This Is Not How You Treat Frozen Shoulder

My first thoughts (only my opinion) on seeing the picture above was, this is certainly not how you should be treating a patient with frozen shoulder or any problem for that matter. 

The photos above and below taken from  Twitter made me cringe. I am apalled at the amount of damage that had been done to the person's tissues. Manual treatment, at least at our clinics and most that I know, do not look at all like that. Now that patient has to also heal from the damage his therapist did on him!

There are already many physiotherapists worldwide saying there is no evidence supporting 'manual therapy' and that manual therapy does not work and is a waste of time and money. 

There are growing calls that physiotherapists should not be doing 'hands on' treatment. This will lend further support to what they believe. 

Everyone has a right to their beliefs and I always say that they just don't know what they don't know. For every physiotherapist that wants to be 'hands off' when treating their patients, there will be a physiotherapist (or more) wanting to do only 'hands on' treatment. 

If you really want to be pedantic, that's not the spiral line. I have attached a picture of the spiral line as intepreted by Tom Myers above. 

Reference

Kerry R (2019). "Hands-on, Hands Off: Is That Even A Thing?" Physio First

*The 'hands off ' approach usually means not doing manual therapy like mobilising (pressing, pushing) on joints, muscles, fascia etc on patients. It does not mean the physiotherapist does not touch the patient, assess or palpate the patient. They still do, it's just that after their assessment, they usually prefer to educate their patients (by talking) or teaching exercises to oversee a care management program that addresses thee patient's long term goals and needs.

PS Sim - Winner Of The Cameron Ultra-Trail 100 Km Race

Picture from PS Sim

PS kindly agreed to not remain anonymous anymore so I can finally write here that she is the runner who won the Cameron Ultra-Train 100 km race despite having plantar fasciitis (for the past six months at least). She came back to our clinic today to allow me to finish assessing her and treat the cause of her pain.

Actually, after my previous post, I've had questions from some readers already asking me what I did for PS and her plantar fasciitis.

Here's a summary of what I did for those asking. No ultrasound, no ESWT (shock wave) needed, no orthotics and no other gimmicks.

Just plain old accurate body reading and thorough assessment after the body reading pointed to clues around her hips being one of the main reasons to her pain in her plantar fascia. Other contributing factors also suggest that changing shoes and her foot type may have triggered it.

So, of course I started treating her hip first and also taught her what to do to prevent it from recurring. She needs to work at this still for the time being.

 I wrote in my last session with her that I only had time to treat parts of her foot along her Superficial Back Line (SBL) and The Spiral Line.

Superficial Back Line

I did more work on her SBL and also treated fascia along her Superficial Front Line today. After that I had to change her pelvic rotation and suggested she may want to try taping her foot (in case she was planning on starting training again).

Happy to discuss if anyone has questions.

Spiral Line

Congrats to PS once again for a race well won and to Melvin for winning PS.