groups, forums and chat rooms are up and running. Tennis elbow ranks lower with only 325,000 sites. Cauliflower ear is way down the list with only 29,900.
The wife of a Washington friend of mine--a smartly dressed lady who works as a magazine designer--recently had her shoulder unfrozen under outpatient anaesthetic in a D.C. area hospital. She couldn’t wait two years for it to go away. The procedure--it wasn’t pretty, she says--calls for the arm to be yanked overhead, ripping through tissue to render it mobile again. Six to nine months of physical therapy can follow.
“It wasn’t too bad,” she recalls. “When the anaesthetic wore off, it reminded me of natural childbirth.”
When she turned up two days later at a meeting of senior managers with a bag of ice on her shoulder, all she got was remarks about her reputation for trendiness, including in elective surgery. Grunted one of the male baseball fans around the table: “Who needs a shoulder if you’re not pitching with it?”
Her staff modestly looks away now as she performs her therapy by hanging from her office door frame or doing the chicken dance flat on her back once every 90 minutes throughout the day, emitting faint bleats.
Every situation has an upside, and I finally found this one. Next time a backpacker on the bus swings around and smacks you in the face with his pack, take heart. Eventually he or she will suffer a bad case of frozen shoulder.
©2004 by Michael Johnson. The cartoon is from IMSI's Master Clips Collection, 1895 Francisco Blvd. E., San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506, USA.
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