Sara Reardon
speaker
284 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard May 2025
last heard Jun 2025
Sara Reardon’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
So my goal is that people can get to pelvic floor therapy sooner. When we see someone in pelvic floor therapy, some of the common things that we see, I'll focus on the female population, is urinary leakage. So they leak with coughing, sneezing, running, jumping, laughing. No amount of leakage is normal, but any type of leakage, there's a pelvic floor component.
What's called pelvic organ prolapse, when the pelvic organs aren't as supported by that hammock of muscles. So they start to push into the vagina and it can feel like a bulge in the vagina, like something's falling out. It sounds pretty scary, but it's really just kind of a muscle weakness or tension issue. Pain with sex is another one.
These muscles can be tight or tense, or you can have vaginal dryness that leads to pain with initial insertion, deeper insertion, or both. It can also cause hip pain, back pain, abdominal pain, constipation, painful periods. So kind of anything in this pelvic arena, the muscles can be affected. They may not be the initial cause, but they're often a component that needs to be addressed.
And then when somebody comes into our clinics, it's a private session. It's not in like a big gym, like it would be another PT session. It's one-on-one with a therapist. And we ask you questions about all of your pelvic floor stuff. You may be there for painful sex, but I'm asking you about pooping and menstruation and childbirth. And then we do an internal pelvic exam.
So this is how we assess the muscles is inserting a glove lubricated finger into the vagina and assessing the pelvic floor muscle through the vagina. In male bodies, we do this through the anal opening. So that's how we access the muscles to see if the pelvic floor itself is affected.
You know, I would say 70-30, just a guess. Like I would say over the course of my career, Sometimes I have men as 50% of my caseload, sometimes less. But I would say, you know, it's typical for me to have majority female bodies and then a handful of male bodies. But I'll tell you this. I think that a lot of men experience pelvic floor issues that are underreported.
I think females for sure have underreported symptoms, but we go to see a gynecologist. We talk to our girlfriends. We go online. We kind of do the health investigation. I think that there's as much shame and embarrassment as women have around these issues. I think men also have it, and that's a barrier for them to get treatment.
And oftentimes I'll be seeing a woman, the wife, and then she's like, I think my husband might need to come in, you know? And so it's just to kind of be, you know, make a generalization. I feel like men can have urinary issues, rectal pain, you know, abdominal pain, all these things, but it's when it affects their sexual function is when they start being like, okay, I need to get help.
And yet then it's gone on for a really long time. And we're like, okay, now we're peeling layers of the onion for a bit before we get to the pelvic floor. But it usually takes something pretty significant for them to say, okay, now I need to get help.
No, we definitely see young people, young men and women. So I would say in the female population, it's unfortunate because for women, we often think like, well, it's after you have babies, you have pelvic floor problems, or it's when you're in menopause. But there are so many young women who have painful periods, painful sex, urinary leakage, and they don't know where to go to for help.
They're not even seeing a gynecologist yet. And so they're learning about us on TikTok and social media and YouTube because they're looking for answers, right? But I think for men, if you have an issue as a young man, it's likely not a hormone issue and it's likely not a prostate issue. Those are issues that come on later in life. It could be muscle tension.
It could be which muscles affect nerves, right? Muscles affect connective tissue. They affect relaxation. So different things like a hard time urinating or starting your stream, feeling like you can't empty completely, feeling like it's burning when you urinate, pain with sitting. pain with bowel movements, hemorrhoids. I mean, all of these things are pelvic floor related.
And if you've gone to see a urologist and they've ruled out infections and you still have symptoms or you've taken antibiotics and you still have symptoms, your pelvic floor should be assessed.
You know, I think exactly the way that we're doing this. I think, you know, bringing it to people themselves, I feel like a lot of medical information, it was like gatekept behind physicians. And maybe we're lucky enough to be in a city with a physician who maybe knew about pelvic floor therapy, but it was still a last resort.
Like, oh, we've done all these tests and we can't find anything, then go. And then you've suffered for months or years. So if you have an issue with anything from pelvic pain, painful sex, bladder leakage, frequent urination, sexual dysfunction, pooping issues, I'm like, just go see one. And we'll tell you if there's no pelvic floor component, we'll be like, sorry, we're not finding anything.
But more often than not, there is. And if there's other issues like an infection or you know, something else more pathological going on. We collaborate with other physicians. We refer out. I mean, I work with acupuncturists, dieticians, nutritionists, personal trainers, psychotherapists. I mean, hormone specialists, like we're just one piece of the puzzle.
I don't think that we can always solve everything, but I think we're a piece of the puzzle that's often missed. And by the time people reach us, they're like, why didn't anybody tell me about this sooner, right? Now they've suffered for months or years and their quality of life has changed or they spent gobs of money on treatments that were ineffective.
And so I think it just needs to be brought in earlier. I think medical providers need to ask the questions. We talked a little bit earlier about sometimes people are uncomfortable talking about this, and that means medical providers are uncomfortable. And I'm like, get over it. Our job is to help the patients.
And if you don't screen for these issues by asking about peeing, pooping, sex, menstruation, birth, hormones, then you're missing a big picture here, a big piece of the puzzle.
Totally. And I think that to your point, one, I mean, I am a woman. I have two kids. I'm in perimenopause. I have had my own issues. And so people are like, how are you so vulnerable? I'm like, if I'm asking other people to come see me and talk to me about these really intimate parts of their life and things they maybe never told anybody, I feel like they deserve that same thing from me.
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