What is Pelvic Health Physical Therapy?
Pelvic Health physical therapy is essentially the assessment, evaluation and treatment of musculoskeletal disorders such as back pain, hip pain, pelvic floor dysfunction and bowel and bladder disturbances that affect your entire body. Your pelvic floor being the foundation of your CORE makes it a pivotal part of your body that must be addressed to ensure whole body health.
In life we go though many things that can cause the muscles in our bodies to change. These changes may affect not only the function of the muscles themselves but nervous system and the organs that are beneath. At Meruu Core Choice Rehabilitation our job is to help restore that muscle function and return you back to life!
What Diagnosis Do You Treat?
Pain During or After Intercourse
Vulvodynia, Vaginismus, Dyspareunia
Low Back & Hip Pain
Sacral-Iliac Dysfunction, Pre-Post- Op Labrum Repair, Diastasis Recti, Sports Hernia, Pre-Post Op Back Surgery
Stress Incontinence
Leaking during sneezing, laughing, coughing, jumping, running, or exercise
Abdominal & Pelvis Pain
Endometriosis, Interstitial Cystitis, Post- Cesarian, IBS, Crohn’s Disease, Dietary Disturbances
Urge Incontinence
Urgency to urinate with anxiety, at a specific location or time in the day
Bladder Dysfunction
Frequent Urination, Night time bed wetting (nocturnal enuresis)
Pelvic Organ Prolapse
Bladder, uterus or rectum decent into vaginal canal
Bowel Dysfunction
Constipation or diarrhea, leaking of fecal matter, pain with bowel movement (anismus), Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS)
How Can Physical Therapy Help Me?
Myofascial Release
This hands on manual treatment is aimed at mobilizing connective tissues in the body and ultimately calms the nervous system. We are designed to move freely and without restriction so when myofascial tissue becomes stiff and rigid from trauma, scar tissue, hormone changes, surgeries, and/or inflammation it can make the nervous system hypersensitive. Mobilizing the myofascial tissues allows the body to have freedom of movement which is vital for the pelvic region to function properly. The bladder, uterus, intestines, rectum, and vagina all need to have movement to do their job appropriately and when myofascial tissue is restricted it can cause significant problems, hypersensitive nerves, increased danger messages, and therefore pain. Dr. Lewis will also educate you on several ways you can perform this on yourself with simple treatment tools.
Therapeutic Exercise
Learn about the exercises required to treat your individual pain and health concerns, how to properly perform all exercises, and how to properly PACE a program WITHOUT flaring pain. Dr. Lewis will help you with determining what exercises are best for you and encourage your commitment and accountability to the plan!
Bladder/Bowel Training
Learn how often you should be going pee during the day, how much water to intake, and how to conservatively decrease and control chronic UTI’s and yeast infections. Dr. Lewis will provide education about the food, drinks, and triggers that cause urine urgency and night time leakage. We will create a proper pelvic floor exercise program to strengthen your muscles and keep the pee in when you couch, laugh, sneeze, or exercise no matter how high your fitness level is.
Our Bowel Habits are also so important. Often people will struggle with loose stools, constipation, or difficulty having a bowel movement for days at a time. We will work together to make small changes in your diet to improve poop quality, educate you on proper toilet positioning and breathing techniques necessary promote an easy, and enjoyable smooth move!
Pain-Science Education
Pain education is one of the most important aspects to recovery. Knowledge is power and gives you control over your pain. Dr. Lewis will provide insightful but easy to understand education about how your body works! You will gain the knowledge to understand your pain and therefore control it so you can calm it long term. Research and clinical results show profound results utilizing this alongside with manual treatment to treat ALL chronic pain effectively.
Mindfulness Training
The nervous system is amazing beautiful and complex all at the same time. It is made up of systems that are responsible for voluntary and involuntary control of your calm and flight or flight states. All must work in unison to achieve optimal body function and keep you in a pain free state. The goal of mindfulness training is to decrease the over activation of your flight or fight system and boast the calming system to allow the body to balance and heal itself! Dr. Lewis will help to educate you about the nervous system and how to use specific strategies to reduce stress on a day to day basis and allow the body to heal. This is where the true magic of healing happens.
Sex Education
Learn about possible root causes for pain during intercourse and how to then address the root cause to decrease the pain. Dr. Lewis will help you understand why libido is low, how past experiences and current environments play a massive role in your pain experience. Graded exposure to intimacy with a partner or yourself will be introduced to allow for a slow but appropriate recovery. We will teach you how to perform your own treatments to allow for a quicker recovery that you are in control of.
Sleep Education
Sleep is vital for recovery from chronic pain...but unfortunately with chronic pain most people have poor sleep quality. It has been found that if you take a healthy individual and sleep deprive them you can induce chronic pain into them...that is how important sleep is to our recovery. Dr. Lewis will review effective techniques that help you conservatively improve your sleep quality without medications.
Diet Education
Diet is immensely important for inflammation reduction and providing the body with the nutrients it needs to heal itself. Inflammation and lack of nutrients significantly contribute to pain, depression, fatigue, and decreased mental clarity. DR. Lewis will dive deep into your diet and help you SLOWLY make ideal and realistic changes in your diet. This is helpful for all autoimmune conditions, pain, weight loss, and preventative care.
Goal Setting
One of the key steps to recovery from chronic pain is setting weekly and monthly goals. We will help you determine very realistic and simple goals each week to target, which will allow you to heal yourself. Dr. Lewis will be your accountability coach through this process and help guide you the whole time you are working together inside and outside of the clinic space. Without having a purpose each day and goals to hit we tend to not be focused on our recovery...and without dedicated focus, we have found it is very difficult to heal.