VIDEO: Skilled in-office therapy may not be needed after reverse shoulder arthroplasty
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Key takeaways:
- Therapist-guided, in-office rehabilitation may not be needed after reverse shoulder arthroplasty.
- Surgeon-directed home therapy had comparable outcomes vs. supervised therapy.
SAN ANTONIO — In this video, Grant E. Garrigues, MD, FAAOS, discusses two trials that compared outcomes for surgeon-directed home exercise vs. therapist-guided, in-office rehabilitation after reverse shoulder arthroplasty.
At the American Shoulder and Elbow Surgeons Annual Meeting, Garrigues accepted the 2025 Charles S. Neer Award for clinical science presented by the ASES Foundation.
Garrigues, associate professor and director of upper extremity research at Midwest Orthopaedics at Rush, and colleagues from Duke Orthopaedics received the award for their randomized clinical trials of 196 patients who underwent reverse shoulder arthroplasty with minimum 2-year follow-up.
Garrigues and colleagues assessed outcomes of surgeon-directed home therapy vs. therapist-guided, in-office therapy after RSA.
“Either way, the patients need to go through a progression. They need to move their arm and rehab. But the question is whether the exercises were simple enough that you may not need the skilled expertise of a physical therapist,” Garrigues told Healio.
“The bottom line was: There was no added benefit to skilled therapy after a primary, routine RSA,” he added. “I think this is going to change my practice. Some people were already of the mind that this wasn’t helpful. Some people think therapy is critical. I think we can answer that question definitively.”
Reference:
https://ortho.duke.edu/news/duke-orthopaedics-research-team-receive-2025-charles-s-neer-award
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Garrigues GE, et al. 2025 Charles S. Neer Award for clinical science. Presented at: American Shoulder and Elbow Surgeons Annual Meeting; Oct. 16-19, 2024; San Antonio.
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