Endometriosis
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Education
Do you plan on surgery for endometriosis? Have you had surgery? Pain patterns can continue with or without surgery, likely caused by underlying fascial holding, muscular tension patterns, and your perception. Pelvic physical therapy can with all of your systems — nervous, endocrine, immune, myofascial, and fluid, to integrate your care, change your pain experience, and train your movement patterns to condition your body.
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Touch therapy
Do you respond well to touch? A pelvic PT uses skilled manual work, touch therapy, to support changing fascial holding patterns and to train your movement and breathing patterns. You may consider visceral fascial mobilizations to support. movement of your abdominal wall and the tissues of you pelvis. Skilled touch therapy may help to open your experience to different ways to interpreting sensations from your body and stop the pain loop.
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Individualized Exercise
When you are inwardly attending to a variety of sensory information, you are likely ready to train more sustainable movements and repeated dynamic postures. A typical journey starts at awareness, activation, and coordination. This process supports your body to mind connection and how different parts work together to support your daily movements. Over time, endurance training will support you. When you have the endurance needed to sustain a more pleasurable movement pattern, then the previously painful habits and compensations are less likely to sneak up on you when you get tired.
How to explain endometriosis pain?
Endometriosis can have multiple factors that contribute to pain. Persistent inflammation and restricted tissues in the abdominal wall, the visceral fascia, and decreased blood flow to nerves may sensitize your pain experience. Nerves may interpret pain, and when there is more inflammation and less movement in some parts of your body, especially the abdomen, those nerve pathways can become more sensitive to pain. This is a protective response to communicate to your brain that something needs to change. The request for change may be as simple as diaphragmatic breathing to massage your visceral organs from the inside. If your pain experience is coming and going for more than three months, you may have adapted responses that are no longer sustainable for you. Physical therapists are trained and practiced in how to train the brain and support the journey to move into new, non habitual, ways that feel better and empower you.
Can pelvic physical therapy help with PCOS symptoms?
Yes. Pelvic physical therapy often uses gentle and specific myofascial skills that are attuned to how you are responding to touch and guidance to change the tissue mobility. These skills can help to broaden movement and mobility capacities and change the habitual loops that are holding onto tension and leading to symptoms from endometriosis and PCOS. Fascial movement is important because fascia wraps around everything in your body- muscles and tendons, bones and ligaments, nerves, visceral organs, and blood vessels. When the fascia is moving freely, blood flow can restore pleasurable movement patterns and balance in your body. This body practice expands your ability to move with the symptoms that may arise from PCOS and endometriosis, and to change your pain experience, whether you have had surgery or not. Skilled touch therapy and individualized exercise that fits into your life are encouraged even after surgery, as the nervous system can still protectively hold patterns of tension until they are specifically tended to.
How do exercises help with endometriosis or PCOS?
Individualized exercises that are specifically prescribed for you may lead to a practice that you can seamlessly fit into your life as a life long unfolding exploration and joyous commitment. As a result, the pelvic floor muscles will support your posture and strengthen your core. Over time, your core and total body strength, power, and endurance will decrease the compensatory tension patterns that can cause symptoms. These habitual, reflexive holding patterns are often what contribute to the pain you feel with endometriosis and PCOS. But when you have the endurance to sustain more supportive movements, then the compensations are much less likely. Exercise can also help regulate hormones, reduce inflammation, lower stress, support a potent nervous system, and help with an overall deeper embodiment and connection to self. Pelvic physical therapists can help you feel confident and safe in returning to exercise in the ways that you need.