I don’t know if you’ve realized it– but the pelvic floor has become crazy popular! This article by The Guardian was published 2 months ago. 3 different patients and a few friends forwarded it to me, as it highlights just how popular pelvic floor rehabilitation has become. And I’m not surprised. When I first started treating pelvic floor disorders, nearly every patient who came in the door had never heard of the pelvic floor, let alone, a physical therapist who treated the pelvic floor. They would look at me with a perplexed and nervous gaze as I would do my best to explain the anatomy and why there really was a GREAT reason that their doctor had recommended them to come see me. This situation repeated itself again, and again, and again.
But now, it’s actually a much more foreign experience. For the most part, my patients have some level of knowledge about the pelvic floor muscles. The internet and social media has allowed people more access to knowledge– including experts who make informative Tik-tok videos, infographics and blog posts 🙂 on their diagnoses and treatment options. This has created more informed consumers who are learning more about their health, care about their wellness, and are seeking to find the best answers for their care.
In fact, it now very rare for for someone to come in and tell me they’ve never heard of pelvic floor rehabilitation. And that is AMAZING my friend.
When I first moved to Atlanta in 2014, I could count the number of pelvic PTs in the area on one hand. Now?? The last time I counted, there were more than 30 of us. I’m sure that number is closer 50 or even more (I know this because nearly every level 1 pelvic floor course I teach has at least a few Atlanta based people in it!!). And while, again, this is amazing– it’s only barely scratching the surface of what is actually needed!
The reality is that pelvic floor problems are super common, and people dealing with pelvic floor problems are often struggling to find care! Look at some of these numbers:
Approximately 10% of people experience fecal incontinence
So… while we are serving so so many more people than we used to, we are just scratching the surface! If you are new to this blog, and want to read a little bit more to start learning about the pelvic floor, check out some of these posts:
Also, if this is resonating with you, and you’re feeling like you may need some help, reach out and let us know!! You don’t need to be one of those statistics– you can get relief, you can feel better! And if you’re not ready to see someone in person, check out some of our mini-courses online on pelvic floor topics!
With Mother’s Day around the corner, we’ve been wanting to give back and help out the mothers in our community (around the country…around the world!) who are struggling in this interesting new normal. Figuring out managing caring for children, homeschooling, work/family obligations, all while trying to keep their families safe, sane, engaged. Let’s be honest, being a mom is the hardest, but most rewarding job ever!
To celebrate our mamas everywhere, we have a few discounted specials to roll out to you!
50% off first Virtual Pelvic Floor Consultation
First, we are offering50% off a virtual pelvic health consultation with one of our incredible pelvic floor specialists. Honestly, we’ve never discounted our services before, but I just felt like this was the right thing to do. So, for $97 you (or the mama you gift this to!) can receive a 55-minute virtual consultation. If you live in Georgia, this will be a pelvic floor physical therapy evaluation. If you don’t, our license won’t let us provide you with physical therapy, but we can still offer you a virtual coaching consultation. So, if you’re struggling with any pelvic health problem– constipation? pain with sex? bladder leaks?– or if you need help recovering after children, getting back to exercise, or preventing problems in the future– this deal is perfect for you! Don’t miss out on this opportunity!!
20% Off Online Classes
Along with this, we are offering 20% off our on-demand classes via the Southern Pelvic Health x The Vagina Whisperer partnership! Each of these classes is 90-minutes and covers SO much information, with great bonuses included! Classes are normally $39 each, so this is a nice discount to get some solid information!! (Gift idea: Consider a birth package for that pregnant mama in your life! Combine our birth prep class with a posptartum recovery class so that new mom has all she needs to rock her birth and after!) Be sure to use promo code MOM20 at checkout!
These specials are only available through Monday May 11, so don’t delay!
Did you know that Endometriosis affects more people that inflammatory bowel disease?
Did you know that 10-15% of women (and some men too!!) suffer with endometriosis?
Did you know that they often see 7+ physicians before being diagnosed with the condition?
Endometriosis is so common, and often can be a very life-impacting condition. As a pelvic PT, I often treat individuals with endometriosis, helping them with the musculoskeletal and neuromuscular sequelae of the condition. I have also helped many patients navigate the healthcare system to ultimately receive the appropriate care they so desperately have needed.
In honor of Endometriosis Awareness Month, I asked Dr. Ken Sinervo, the medical director for the Center for Endometriosis Care in Atlanta, GA to spend some time with me discussing this important diagnosis. Dr. Sinervo is an expert in treating endometriosis, and I can’t tell you how lucky I am that his office is about 20 minutes from mine! He is also a kind and humble person and a compassionate physician, and I was so excited to interview him for this post!
