Physical Therapy and Manipulation under Anesthesia for Patients with Frozen Shoulder

Frozen Shoulder (FS) has been a common disease that causes notable morbidity. Conservative treatments starting from oral medication, physical therapy, exercise, steroid injection, and hydrodilatation can be chosen before surgical procedure. Recently, there are many arguments regarding the manipulation under anesthesia (MUA) procedure whether it is good or bad compared to physical therapy. This paper is done by reviewing and searching journals with “frozen shoulder”, “physical therapy”, “manipulation under anesthesia”, and “conservative” on the search engines. From 47 journals that were reviewed, 45 were found composed as references for this review. There is no exact consensus from few pieces of literature to define which FS patients will benefit the most following the MUA procedure. Physical therapy or home exercise is still the first-line treatment for FS. Most of the cases showed that this first line of treatment is capable of resolving FS. physical therapy has its place in every phase of the FS, starting from the freezing until the thawing phase. Physical therapy remains the key and core choice of treatment in treating the patient with FS. It seems that physical therapy still the most important treatment to be applied as most of the studies reported satisfaction alongside the combination of other conservative treatments. Keywords: frozen shoulder, physical therapy, manipulation under anesthesia, conservative.