Women's Health issues include:

A.  Urinary Incontinence: 

Patients learn to correctly contract their pelvic floor muscles, control their urgency, and eliminate bladder irritants.  By strengthening pelvic floor muscles, the patient can control incontinence.  Urgency decreases when the patient eliminates food and drink which causes bladder irritation and leakage.

Patients learn to strengthen abdominal and core muscles.   Also, they learn to relax, using diaphragmatic breathing to prevent intra-abdominal pressure. 

There are different types of incontinence:

       Urge Incontinence:  The patient has strong urges to urinate, which are very difficult to ignore and cause leakage. Urine leakage caused by "triggers" such as:  "key in the door", pushing the garage door opener, running water, or being in a cold area, are symptoms of urge incontinence.  Urgency is often accompanied by frequency, and there is a strong association with diet because certain foods and drinks can be irritating to the bladder. We provide the patient with information on common bladder irritants  The patient will fill out a bladder diary in order to determine which specific food and drink are irritating their bladder.  We also teach pelvic floor strengthening exercises, bladder training, and breathing techniques which give the patient control over urges, calm the bladder and  prevent leakage.  Urgency can be controlled.  Don't let you bladder control your life. 

      Stress Incontinence:  The patient has urine leakage with coughing, laughing, sneezing, lifting, and sometimes with running, exercising, or moving from sit to stand and other activities. This is usually caused by weak pelvic floor muscles.  Strengthening exercises are necessary for  preventing this problem.  These exercises must be learned correctly in order to be useful.  The patient must learn to isolate the pelvic floor muscles without contracting the abdominals, gluteals, or hip adductor muscles.  Also, there are two types of muscles which need strengthening:  the slow acting, and the quick acting muscles, so different techniques are utilized in training.  

B.  Breast Cancer PT

    After a Mastectomy or Lumpectomy, a woman may need physical therapy exercises to increase range of motion of her shoulder and to start using her arm functionally.  There also may be scars and/or scar tissue which can be softened, lengthened, and stretched in order to allow full motion and comfort in the surgical area. 

    If there is Lymphedema in the arm, Marilyn Nishi-Gormely, PT is a certified Lymphedema specialist and will utilize manual lymph drainage techniques, teach the patient prevention and self-treatment techniques.  An arm sleeve needs to be worn daily by the patient to prevent the arm from increasing in size, and will be ordered after treatment techniques have decreased the size of the arm.  The patient may need to have multi-layer bandaging in order to decrease the lymphedema.