PHS / Frozen Shoulder

It begins gradually. A pull when putting on your jacket. A stabbing pain when you reach for a glass on the top shelf. A moment of bewilderment when you want to comb your hair in the morning and your arm suddenly refuses to go where it just was. And then, week by week, the radius shrinks. The shoulder stiffens. It freezes. In the end there is a joint that refuses to do anything at all.

Medicine calls it periarthritis humeroscapularis or Frozen Shoulder. Inflammation and degeneration in the soft-tissue mantle of the shoulder joint, adhesions in the joint capsule, shortened tendons, irritated tissue. All of that is true — and it describes what happens without saying why it happens. Because Frozen Shoulder almost never appears where something has simply broken down physically. It appears where a person has reached an inner point at which something can no longer go on.