I often hear from male friends or partners of my patients that they don’t have to worry about what I do for a living or they make jokes about never needing to see someone like me. Some even go so far as to say they don’t have a pelvic floor! Guess what? They absolutely do, and men can struggle with some of the same issues women do. The male pelvis has the same muscles as the female pelvis, with some of them arranged in a slightly different way for varied functions, like accommodating a longer urethra.
Recently I’ve been seeing men with urinary leakage after prostate surgery, tailbone pain while sitting, sexual dysfunction and pain with intimacy, and pelvic pain with exercise. Constipation, fecal or gas leakage, and hemorrhoids are other common complaints we hear from male clients. Pelvic floor dysfunction is not isolated to the female pelvis and neither should pelvic floor physical therapy.
As with female clients, we treat the whole human, not just the pelvic floor. We will start the session talking about your symptoms. When do your symptoms occur? Are you able to modify them in any way? What does bowel and bladder function look like? How is hydration, nutrition, sleep, and stress management? After we discuss what is going on and lifestyle factors that affect healing and inflammation, we will assess your overall movement patterns and strength as well as things like the range of motion of the hips, low back, abdominals, and rib cage. These areas have a direct relationship with the pelvis and how well the pelvic floor does its job. Only with your consent, we might recommend a pelvic floor assessment, either visual or digital. This can give us a better idea of tone and coordination of the pelvic floor so we are able to provide the most appropriate interventions for your concerns. Depending on the complaints, we might perform manual therapy techniques to help with pain or tightness in muscles surrounding the pelvis. Then we will go through exercises to address the deficits found during the assessment that in turn will help manage your symptoms. Our goal is that you leave your first session feeling heard and seen and with a real plan moving forward.
One reason we do what we do at Disrupt Physical therapy and Wellness is to serve a population that often gets left behind, pregnant and newly postpartum moms. The same is true of men with pelvic floor dysfunction. While it is challenging to find pelvic health practitioners in general, it is even harder to find providers that treat men. Whether it’s you, your partner, or someone you know, men do not have to live with pelvic floor dysfunction and we would love to help them reach their goals.
-Dr. Kassi Rieger
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