Forty patients with frozen shoulder were randomly allocated to a treated group who received oral prednisolone or a nontreatment group who received no specific therapy. All the patients were encouraged to perform home pendular exercise. The improvement in pain at night showed a significantly different pattern in the two groups (p less than 0.05), with the treated group improving more rapidly. Pain on movement and at rest and the recovery in the range of movement was not significantly different in the two groups. There was no difference between the patient groups at the end of the study (8 months follow-up) and patients still had a marked restriction in range (p less than 0.0001) when compared to normal controls of similar age and sex.