Your vaginas are too weak!! - rage post!!

[AnnaCrowleFanGirl]

We’ve known for a long time that women are let down by a medical profession that treats men as the default person with for example only the most cursory training on the menopause. But I cannot believe that almost all women’s health physiotherapists are working on a model of the body that was outdated in the 80s/90s. The idea that your pelvic floor holds up your organs or else they can ‘fall down’ causing pelvic disfunction/prolapse has now been proven to be totally wrong by the amazing Anna Crowle! Prolapse is caused by tension not weakness and kegels appear to make that tension worse. I am raging that women are told they basically have a weak vagina and that is why they are suffering. It is so sexist and insulting to women. Like now you have had a baby you’re broken and it’s your fault for being weak. Just raging at this!

Tiphaine I felt it was a feminist issue but I thought I had put it in feminist chat

LadyCordeliaFitzgerald Interesting thank you

So just to try to explain a bit more about AC’s explanation. She says the body used to be thought of like a stack of bricks but is now known to be suspended by fascia like a stretchy web. Therefore the organs are not propped up from below, rather connected from all sides by the fascia. The principle is called biotensegrity. It is impossible for an organ to ‘fall’ therefore. They can be pulled out of place by tension however. To believe that you need to tense up below to stop organs ‘falling’ is counterproductive. In other areas of medicine this ‘new’ (1980s/90s) theory is known and forms the basis of modern medical treatments. In this area of womens health however it lags behind, based on a hopelessly out dated model of the body. Hope I have explained that right and done this important work justice.

Hmmmm, some middle class hippies women I know went to a very expensive day-long workshop to learn about this. I was sceptical- it really doesn't seem to have an evidence-base

Honestly, it's not at all unusual for medicine to gain new and better understanding of the body. It doesn't mean that what was thought before was stupid, careless, or offensive. People have an unrealistic idea of how easy it is to understand all the interactions that lead to things like back problems, or gut issues, or skin problems.

Presenting it as some kind of claim that women are weak is dumb, you could just as well say this person is saying women are frigid or tense. Which would be equally untrue.

I'm not sure two papers, not peer reviewed, in barely heard of journals really cancels out years of research, evedince based medicine and treatments

Theredjellybean My understanding is that all the existing evidence shows that kegels do not really work for prolapse. Yes I feel the main feminist issue here is that this has not been researched on a bigger scale already.

I agree there's a feminist issue around poor health, poor research, poor outcomes for women's urogenital health.

I can grasp the picture of the fascial net, too. It rings true. I don't agree it's intrinsically different to the old hammock/sling of pelvic muscles, just a refinement.

Is myofascial pelvic tissue release another name for something else?

We’ve known for a long time that women are let down by a medical profession that treats men as the default person with for example only the most cursory training on the menopause.

Not sure what you mean by this. Men are normally used for early drug trials, but that's because there would be a shit storm if certain birth defects were found to have been caused by testing a drug on women. Men are also normally used as the subjects during medical training, but isn't that because men are far less conservative about general nudity?

The evidence doesn't show that women are being failed by the medical profession. In all stages of life, mortality for men is higher than for women.

I highly recommend Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez for more information on the data gap between the sexes in the medical world, amongst others. Sunday Times review here: www.thetimes.co.uk/article/81ba0b08-401c-11e9-af00-ec1d0a9dead5?shareToken=5e9b969969b6b68633742d37a577c6d5.

OP, She's not the only person talking about this. Katie bowman is another. (Google kegels not invited) and Christine Kent.

My appointment with an obstetric physio was in a room with a curtain that didn't fit and a man with a knee injury in the next cubicle. No examination offered and I'd have been very uncomfortable in those circumstances anyway.
I was given an explanation of how to do a kegel, followed by "but you'll probably need a 'little fix'", showing just how much confidence she had in those.

Advice from alternative sources was much more helpful.

OP, I blame years of UTIs for an overly tight pelvic wall.

Tim Parks wrote a book called Teach Us To Sit Still about the(a) male version of this, chronic pelvic pain, and myofascial release was a thing, but seen as fringe and cranky yet helping people more than conventional medicine... I can well believe our understanding of organs in the body and how it all works together is changing with new learning.