Passing urine (pee) or feces (poo) anytime you do not want to is called incontinence. After you have been potty trained and your urological system has matured (late teenage-hood) it is never normal to leak. There may be times in your life when leaking is more likely – when pregnant, after delivery of a child even via ceserean section, after prostate surgeries. It can also happen in people who have never had these experiences (in female athletes, after motor vehicle accidents or other traumas, after prostate surgeries). It is a social problem in that it will not kill you. However it will impact your quality of life significantly and it is the second most common reason for elders to be institutionalized. It generates a multi-billion dollar industry of products and garments to manage the impact of being incontinent. It causes women and men to stop choosing to move, for fear of leaking.
Consider this: we know due to research that movement is protective of our brains, diminishing the kinds of changes in our brains that are seen in people who have dementia. Dementia and its related forms is the number one reason that people are institutionalized in later decades. If women and men are deprived of movement experiences in their mid-life due to incontinence does this lead to dementia in later life? I cannot prove it, as dementia has many different factors associated with it, but I can certainly draw the parallel that lack of movement throughout our lives is one of those factors. Looked at in this way the problem of incontinence has greater significance and finding ways to cure it, not simply manage it, become paramount.
There are different kinds of incontinence. Stress incontinence means you leak when a stress is placed on your body like a movement, a cough, sneeze, or laugh. Urge incontinence means you leak when you have an urge to go to the toilet – like your bladder takes off before you are quite ready for it to do so. Mixed incontinence is when you experience a bit of both. Unaware incontinence is when you find you have leaked and you were not aware of it when it happened.
I can help you with your incontinence problem because the systems that help control our bladders and bowels are related to muscles and nerves. These muscles can be damaged, become weak, tight, painful. They can be treated and trained just like all our muscles and thus, are perfectly suitable to physiotherapy treatment. Physiotherapists who treat pelvic floor dysfunction are taught, via a series of post-graduate courses, how to assess and treat this area. My further training and experience in ConnectTherapy™ allows me to determine when to treat the pelvic floor specifically or when the pelvic floor will be able to function optimally when another area is treated.