Newsroom Hospital for Special Surgery

With Jimmy Butler, the Warriors are banking on a recovery that’s just about unprecedented

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 13:44:00 -0500

According to The San Francisco Standard, in the last 20 years, no NBA player Jimmy Butler’s age or older has returned from a torn ACL. Even in other team sports, it’s nearly impossible to find a comparable success story.

That doesn’t mean the 36-year-old Warriors wing can’t return to the court — just that the challenges he faces are practically unparalleled.

“He’s in a better situation than most 36-year-olds,” Laura Moore, MD, PhD, sports medicine surgeon at HSS said. “But everything gets harder when you get older. It’s harder. You’re probably at a little higher risk for stiffness, you’re at a higher risk for persistent swelling, you’re at a little bit of higher risk for aches and pains. And as you get older, it’s always harder to recover muscle mass. So he’s not a typical 36-year-old, but everything gets harder when you’re older.”

Butler will have every resource — physical therapists, recovery technology, athletic trainers managing swelling — available to him to achieve the best outcome possible. Still, he is “at kind of the tail-end of the bell curve for ACL injuries,” Dr. Moore said.

Read the full article at sfstandard.com.

Frozen Shoulder: The 'Excruciating' Condition Common During Perimenopause

Tue, 01 Jul 2025 09:01:00 -0400

According to TODAY.com, about 3 % of the population will develop a condition called frozen shoulder, which causes pain, arm stiffness and eventual immobility of their shoulder that can last up to two years. Experts aren’t entirely sure why it happens, but it impacts women twice as often as men and there seems to be a hormonal component to it.

“They actually have a name for it in other cultures,” Laura Moore, MD, PhD, sports medicine surgeon at HSS, tells TODAY.com. “In China, they call it the 50-year-old shoulder.”

Frozen shoulder starts with often unexplained shoulder pain that many attribute to an injury and progresses into stiffness that immobilizes the arm completely.

Read the full article at today.com.

Another Fun Thing About Middle Age: Frozen Shoulder

Thu, 17 Oct 2024 23:22:03 -0400

The Wall Street Journal discusses frozen shoulder, a painful condition where inflammation immobilizes the shoulder joint for months or even years. Doctors don’t know exactly what causes it. Unlike many other orthopedic problems, it’s not often triggered by overuse. Midlife women are especially prone to it.

Frozen shoulder sometimes happens after an injury or surgery, but it often develops out of the blue. The condition occurs when the shoulder’s capsule becomes stiff and tight as adhesions—thick bands of tissue—develop.

Symptoms come in three stages: The “freezing” stage typically occurs first, with worsening pain that makes it hard to move your shoulder. During the second—or “frozen”—stage, pain lessens but stiffness remains, and your range of motion is limited. The final, “thawing” phase is when your range of motion returns to normal.

Frozen shoulder can last from three months to two years. On average, it lasts six to nine months, says Laura Moore, MD, PhD, sports medicine surgeon in the HSS Women’s Sports Medicine Center. Treatments, aiming to reduce inflammation and improve pain and function, can vary, she says. Her go-to is a combination of steroid injections, an oral anti-inflammatory and physical therapy.

Read the full article at wsj.com. A subscription is required.