In the video below, we discuss:
What is endometriosis and where does it occur?
What are the current theories on the causes of endo?
How can it be treated?
Excision vs. Ablation surgery
How to find an Endo expert
For pelvic PTs: How do you identify patients who may have endo?
And, as an extra bonus, cherry on top, Dr. Sinervo describes the research he is involving in trying to identify potential markers to actually test for endometriosis!!
I hope you enjoy the video as much as I enjoyed interviewing him! I apologize in advance if our video cuts out a little bit, but I don’t think it impacts the incredible content (Our weather in Atlanta was a little struggly, so I think my internet had some difficulties!).
Last summer, Sara Sauder asked me to collaborate with her and Amy Stein on a submission to Sexual Medicine Reviews, highlighting the role physical therapy can play in helping men and women with sexual dysfunction. I was thrilled to have the opportunity to collaborate with Amy and Sara, and for the next year or so, we worked together to create “The Role of Physical Therapy in Sexual Health in Men and Women: Evaluation and Treatment.”
In this article, Amy, Sara and I discuss the role the pelvic floor muscles play in sexual health and common dysfunctions that can occur. We also discuss the process of physical therapy evaluation and treatment for sexual dysfunction, as well as the evidence regarding the efficacy of such treatments. Submitting to a peer-reviewed journal was humbling and exciting, and honestly, gave me much more respect for the process. I have been wanting to get involved with research for some time now, and I hope that this will be a springboard to more involvement and more writing.
The journal gives authors access to full-text of the article for the next 45 days, and I am excited to have the opportunity to share it with all of you!! Please let me know what you think of the article, and enjoy!
I am super excited to roll-out the first Small Group Mentoring Program! I envisioned this program starting about a year and a half ago after teaching a Pelvic Floor- Level 1 Course and talking with clinicians who were getting started in the specialty of pelvic health. I sensed such a need for support, guidance, and community as people were building their caseloads treating new diagnoses. So, this program in many ways is an answer to that need. The goal of this program is both to improve clinical confidence and excellence in care as well as foster community for continued professional growth in the future. The inaugural small group mentoring series will begin November 2018 and run through April 2019.
What the program includes:
6-months of small group mentoring (with a maximum of 8 clinicians per group) via monthly 90-min video(Zoom) conferencing on topics individualized based on the group interest. For additional information on the session details, check out the FAQ document at the bottom of this post!
Periodic access to patient education handouts/resources as they match the topic of discussion
Facilitation of group collaboration, discussion and community-building through a private Facebook group page.
Discounted individual mentoring rates while participating in the program
Pre-Requisites:
At this time, small group mentoring is limited to Physical Therapists or Occupational Therapists who are licensed to treat patients. I am happy to provide individual mentoring for other health professionals, personal trainers, yoga instructors, etc. but am limiting the scope for small group mentoring to ensure the same background education and scope of practice for clinical discussion. To optimize discussion, it is strongly encouraged that participants have taken at least a Level 1 Pelvic Floor course or equivalent, and are currently treating patients with pelvic floor dysfunction. Physical Therapy students will be considered on a case-by-case basis, provided the student has completed or is currently completing a rotation in pelvic health and has completed the aforementioned coursework.
Your Investment:
Your introductory rate as a participant in the inaugural series will be $475. This will include 6, 90 minute group mentoring sessions, or 9 hours of mentoring, as well as all of the items mentioned above! *NOTE: This is an introductory rate, and rates are likely to increase in the future!
Register Today!
The inaugural small group series will be very limited in participants, so please reserve your space as soon as you can! Registration will be open until October 22nd, or until spaces fill! To apply, please complete the application available below and e-mail to jessicarealept@gmail.com.Upon receipt of your application and placement in a group, you will receive an invoice for payment. Payment is required in full by November 1st. Unfortunately, the inaugural session will be limited in number of participants, so not everyone will be able to be accommodated. If this occurs, you will be placed on a waiting list for the next session.
See the video below for some additional information! I look forward to working with many of you in this program!
This afternoon, while my rambunctious little toddler was attempting (and ultimately failing!) a nap, I had the fantastic opportunity to chat with Shelly Prosko, a physiotherapist and yoga therapist in Alberta, Canada who specializes in working with individuals experiencing chronic pain (including pelvic pain!). Shelly is an all-around incredible human, knowledgeable clinician, and dynamic educator. I hope you all enjoy this interview as much as I enjoyed it!
Shelly and I chatted about some of the incredible content she has online, so I wanted to make sure I shared all of that information with you! If you would like to see the full playlist of her Words of Wisdom (W.O.W.) Chats, click here.
