Acknowledging that some women despite their symptoms will
prefer to avoid surgical intervention, Minnesota Women’s Care offers a
intensive pelvic floor rehabilitation program to help stop urinary leakage
without surgery. Enhanced pelvic floor
rehabilitation has a 30-40% increased chance over placebo in stopping urinary
leakage without surgery.
Our Urostym Pelvic Floor Rehabilitation System provides
biofeedback that assists patients with localization of the pelvic floor muscles
necessary to strengthen the pelvic floor.
One of the things that we do in our initial assessment is palpate the levator
ani complex as the patient is asked to perform a kegel. The overwhelming majority are not squeezing
the correct muscle. Yet the majority
indicate “I’ve been performing Kegels and they don’t work”. For most the problem is not that Pelvic floor
exercise doesn’t work, but rather that they are not exercising the correct
muscle. In addition to Biofeedback to
help localize the levator ani, the Urostym Pelvic Floor System provides direct
electrical stimulation of the pelvic floor muscles to help strengthen the
muscles. It also helps to assess the pelvic floor
function to guide therapy.
Intone, a new product provided by our office for women to
take home, provides biofeedback, electrical stimulation, measurement of the
degree of “squeeze”, and a log of the patients exercise results. The device is used daily for 12 minutes for 9
weeks, then twice a week. At office
visits, we connect the patient’s intone device to the office computer and are
supplied a detailed report of how often they exercised and how effect the
routine was. This allows effective
coaching and results in better compliance.
Melvin Ashford, MD
