Understand the problems – both the hypothetical and the real In deciding whether to continue with (or change to ) the Pill, or the Mirena, or Implanon, you need to weigh up the pros and cons for you. My last blog post talked about the pros: the possible reasons people use these medications. This [...]
Consider Your Alternatives You now know you would like to get off chemical contraception, whether it is the Pill, the injection (Depo Provera), the implant (Implanon) or the hormone-secreting IUD (Mirena). You understand how they work and don’t feel happy with what they are doing to your body. Or, you may already have experienced [...]
Prepare by taking your nutrition and your health in hand Are you scared to take the plunge and get off the Pill? There is no need to be! In this post I'll talk about covering your bases to make the transition as smooth as possible. Hopefully be now you have followed the first three [...]
Why, oh why, is it so difficult to stick with pelvic floor exercises? When we are so good at multitasking, pelvic floor still falls to the bottom of the pile. And yet we know how essential they are for preventing, improving and resolving bladder leakage, or incontinence as it's unglamorously known! Somehow, by the [...]
Tampons can be tricky to use. What's the solution? I'd like to help you to solve this common problem. I hear about the problem inserting tampons all the time from my patients in my practice. When tampons won't go in, no matter how you try, it can be frustrating. You would be surprised how [...]
What could possibly make pelvic floor exercises easy to stick with? My last post gave you some tips including listening to an audio on pelvic floor exercises able to be downloaded to your phone or desk top. But different things work for different people. Here's five more tips to get you sticking with your pelvic [...]
Vaginismus, vulvodynia, vestibulodynia, vaginitis, vulvar lichen sclerosus, vaginal atrophy, vulvitis… Any of these might be names that your “painful sex” has been given, but they don’t tell you much about the root cause. Painful sex itself is medically termed “dyspareunia”- but again, if a doctor tells you that you have dyspareunia, it doesn’t leave [...]
Helping The Muscle That Is Literally A Pain In The Butt I have a dear patient who loves to express how much she despises the piriformis muscle. She continually wonders aloud at what the point of having this muscle is, and laments its existence at all. She thinks it exists purely to wreak havoc [...]
If you’re like my patients you’re a woman with a million things on her plate…how on earth are you supposed to remember to do your pelvic floors? I recently blogged about how I don’t like the common advice to do your pelvic floor exercises at traffic lights. This came at some disappointment to one [...]
Epigenetics: it’s more than a buzzword. When you're thinking about fertility, you need to know about it. It’s the way you can influence your genes. It’s the element of control you have over whether you inherit your mum’s endometriosis or your dad’s bipolar disorder. And when you are planning for a baby, the idea of [...]
