Eventually, you will have pain-free motion in your arm. This warning should not be necessary, but unfortunately some doctors are unaware of what steroids do to blood glucose. If your doctor doesn t understand how serious a problem this is, insist on including an endocrinologist in your medical team. I suggest anybody who really wants to know about it who can visit Boston go to see Dr. Gordon Lupien, who used to be orthopedic surgeon at Joslin and, according to a couple doctors I asked, knows more about adhesive copsulitis in diabetic than anyone else. Diabetics get frozen shoulder more than non-diabetics.
Women get frozen shoulder more than men.
The exact cause and pathology is completely unknown, but often adhesive capsulitis follows an untreated injury, or bursitis or tendonitis or even a period of no stretching exercises. Adhesive capsulitis is often mis-diagnosed as a torn rotator cuff, which may will be involved but which will heal without the surgery most orthopedic surgeons prescribe for it. What s more, an often undiscussed side-effect of the surgery is permanently reduced range of motion, because tendons are snipped and resewn, and thus shortened. Cortisone is often prescribed for non-diabetic patients, and only for diabetic patients by doctors unfamiliar with the dramatic effect cortisone has on bloodsugar levels. Dr. Lupien told me cortisone doesn t even really have any long-term effect except to reduce the pain for awhile, and should be avoided completely since it could also permanently screw up how your body deals with cortisone.