The individual links to the W.O.W. Chats we discussed are located below:
Lorimer Moseley: Pain Science Education vs Understanding Pain (I absolutely loved this one!!)
Over the past week, and really the past year, the cases of sexual abuse and assault perpetrated by Larry Nassar, a medical doctor with MSU and USA gymnastics, have rocked the nation. The horrific abuse he inflicted on well over 150 young women, under the guise of “appropriate medical intervention” is deplorable, and I know many of us were glad to see him held accountable for his actions with both the verdict and sentencing last week.
In the pelvic PT world, this hit very close to home, and made all of us completely infuriated. For this person to take a completely valid, evidence-based and extremely beneficial treatment technique, and contort it into being an avenue for abuse was unfathomable to those of us who have dedicated our careers to helping men and women with pelvic floor problems. Several colleagues have spoken out about this. Particularly, Lori Mize, the incoming Vice President of the Section on Women’s Health, wrote an excellent post for the Huffington Post, that I would strongly encourage you to read.
Over the next year, I want to highlight a variety of treatment techniques used in pelvic floor physical therapy to help you better understand treatment options, and hopefully alleviate some fear that some of you may have about “the unknown.” In light of these current events, I thought it would be meaningful to start by discussing internal manual therapy techniques for the pelvic floor muscles.
What is it?
Internal manual therapy techniques are a treatment used for someone who has overactive, tender and/or shortened pelvic floor muscles. Before we get started, if you want to better understand the anatomy of the pelvic floor, check out this post by my friend and colleague Tracy Sher. Tender or overactive pelvic floor muscles can occur when someone is experiencing problems like pelvic pain, painful sexual intercourse, tailbone pain, as well as urinary or bowel dysfunction.
These techniques are performed either vaginally or rectally by a skilled medical practitioner who has undergone advanced training to learn to evaluate and treat the pelvic floor muscles. They are only performed once the patient has been thoroughly educated about the treatment techniques and consents to participating in the treatment.
What does treatment involve?
The goal of internal manual therapy is to improve the relaxation, lengthening and tenderness of the pelvic floor muscles. Generally, the patient is first positioned comfortably in either hooklying (on their back with knees bent, sometimes resting on a pillow– yep, no stirrups needed!), sidelying or sometimes on their stomach, depending on what position is preferable to the patient and allows the therapist access to the tissues being treated. The therapist then places one gloved finger within the vaginal or rectal canal and gently presses on the muscles of the pelvic floor to identify (with constant feedback from the patient) where the muscles are tender or uncomfortable. Manual therapy techniques then can be performed to help improve the tenderness of these muscles and promote relaxation and lengthening. These techniques can include:
Holding gentle pressure while the patient focused on relaxing and breathing
Holding gentle pressure while the patient performs a contact/relax of the muscles or a pelvic floor bulge.
Holding gentle pressure while simultaneously pressing with the opposite hand on a point around the pelvis to produce slack in the muscle (a modified strain counter strain technique.
Sweeping stretches over the muscle belly
Different therapists have different approaches, but they all are done in complete collaboration and communication with the patient and are modified based on the patient’s comfort and response to the treatment. Personally, I tend to prefer more gentle approaches while also focusing globally on improving awareness and calming the nervous system. This is not a “no pain no gain” situation– in fact, most often we see the best results when we are able to keep pain at a very minimal level.
What type of training should the therapist have?
It is very important that the person performing this treatment has had specialized training in this technique. At minimum, they should have attended an initial continuing education course that teaches a beginner level evaluation and treatment of the pelvic floor, generally weekend course including at least 24 hrs of instruction. Many training programs now include a 3 or 4 course series, and I strongly encourage clinicians to complete the coursework to learn how to comprehensively care for their patients. At Herman and Wallace Pelvic Rehabilitation Institute, the organization I am a faculty member of, we have a 4-course series which includes a level 1, 2A, 2B and Capstone. The Section on Women’s Health has a 3- course series and there are now several other companies offering varying training programs. Of course, I’m biased as a faculty member of H&W and if you’re reading this and work in healthcare in pelvic rehab, you should definitely come to one of my courses!
Who does this treatment help?
As I mentioned above, manual therapy to the pelvic floor is helpful when a person has overactive, tender and/or shortened pelvic floor muscles that are contributing to the problem they are experiencing. This can occur when a person has pain in and around the pelvis or if the person is experiencing urinary, bowel or sexual dysfunction.
We are producing more and more research about these techniques every day, but here are a few snippets:
In this study, 50% of the men treated to address chronic scrotal pain saw a significant reduction in their pain.
