The Shoulder That Stopped Me Cold
What frozen shoulder taught me, as both a doctor and a patient, about the mystery we're calling hormones
The morning everything changed
It started with something small. A strange, almost imperceptible sensation in my left shoulder as I rolled over in bed. The kind of thing you'd brush off, file under nothing, and forget by morning.
Except the next morning, I woke up and couldn't lift my arm.
No accident. No fall. No injury I could point to. I just... couldn't. I couldn't hold anything with weight in my left hand. I couldn't raise my arm above shoulder height. I couldn't reach behind me. Overnight, without warning, I had lost strength and range of motion in a limb I'd used without a second thought my entire life.
I'll be honest with you: it was frightening. And I say that as someone who spent decades in clinical medicine, who has sat with patients describing their own mysterious symptoms and stayed calm and systematic. There is something deeply unsettling about when the mystery becomes your own body.
"There is something deeply unsettling about when the mystery becomes your own body."
I called my favorite physical therapist, the one I'd trusted and referred my own patients to for years, and asked if he could see me the next day. I was scratching my head. I had no answers. I just needed to start somewhere.
I wasn't starting from zero
I was in my late 40s. And I was already fighting battles on multiple fronts.
For years I had been managing endometriosis, a diagnosis that had been debilitating at its worst, reshaping my relationship with my body in ways that felt both intimate and exhausting. I was on bioidentical hormone replacement therapy, actively trying to support my system. I had TMJ. I had chronic low back pain and sciatica that I had quietly accepted as just part of my life, though not without a fight. Over the years I tried many, many therapies, always searching for answers, always chasing some version of relief. Chiropractic, physical therapy, acupuncture, various supplements, injections... I kept looking. These were symptoms I lived with. They had their own rhythms and their own stories, and I had learned to carry them, even as I kept searching for a way to put them down.
What I didn't realize at the time, what I couldn't see from where I was standing, was that all of these things might be telling the same story. That the shoulder was just the loudest chapter yet.
What medicine was saying
My physical therapist is someone I respect deeply, and he came prepared. He shared a growing body of research pointing to something that didn't yet have a formal name at the time, though it has since been labeled "Musculoskeletal Syndrome of Menopause" in more recent years. The pattern was striking: women in their late 40s and 50s presenting with debilitating joint pain, sometimes dramatic and seemingly unprovoked, with no clear precipitating event.
The explanation being offered: women in this demographic are experiencing a systemic shift driven by declining estrogen. Estrogen, it turns out, has anti-inflammatory and connective tissue-supporting properties. As levels drop, the theory goes, tissues become more vulnerable. Joints ache. Shoulders freeze.
And here's the thing, I don't dismiss this outright. Research is research. Many women in this demographic are suffering with joint pain, and some of them do find relief with hormonal support. That matters.
And yet, this framework had a significant gap when it came to my own situation. Yes, I would likely have been considered perimenopausal at the time, that transitional window that can span years. But I was already on bioidentical hormone support, actively trying to stabilize my system. If low estrogen was the driver, shouldn't that have been addressed? The hormone explanation, however reasonable on the surface, couldn't quite close the loop.
"I was already on hormone support, actively trying to stabilize my system. If low estrogen was the driver, shouldn't that have been addressed?"
So while I worked diligently through the physical therapy process, and while we made careful, hard-won progress over the months, there remained a residue of something unresolved. A question that the hormone explanation couldn't quite answer.
A year of PT, pain, and no real answers
Recovering range of motion in a frozen shoulder is not a graceful process. It is slow. It is painful. And it is humbling in a way that is particularly acute when you are a clinician who has sent dozens of patients down this same road.
I knew what the PT was doing and why. I understood the anatomy, the mechanism, the reasoning behind every mobilization. And still, I winced. Still, I had days where progress felt like an illusion. Still, I had mornings where I woke up and tested my arm first thing before I was ready to face whether it had cooperated overnight.
Over the course of about a year, we got my range of motion back. We did the work, and the work paid off. But the bottom line, the answer to why this happened, remained a mystery. It came out of nowhere. It resolved through effort. And no one, including me, could tell you exactly what had caused it.
That unresolved question stayed with me.
Years later: the piece that changed everything
It was years after that shoulder healed that I came across Anthony William's work, Medical Medium, and encountered a framework that recontextualized much of what I had experienced, not just in that frozen shoulder, but across years of accumulated, seemingly disconnected symptoms.
The premise, which I came to find deeply compelling: many chronic musculoskeletal conditions, including frozen shoulder, have a viral component that flies completely under the radar. Specifically, a particular strain of the shingles virus and/or Epstein-Barr virus, lying dormant in nerve tissue, can under certain conditions, stress, immune suppression, toxic burden, migrate and inflame the tissue surrounding nerves and joints. The shoulder capsule becomes collateral damage. And no standard lab panel is going to catch it.
When I heard this, something clicked. Not a soft, polite click. A loud one.
The TMJ. The low back pain. The sciatica. The endometriosis, which itself has viral and immune system connections that conventional medicine has been slow to take seriously. The frozen shoulder. These weren't separate stories happening to different body parts. They were variations on a theme, a body carrying a hidden burden, expressing it in different ways over time.
"These weren't separate stories happening to different body parts. They were variations on a theme."
Everything suddenly made more sense than it ever had under the hormone framework.
Hormones as bandaid, not villain, not cure
I want to be careful here, because I am not asking you to throw out hormonal support. That's not the argument.
For some women, hormonal therapy brings real relief, and real relief is not nothing. When you are suffering, when your shoulder won't move and your joints are screaming and you can't sleep, the thing that quiets the inflammation is valuable. I am not here to take that away from anyone.
What I'm proposing is a reframe. When hormones, whether bioidentical, topical, oral, or otherwise, seem to help joint pain and inflammation, I want us to ask: are they resolving the root cause, or are they functioning more like a steroid injection? Anti-inflammatory. Symptom-quieting. A way of turning down the volume on a signal the body is sending?
Steroids have their place. Injections have their place. Bandaids, at times, are exactly what we need to keep functioning while we do the deeper work. There is no shame in that.
But if we stop at the bandaid, if we call the question answered because the pain is quieter, we miss something. We miss the opportunity to ask what the body was actually trying to say.
What would it look like to go deeper?
This is the question I now bring to every woman who walks into my practice describing mysterious joint pain, shoulder symptoms that appeared out of nowhere, or a constellation of seemingly unrelated complaints that medicine has filed under menopause, hormones, or aging.
What does it look like to address the foundation? To support the liver in clearing viral debris and the accumulated toxic load that gives dormant pathogens their opening? To use targeted antiviral foods and supplements, wild blueberries, zinc, lysine, celery juice, to reduce viral activity at the source? To address the nervous system and the adrenals, which are often the terrain that viral activity thrives in when we're depleted?
It looks like more work than a prescription. It looks slower, and it requires a patient who is willing to be curious about their own body rather than just managed by it. It requires a practitioner who is willing to hold both the conventional framework and something larger at the same time.
But for the women who are willing, who want to move past the pain, not just quiet it, I have seen this approach shift things that years of symptom management could not.
"What if your body was never broken... just burdened?"
I think about my frozen shoulder differently now. Not as a menopause story. Not as a hormone deficiency. But as a message from a body that was carrying more than I realized, in a language I hadn't yet learned to read.
I'm grateful I kept looking for the translation.
