Physiotherapy is normally the first treatment of choice in the rehabilitation of painful shoulder

Physiotherapy is normally the first treatment of choice in the rehabilitation of painful shoulder conditions, but it comprises a wide range of interventions of which therapeutic exercise is only one. Systematic reviews published to date often assess the effectiveness of physiotherapy as a whole, thereby giving all forms of interventions equal value, even the less common. Moreover, it has been argued that the poor reliability of shoulder diagnoses has led to great discrepancies between findings in the literature on shoulder rehabilitation. The purpose of this systematic review was to evaluate the effect of therapeutic exercise as a specific treatment on the non specific group of mechanisms causing shoulder pain.

It was found that therapeutic exercise had a positive effect on reduction in pain levels and that there is evidence for a dose-response relationship. Surprisingly, exercise interventions did not have a positive effect on the range of motion in shoulder pathologies; this however may be the result of large differences between individual study effects. When function was considered as an outcome, there seemed to be a small positive effect of exercise interventions over no care or other interventions > from Marinko et al.; J Shoulder Elbow Surg 20 (2011) 1351-1359. All rights reserved to the Journal of Shoulder and Elbow Surgery Board of Trustees