Urinary Incontinence, a common wellness concern, directly affects roughly 13 million Americans. However, at Harbour Direct Primary Care, our solutions for urinary incontinence can effectively reduce incontinence for both men and women.
In this blog, we’ll talk about the different types of urinary incontinence and your options for urinary incontinence treatment in Jamestown, RI.
Types of Incontinence
When it comes to urinary incontinence, there are 3 main types we can treat at Harbour Direct.
Stress Incontinence
Have you ever laughed or sneezed and felt a little urine leak from your bladder? Or do you feel like you need to urinate or leak when you laugh, run, or jump? If you have, then you probably have stress incontinence.
Your pelvic floor, a group of muscles, stretches from the front of your pubic bone to your tailbone. These muscles work with your core to keep you upright when you sit or walk. They also work alongside your other muscles and organs to aid in normal bodily functions like urination, defecation, and sexual intercourse.
Your pelvic floor muscles naturally relax and contract as you move, but when they stretch beyond their normal limits, they can become damaged and weak. And when your pelvic floor weakens, it cannot aid in your normal bodily functions, causing issues like urinary incontinence or sexual dysfunction.
So when you sneeze, jump, cough, or laugh just a little too hard, your pelvic floor isn’t able to help your bladder “hold it,” causing leaks.
Urge Incontinence
This type of incontinence feels a bit different, because it doesn’t result from an overstretched pelvic floor, but instead from an underlying illness. Typically, it’s an illness that impacts your neuromuscular function, causing your bladder to involuntarily contract, releasing urine.
In everyday life, this means you might experience the sudden urge to urinate without reason, and sometimes you may not make it to the bathroom before urinating.
While we can reduce some of the symptoms of urge incontinence using our urinary incontinence treatment in Jamestown, we need to address the underlying cause of the neuromuscular concern before we can fully treat your incontinence. Some common causes of urge incontinence can include:
- Diabetes
- Stroke
- Multiple sclerosis
- Regular UTIs
- Parkinson’s
- Overactive bladder
- Certain medications
- Nerve damage
Mixed Incontinence
If you feel like you experience both types of incontinence, then you may have mixed incontinence. As the most common type of incontinence, our options for urinary incontinence treatment in Jamestown can help improve your symptoms. So you can talk to your provider about what symptoms you are experiencing, and which treatment options would best address your needs.
Your Solution for Urinary Incontinence
At Harbour Direct, we offer Emsella as a treatment for urinary incontinence. This solution works by using high-intensity focused electromagnetic (HIFEM) energy to stimulate over 11,000 contractions within one 28-minute session. These contractions provide an intense workout for your pelvic floor muscles, helping to strengthen and increase muscle tone for your pelvic floor.
For urge incontinence, which results from an underlying illness rather than a weakened pelvic floor, Emsella can help improve your symptoms but it cannot completely treat your concerns. Typically, we use Emsella to improve your day-to-day symptoms while you meet with one of our physicians to address the underlying cause of your incontinence.
The Emsella Process
Emsella has a fairly straightforward process, but we want our patients to have all the knowledge and resources they need to feel prepared and confident in their treatment plan. So here are the steps you can expect to follow when you visit our team for urinary incontinence treatment in Jamestown, RI.
Consultation
For your first appointment with our team, you schedule a one-on-one consultation with one of our experienced providers. They take the time to listen to your concerns and ask you more questions about your symptoms so they can understand what kind of incontinence you are experiencing. They also ask you about your medical history, including any medical conditions you have and medications you take. This helps to rule out medications and other specific conditions as the cause of your incontinence.
Once your provider has a clear understanding of your needs, they talk with you in detail about your Emsella and whether or not they believe it can help reduce the symptoms of your incontinence. Together, you create a treatment plan, determine whether it should include Emsella, and schedule any appointments.
