Treatment of ipsilateral shoulder pain after thoracic surgery—time for comparative studies?

Ipsilateral shoulder pain (ISP) is a common complication to thoracic surgery with an incidence between 37–97% depending on the study population and type of thoracic surgery (1-4). In many cases, the pain resolves or minimizes after the first few days, but has been reported to last up to 4 days and becomes chronic in a subset of patients (5,6).