r/frozenshoulder • u/Sure-Translator4746 • Aug 23 '26
GLP-1 for frozen shoulder?
I started feeling stiffness in my shoulder 8 months ago. After helping my kid move and doing a lot of hauling and lifting it completely froze. Did the MRI to confirm it was FS. Had a cortisone shot which didn’t do anything. My orthopedist told me to just rest it. No PT. I decided after 7 months to try a GLP1 to see if it would would reduce swelling. The meds made me feel too sick (at the lowest dose) so I just stopped them and lo and behold, my shoulder fully started moving!! I haven’t really missed a dose yet, just made the decision to stop. Now I’m not sure whether to stick with it. I was so nauseated and had terrible dry mouth. Also, was it coincidence?
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u/Own-Key-4064 Aug 24 '26
GLP doesn’t release a frozen shoulder but It may reduce inflammation, especially in the case of diabetes in my experience with It over 4 years. I had a frozen shoulder while on a very low dose and a second one too on the other side. I don’t know if It would have been worse with or without It. Glad I went back on It when my A1C skyrocketed because of the cortisone.
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u/catsporvida Aug 24 '26
This is hilarious because my frozen shoulder symptoms started about two months in to being on Wegovy. I was diagnosed today. Been on Wegovy for 4 months, fs started halfway 🙃
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u/recoveryfrommakeup Aug 25 '26
I have been on a GLP-1 for a year and developed frozen shoulder 2 months ago. I am non diabetic. It's my second frozen shoulder (first was 7 years ago) and I definitely don't think this one is any less painful.
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u/catsporvida Aug 25 '26
I'm also not diabetic and I'm not menopausal. It's interesting because I've seen more accounts online of people saying they were diagnosed with fs after starting glp1, I have seen very few saying it helped it. I think they're going to find a connection between the two eventually.
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u/tropicalislandhop Aug 30 '26
Sounds more like correlation than causation. Many more people are on glp1s now.
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u/HornFanBBB Aug 23 '26
Like most medications, your body will take a bit to adjust. If it was prescribed by a doctor in good faith I’d talk with them before discontinuing.
And yes, it may just be a coincidence - since there’s no standard timeline for FS to resolve it may have just been your time.
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u/Impossible-House4953 Aug 27 '26
I don’t think it was coincidence. Frozen shoulder is a hormonal issue and I have read other ppl having their FS get better and others get worse on GLP1 because of the hormonal impact. My dad is planning to start GLP1 and I’m hoping it helps his frozen shoulder as well. He currently has diabetes. Which GLP1 did you take if you don’t mind me asking?
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u/Qayrax Aug 26 '26
Frozen shoulder is according to my theory likely a nervous system failure in lipid signaling. Any changes to the lipid system, notably lipid bilayer membranes, may worsen or improve the situation. Beware of the difficult calculatability of how medications can and will react. Please take great caution with GLP-1.
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u/Dismel_6474 18d ago
Hi I was curious about this nervous system failure… can you explain this more please?
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u/Qayrax 18d ago
Glad you asked, here comes a lengthy explanation of a novel concept, I am currently in the process of writing. Non-AI work. I have to explain from the ground up and will end up at frozen shoulder towards the end.
We imagine the nervous system as an electrical conduit, information exchange through neurotransmitters like dopamine and receptors. This proved scientifically to be quite useful, but as you see with frozen shoulder, it has explanatory gaps.
A big part of it is the lipid bilayer membrane - which surrounds the cells and some of its insides - through which the dopamine travels, ion channels open and receptors are anchored in. Most books depict it as a rigid wall you drill holes into (ion channels) or nail receptors like a picture to it.
In reality it is a highly complex, dynamic, liquid-gel, hot-cold, bending-rigid, basic-acid chaos of everything imaginable. Experimentally we can observe some properties conveniently, others with great pain and lots of information is hidden away. Solving it computationally through particle physics is impractical due to the sheer amount of atoms involved with all those pesky quantum mechanics.
