The connections in the human body are amazing!

Connections in the human body are amazing

I am working with a client who came to me for urinary urgency, urinary frequency, urge incontinence, stress incontinence, fecal incontinence, and fecal urgency. She also has low back pain with sciatica. I know that is a little complicated, basically she has to go to the bathroom more frequently than usual, with less warning than normal, and leaks pee and poop sometimes; and she has back pain too.

I have been working with her for a few weeks. She now has normal bowel movements, is gradually increasing the amount of time between bathroom trips to urinate, leaks only with sneezing and jumping, has no pain in her leg )no sciatica), and has no back pain about 50% of the time. Overall things are going great!

We have included some visceral mobilization in her treatments, but had a really interesting treatment session a couple weeks ago. I wanted to share it with you, because it really demonstrates the connections in the human body. She flared her back pain a little bit a few days before her session. She was still having lots of time without back pain, but when present it was more intense than it had been the week before. To get it under control she did some exercises we had been doing, and her pain quickly came back under control. I then worked on and in her abdomen.

I mobilized her duodenum (the first of three sections of the small intestine) to free fascia surrounding it (yes, I can use my hands to move the organs). She felt that pulling along her back, and felt looser after. I then mobilized her bladder, her uterus, and her rectum (yep, I move those organs sometimes too). These three organs are all very related, they are essentially squeezed together in the small pelvis. During the treatment, she felt the leg pain return and dissipate, her back pain return and dissipate, and an urge to urinate occur and dissipate. When the treatment was done, she could move all directions without pain. Her back pain, urinary symptoms, and fecal symptoms are integrally connected and therefore need to be treated together, as one set of symptoms with one set of solutions.

All too often, I have clients who want to work on one problem and not another. Clients tell me they want to treat their back pain, but occasional stress incontinence does not bother them. Clients tell me they want to work on their urinary incontinence without addressing constipation. Clients tell me they want to resolve urinary incontinence, but the back pain is not bad. This thought process of separating out symptoms and treating them as if they are unrelated is problematic. You only have one body with all parts connected. When a problem occurs in one area it affects and may even cause symptoms in another area.