Episode 1770 - Defining normal in pelvic health

Dr. Christina Prevett // #ICEPelvic // www.ptonice.com 

In today's episode of the PT on ICE Daily Show, ICE Pelvic division leader Christina Prevett takes a pragmatic approach discussing variations we see in practice and physiology and acknowledges where we still have work to do.

Take a listen to learn how to better serve this population of patients & athletes or check out the full show notes on our blog at www.ptonice.com/blog.

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION

CHRISTINA PREVETT Hello everyone and welcome to the PT on ICE daily show. My name is Christina Prevett and I am one of our lead faculty in our pelvic health division and I'm coming to you from a cottage on my 35th birthday because I had a Wonderful husband who surprised me but that does not mean that I'm not gonna get excited talking about all things pelvic health so We had a really interesting conversation come up over the last several weeks, and it's funny because it's come up in a variety of different circles around defining normal. What is normal when it comes from a pelvic health perspective? Because when we are trying to make diagnoses of different conditions, urinary incontinence, pelvic organ prolapse, diastasis recti, we have to know what the realm of normal is so that we know when we deviate from it. And so we had a question come up in our app about, what is the amount of normal voiding, the number of normal voiding episodes that an individual should have during the day? Because some of our literature says 5 to 8, and some of it says 8 to 13. And then if you leak a little bit when you're really tired, does that actually consider you to have a condition? Do you have urinary incontinence? If you have a kind of a spasm in your shoulder, you wouldn't say that your shoulder was injured, but you would say that you have urinary incontinence. And it's such an interesting question, and I kinda wanna dive into it a little bit today. So last week, as many of you know, I'm a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Alberta. And so what I am looking at in my research, I am an interventional researcher, specifically looking at resistance training and its impact on health. And what my studies are looking at specifically right now is on resistance training in pregnancy and its impact with pelvic floor dysfunction. What I was doing was I was learning from physiology researchers. I was looking at individuals who were looking at pelvic floor assessment and measurement. And up in Ottawa, I was at Linda McLean's lab, they are doing data taking on what is normal force production of the pelvic floor and what are things that we can expect to see as differences in the pelvic floor on ultrasound, on EMG force activation, and on dynamometry, which is force production. in a younger cohort of individuals an