Therapeutic Solutions for Incontinence

Baptist Health Paducah: Therapeutic Solutions for Incontinence

Physical therapist Krissie Robinson, DPT, explains how physical therapy can help treat and prevent urinary or fecal incontinence by retraining and strengthening pelvic muscles.

Therapeutic Solutions for Incontinence HealthTalks Transcript

Krissie Robinson, DPT, Physical Therapy
The pelvic floor is a set of muscles that line the bottom part of the pelvis. They help to keep us continent— to keep us from leaking urine or feces. They allow our internal organs to stay up as well house the sphincters to allow for urine and feces to pass. The pelvic floor can dysfunction in many different ways. One of the most common ways is people complaining of urinary and fecal incontinence. A lot of times that is a muscle weakness issue. The muscles can also get where they’re irritated and can spasm and can almost become taut and cause pelvic pain. That is where physical therapy can help retrain those muscles and teach you the proper exercises to be doing to prevent any kind of leaking or pelvic pain. A lot of times patients don’t want to go to social outings. I’ve had patients tell me they stopped going out to movies or going to church because they were afraid that they were going to have an incontinence issue, and that’s where physical therapy can really help to do bladder retraining as far as the muscles go, as well as diet modifications and fluid intakes that we can talk about and discuss. As far as leaking urine, you know, it is not necessarily normal to leak urine. Nobody should have to go through life with pelvic pain or incontinence issues. It can be dealt with and it can be fixed.