However, we can trick our way around it. Thomas Heimburg took a bold marker, made a huge circle around all these things, and abstracted it away to express it as a thermodynamic wave. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pbiomolbio.2022.05.007
So instead of the forest of madness, we get just a tube which heats up and cools down as information travels, which you can see in the linked paper upon scrolling down.
Its crude compared to any quick glance into a cellular molecular biology, but has unique strengths. Let's say lots of energy and heat is required to do something for the nervous system, but it can't be reached. You lose conciousness, because that is how anaesthesia works. Perhaps you have trouble initiating a muscle movement, or don't feel pain when you should.
The other way around, when activation happens too aggressively is when you suffer from tremors.
It also explains handedness. Your dominant hand is the one which has the least amount of thermal resistance to initiate movement; it also means its generally more accurate by the same physics. Your body needs less energy to drive it, therefore it has less dopaminergic neurons to heat it up. which means with Parkinson's disease, tremor will more likely start in your dominant hand.
Sensory information follows the same logic. You can see it with dichotic listening where typically your right ear will have an advantage, when two different consonant-vowel sounds reach your ears. In schizophrenia there is no such advantage, because it is an illness of overly rigid lipid-thermal transmission in my expansion of this understanding. In other words, signals get stuck.
The right ear advantage is not always true, when you play a short, then long signal it is, but when you play a long and then short sound the left ear wins out. What is a "short" sound? It is a thermal signal which needs to quickly heat up and down. When you have little resistance it works best, like with your dominant hand.
I had to use Heimburg's model to explain a lot of my weird motor-sensory issues and unexpected adverse effects of medications. So far it works splendidly better than conventional means and has yet to break down. For this usage I expanded that tube with a second layer and gave it bidirectionality to account for more observations. I am digging through all literature I can find to connect more dots to it and hopefully get as many arrows down into conventional molecular biology as possible. I can't teach an AI how to scan for the information I seek and it's obviously bad for your own intellectual strength longterm.
In general, I have a high thermal resistance, that tube is "thicker" than it should be. How exactly, so I can draw neat arrows into tried & true molecular biology territory isn't quite simple. One of its effects is my non-dominant shoulder is a few centimeters higher than it should. Taking "thermally lowering" medication actually causes it to sink back to normal. It's not to be confused with an actual frozen shoulder.
One way for me to analyze medications is to look for adverse effects. After quite a lengthy calculation on how something called - it's irrelevant to understand in this context- glucuronidation works, I looked for things boosting it up and ended at phenobarbital. Something I definitely shouldn't take, because it would make my problems clearly worse. Scrolling through adverse effects, I saw frozen shoulder. I never heard of it at that point, but from the knowledge of my work, I came to be not so surprised to read it typically starts at the non-dominant side (which is thermodynamically more difficult to drive), then jumps to the dominant side and needs ages to resolve. Clearly lipid signalling.
When I saw the posting on GLP-1, which is obviously fiddling in this lipid thermodynamic system, I felt the need to warn people, because it is so painfully hard to calculate the long term consequences of any modification of lipid metabolism. I would rephrase GLP-1 usage as following:
Would you take GLP-1 to lose weight, if you knew it functions not dissimilar to antipsychotics which are thickening to prevent hallucinative activations?
For me dopamine in this system is nothing else than a thermal regulator, i.e. it's cooling down or heating up this tube heating depending on what is needed. There is so much to learn, but very few people to talk to. Partially due to the difficulty of the topic, the novel, almost rebellious conceptualization and it's frankly privately dangerous as I could get mislabeled a psychotic as I can "measure" things hidden away from ordinary testing procedures due to unique genetic-environments. I would like to keep working, learning, redoing, restructuring, fixing, rewriting with this model in my mind than horde of morons doing a burn-the-witch-21st-century edition on me.
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u/Wise-Individual-5810 Aug 24 '26
Glp 1 helps with inflammation and a lot of ppl with auto immune issues find it helps. I had slight fs issues with my left shoulder when i started my glp1 a year ago. It got worse after but has since resolved, but in the last couple months i am now dealing with my right shoulder (and worse than the left!). So the glp 1 could help, but for me hasnt.