In this study, 93 people were treated with pelvic floor techniques to address coccyx pain (as well as pain after coccyx removal). Overall, they saw an average of 71% improvement.
This study compared comprehensive pelvic PT to cognitive behavioral therapy for women with provoked Vestibulodynia. They found that 80% of the women in the PT group had significant improvements compared to 70% in the CBT group.
This study evaluated the effects of pelvic floor physical therapy techniques on pain reduction in men who had chronic pelvic pain. Treatment included internal and external techniques and over 70% experienced moderate or robust improvements.
This study found that 62% of women experiencing urinary frequency, urgency and/or bladder pain who were treated with physical therapy interventions, including internal manual therapy techniques, reported feeling “much better” or “very much better” following the interventions.
I hope this was helpful and removed some of the fear from this technique! If you think this treatment may be a helpful one for you, talk with your health care provider! As always, I love to answer any questions you may have!
I’m sort of nerdy (you already knew that though, didn’t you!)… so periodically, I like to go to my favorite medical search engines to find what is new in the literature regarding all things pelvic health. This helps me to keep aware of new treatments that are available, and helps me to constantly re-evaluate the treatments I provide for patients to make sure I am providing the best treatment I can!
Urinary urgency/frequency, urge incontinence, and overactive bladder problems are often not as frequently discussed in physical therapy circles as stress incontinence. Surprisingly, pelvic PTs actually treat these problems equally as often, if not more! A comprehensive PT program can be extremely effective for these types of problems! (So, if you are having urinary urgency, frequency or overactive bladder problems, and you live near Atlanta, give me a call! :))
So, what’s new in the research to help with overactive bladder problems and urge-related incontinence?
Myofascial release techniques can be very helpful for patients with urinary urgency and frequency.I was pretty excited to see this study come out in the Journal of Female Pelvic Medicine and Reconstructive Surgery. Pelvic PTs have noticed for quite a while that many men and women with urinary urgency and frequency actually tend to have hypervigilant overactive pelvic floor muscles rather than the traditional weak and stretched out muscles people like to think they have. Manual therapy, included within a comprehensive rehabilitation approach, can be very effective for helping this population, and I’m excited to see a recent study supporting the same thing!
Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) seems promising in helping to reduce symptoms of overactive bladder and urge incontinence. I didn’t find this surprising at all, but was again, excited to see this coming out in the literature. If you see in my first note above, many people with urinary urgency and frequency actually have a “hypervigilant” or “overactive” pelvic floor muscles. Stress reduction and mindfulness techniques help to calm the whole body–pelvic floor included! Along with this, we often find that people with urgency/frequency problems tend to live in a more sympathetic nervous system dominated state (basically, the “fight or flight” response is in overdrive!). Calming this system can be very helpful in calming the bladder.
Pelvic floor muscle training continues to be recommended as a first line treatment for stress, urge or mixed incontinence. It’s true, the most updated Cochrane Review published in 2014 continued to recommend pelvic floor muscle training to assist in improving all bladder symptoms. Their review showed close to a 55% cure rate–which is pretty good, considering this was just retraining the muscles in isolation. Imagine what could happen when the right retraining of the pelvic floor muscle is combined with behavioral retraining, dietary training and retraining the pelvic floor within the body as a whole? I bet the results would be much much better.
Percutaneous tibial nerve stimulation may help to reduce urinary frequency and urge-related incontinence. This started becoming popular a few years ago, and honestly, there needs to be more higher quality studies in order for us to really see how effective this treatment is or isn’t. But, that being said, some of the initial results seem promising. If you are not familiar with this technique, it utilizes a very thin needle which is placed near the ankle to stimulate the posterior tibial nerve with a low electrical current. The thought is that this nerve comes from the same level in the spinal cord that the nerves to the bladder originate, so stimulation could possibly help modulate an overactive bladder. (Similar concept to the Interstim treatment which stimulates at the sacral nerves, but less invasive) Looking forward to what the research shows on this treatment in the future!
Losing weight can help improve bladder symptoms. This is true for both urge related incontinence and stress incontinence (although, seems to help stress incontinence a bit more). In this particular study, 46% of the participants in the weight loss program achieved more than a 70% reduction in their incontinence symptoms. So, if you are overweight or obese, beginning a weight loss program may be a great first step toward improving your bladder function.
The great news is that we continue to learn more and advance in our understanding of helping men and women with these problems every day! What new research have you seen that is promising? As always, I’d love to hear from you!
**Note: I didn’t include medication in this list… not because I don’t think it’s effective or that the research is exciting, it really is! Mostly, because this is where my search took me this time around. The right medication can be a significant helper to many people having these problems– perhaps a future blog can talk about that! 🙂
