I’ve recently had a 45 year old female patient whom clinically presented with adhesive capsulitis. If you are not familiar with this diagnosis it is also known as “frozen shoulder”. The patient presented with shoulder pain and progressing decrease in range of motion of her right shoulder for about a 1 1/2 years. Over the course of the first several weeks, we were able to achieve an increase in range of motion and decrease in pain with manual stretching, kinesiotaping, and joint mobilizations, however, further range of motion was limited by pain. We decided to trial dry needling as an adjunct prior to our stretching and mobilization techniques to determine effects. We targeted the upper trap, biceps, pec, and deltoid. She reported soreness following the dry needling sessions but felt like she was now able to feel our manual stretching more in the joint versus the pain in her muscles. She, overall, had remarkable improvements in her shoulder range of motion (over 20-45degrees in only 4 dry needling sessions) to the point where she was able to start swimming again. I came across this case report in JOSPT (Journal of Orthopaedic & Sports Physical Therapy) that also had similar effects: http://www.jospt.org/doi/abs/10.2519/jospt.2014.4915#.VkotuLerRdg
Dry needling for the win!
