Hi, I'm Dr. Alicia Jeffrey-Thomas. I'm a pelvic floor physical therapist, and I'm here to answer questions submitted by the plusOne community.

So, how can pelvic floor physical therapy help with all of these issues that we've been talking about? A lot of this is going to be really individual. So, we do a lot of education in pelvic floor therapy. So, we're looking at are there behavioral modifications that need to change, especially if we're working on something like overactive bladder urgency frequency. We're talking about how to retrain the bladder to not feel that signal quite as often, or to be able to manage the intensity of that urge when it happens so that we don't have an issue when we're trying to get to the bathroom.

We talk about fluid intake, both to make sure that we're adequately hydrated, but also that we're avoiding things that have potentially making our symptoms worse. We'll talk about things like toileting posture to make sure that you're emptying in the most optimal way, both for bowel and bladder, and we teach you how to control your pelvic floor muscles, whether that's you need to be able to get them to contract better in order to hold things in, or that they need to be able to learn how to relax in order to eliminate completely or to alleviate pain.

And, we turn all of that into more functional activities that you can take with you in your day to day routine. And yeah, sometimes you'll get exercises for homework. It is physical therapy after all. But the biggest thing is that we're here to listen. We wanna get the full story of everything that's happened so that we can start to put all of those little pieces together to come up with a solution for you, follow along to see what questions we answer next.