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“I wish I had known about this earlier..."

Everything you never thought you needed to know about your pelvic floor, incontinence and prolapse, and how to help yourself improve.

By Alexandra Frankham, Pelvic Health Physiotherapist, Performance Physiotherapy https://physio.je/

“I wish I had known about this earlier”, is what 99% of women in their 50s and 60s say to me at our first consultation. Whilst there is access to good health prevention information, we rarely think it applies to us. We never think that it will be us on the receiving end of treatment, for whatever it may be. We are all invincible, until we are not. If we're fortunate, we are all going to age and with age comes weakness and change. Pelvic health disorders are even more common as we get older but rarely talked about. The earlier we start to work on prevention and cure the better the outcome! 

Pelvic health is particularly...

Did you know that?

• 1 in 3 of women are incontinent of urine after having a baby (Hansen et al., 2012)
• 1 in 10 have faecal incontinence after childbirth (and many of these go on to have dyspareunia - painful sex)
• 1 in 12 have pelvic organ prolapse
• The relationship between incontinence and depression & poor mental health is well established (Melville et al 2009)
• Symptoms of pelvic floor dysfunction during and postpartum are a significant risk factor for poor maternal mental health (Swenson et al., 2018)

**Physiotherapy is by far the most cost-effective way to both PREVENT and TREAT these conditions!**

Did you also know that?

• Breast cancer is the worlds most diagnosed cancer (WHO, 2021)
• Unhealthy diets, insufficient physical activity, use of tobacco and harmful use of alcohol, have all contributed to the increasing cancer burden
• The points above about breast cancer are also risk factors for other gynaecological conditions such as PCOS / endometriosis / dysmenorrhea...

Let me be clear from the start that you are evidently breathing adequately for survival, otherwise you would not be here. But do not mistake doing something that you do for survival with something that cannot be improved upon and in turn do wonders for your day to day living as well as for a significant enhancement to your recovery after any surgery or treatment. 

Most of us breath in more than we breath out, and this can be caused by shallow breathing or mouth breathing. Over time this can change the body’s chemistry which can cause stress.  

Long term symptoms of over breathing like this can be feelings of neck and back pain; fatigue; stress; a feeling of anxiety; brain fog. 

This is an easy fix but it must be practised daily. 

Restore your breath with abdominal breathing. 

Lie down or sit supported in a chair and place one hand on your abdomen and one hand on your chest.  

Calmly breath in and out and start to notice where you...

Some time ago I was driving into work and I noticed the left side of my face felt numb. In fact, as I sit and write this sentence, I can feel it going numb again – my brain has remembered! It’s ok, it will be gone by the time I’m finished writing. 

As I pulled into the car park at work the sensation felt stronger. I parked my and went into my office and physically touched my face. It felt a little different, although I could feel hot and cold sensation there were dulled compared to the other side. I could hear, see, swallow and speak and my fascial muscles and arms and legs were all working fine, so I didn’t feel that I needed to see my Doctor, or better still to pop into the Neurologists office two doors down. 

The numb feeling stayed for the day but by the time I was home in the evening the sensation had gone and my face felt normal again. 

The next day the same thing happened. 

I had been experiencing stress at work for some time....

Both pelvic girdle pain (PGP) and low back pain (LBP) are commonly report by pregnant women (Vleeming, Albert, Ostgaard, Sturesson, & Stuge, 2008). Although pregnancy related low back pain (PLBP) and pregnancy related pelvic girdle pain (PPGP) can be defined separately, they are often combined in much of the research on pelvic pain in pregnancy. PLBP has been defined as being between the 12th rib and the gluteal fold and PPGP has been defined as being felt between the posterior iliac crest and the gluteal fold, particularly in the vicinity of the sacroiliac joints and /or in the symphysis pubis (Vleeming et al., 2008).

Prevalence data on PLBP and PPGP is varied however recent data suggests a prevalence as high as 70-86% (Gutke, Boissonnault, Brook, & Stuge, 2018; Liddle & Pennick, 2015).

A recent multinational sample study from the US, UK, Norway and Sweden found that women in the UK demonstrated highest pain intensity sores and highest scores on the Pelvic Girdle...

Thanks to Chris Evans on the Virgin Radio Breakfast Show I was enlightened on the trending film “The Game Changers”. I now know that everyone is talking about it, but being a studious, busy, mother of two and running a business I was not aware of it. I don’t tend to ‘hangout’ much with a crowd that are really ‘trending’, as it were. You can probably already gather this through my written language. So, much to my husband’s dismay, after a great ‘kids dinner’ out with friends (he had the gourmet beef burger, I had a salmon risotto) we sat down to watch a Saturday night movie and I encouraged us to watch ‘The Game Changers’. Now I am not a film buff or critic but I genuinely thought it was really well filmed and produced and kept the audience – Paul and I – really engaged. Paul, being male age 30+ was the target audience. I however was personally fascinated by their discussion and experiment on...

Were the words a friend said to me when I went to congratulate her on the birth of her beautiful new baby boy. She was in a state of shear panic, absolutely horrified that she ‘might never be able to have sex again’.

I was working on the maternity ward at the time and the midwife had asked me to go and see the lady in room 5, who I then realised was a friend of mine (one of the hazards of living on a small island). From a medical perspective she’d had a ‘normal vaginal birth’ with a couple of labial tears and a second degree tear, she had been pushing for a perfectly reasonable 30mins and no instruments or assistance was needed. But she had had these tears and of course substantial tears at the devastation of what this may mean for her future. A young girl never to have a decent sex life again, were her first thoughts after having her baby. I tried my best to verbally reassure her but this was not helping so offered to examine her, a look of relief came...