Treatment
One of the best things about Emsella is that it is a completely noninvasive treatment. You do not need any injections, incisions, or probes to accomplish your goals. We just ask you to arrive at your appointment in thin, comfortable clothing, something similar to athleisure wear. We also ask that you avoid wearing any metal, and let your provider know beforehand if you have any metal or electronic implants.
They have you sit on the Emsella chair, and begin treatment. You may feel an odd sensation as your pelvic floor muscles experience rapid contractions. But because they are muscle contractions and not like the contractions you experience when giving birth, they should not be painful or uncomfortable. For 28 minutes, you sit comfortably on the Emsella chair for your urinary incontinence treatment in Jamestown, RI.
Results
You and your provider then determine how many sessions of Emsella you need during your consultation, but most patients achieve the best results after 6 sessions of Emsella. It will take up to 3 months to see maximum results as it takes that long to develop new muscle fibers in your pelvic floor. You will need regular maintenance sessions to keep up your results, but you and your provider can talk about that after treatment based on your individual needs.
Once you finish with your full treatment series, you can see the full results about 1 to 3 months after your last session. Then, you can typically expect your results to last for 3-6 months.
Commonly Paired Treatments
In all our care, we emphasize personalization, because we know that you deserve more than a “one-size-fits-all” treatment plan.
However, after years of providing dedicated care to hundreds of patients, we have noticed that some other treatments pair well with Emsella to improve and prolong the results you achieve with your urinary incontinence treatment in Jamestown. If you are one of our primary care patients, we may recommend one or more of these therapies based on your individual goals.
Since these additional treatments require weeks of care and regular visits, they are only available to our primary care patients. However, our treatments for urinary incontinence can be paired with many other treatments. Your personal primary care provider can talk with you about your options for care.
Hormone Therapy
Hormone changes can play a large role in the strength of your pelvic floor. A lot of our hormones help with developing and maintaining muscle strength, including the strength of our pelvic floor muscles.
When our hormone levels begin to decrease because of menopause or andropause, our pelvic floor muscles can lose strength, and we begin noticing the symptoms of urinary incontinence.
By pairing Emsella with hormone therapy, you can boost the effects of your pelvic floor strengthening; providing those vital muscles with the hormones they need to become and stay stronger.
As an added benefit, hormone therapy can also help reduce other symptoms that come with menopause and andropause, like sexual dysfunction, night sweats, mood changes, weight gain, muscle loss, and more.
Weight Loss Management
Personalized weight loss management also pairs well with urinary incontinence treatment in Jamestown. One of the factors that can cause the pelvic floor to stretch is excess weight.
Your pelvic floor helps strengthen your core and hold up your organs. If your pelvic floor also has to hold up excess weight, it may stretch beyond its limit, causing damage to the muscle fibers.
To reduce the strain put on your pelvic floor, we create custom weight loss plans that can help you shed excess fat. We use a combination of tools, like GLP-1 injections and weight loss coaching, to help you establish healthy habits and maintain them to stay at a healthy weight. With this dynamic duo of treatments, you can help prevent your symptoms from returning.
Say Goodbye to Leaks
You shouldn’t have to “just deal” with your urinary incontinence symptoms. Thankfully, our team at Harbour Direct Primary Care offers a comfortable, noninvasive urinary incontinence treatment in Jamestown that can help you conquer your leaks.
If you feel ready to say goodbye to the symptoms of incontinence, we encourage you to request an appointment with one of our expert team members. And if you don’t feel quite sure whether Emsella is right for you, that is okay!
We also offer a complimentary treatment planning tool that helps you discover and explore different treatment options based on your specific needs. We make sure you have the tools to feel comfortable again and enjoy laughing, jumping, and sneezing without worries.
And if you have any questions or concerns before using any of these tools, we also encourage you to reach out to our team. Our experts are more than happy to chat with you to help you gain some clarity about this treatment and how it can help you. While incontinence can be difficult to manage, we do our best to make finding the solution as simple as possible.
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