Do I have Female Pelvic Pain ?
We like to keep up to date in our specialist Pregnancy, Post natal and women’s health clinic. We do this by teaching with world class pelvic health tutors like Dr Ruth Jones ( Southampton UK) , Joanne Millios ( Australia ) and Maria Elliot ( Harley Street London). We also ensure we attend leading international conferences and have been invited to present at WCPT 2017 in Cape Town and have been invited to teach for the presdigious South African Physiotherapy Society in Stellenbosch, SA. It’s important that we keep up to date with research in pelvic pain as this helps all of our patients.
What’s new out there in female Pelvic Pain .
Thanks to some brilliant pelvic pain researchers Chalmers et al ( 2017) it’s now much easier to determine if you have female pelvic pain. If you answer yes to these 5 questions or some of them you may have pelvic pain .
1. I have pain on intimacy or sexual relationships
2. I get stomach, abdominal or intestinal symptoms
3. I have some mood changes
4. I have pain on using tampons
5. I struggle to sit for longer than 20 minutes
How useful is this in the clinic
We think it’s a nice and quick way to initially find out if you may have pelvic pain. These are also some quick questions we can ask you on the phone if you enquire about having specialist pelvic physiotherapy in our Birmingham , UK clinic. In the past we used the NIH Female pelvic pain questionnaire which is great and we will still use it as it’s very detailed but we like this new one especially for that first patient chat.
I have answered yes to some of those questions is that bad?
No , the good news is that you finally may be on the start of a more positive road to seeing someone who understands your symptoms and is used to seeing lots of women with complex pelvic pain. Finding a specialist Pelvic physiotherapist who has experience and expertise of treating this condition is very very difficult but we have 3 in our clinic, Fiona Mitchell, Lisa Hastie and Sundeep Watkins. If you are nearer the South Coast, Southampton we can arrange for Dr Ruth Jones to see you or if you are London based we can get Maria Elliot to see you. Only a few weeks ago there was a big feature in The Telegraph on how most women with gynaecological problems were told by their Gps that “ It’s all in your head” . This is unacceptable and we must demand better care for you and all those other thousands of women with pelvic pain.
Check what are specialist pelvic pain physios do on our website and feel free to get in touch via email or phone or you can book online.
We can help you get your normal life back.
References
Clinical assessment of the impact of pelvic pain on women.
Chalmers KJ1, Catley MJ, Evans SF, Moseley GL.
Pain. 2017 Mar;158(3):498-504
