What Is an Irregular Period?
In an ideal world, your periods arrive on time each month, don’t pose any issues in terms of flow, and quietly go away until the next round. But for up to one-quarter of women, periods fall far short of this ideal.
Urinary incontinence affects women at a far higher rate than men, especially as they get older. In fact, 1 out of 3 women over the age of 45 reports stress urinary incontinence, and this number jumps to 1 out of 2 over the age of 65. While there may be some solace in the fact that there’s a large sisterhood of women who are in the same position as you, it does little to solve your problem, which is where we come in.
At Tahoe Women’s Care, Dr. Gary Willen and our team specialize in women’s health, and we offer a wide range of services that tackles everything from sexual health to urinary incontinence. Whether childbirth has weakened your urinary tract or menopause has left you with reduced bladder support, we offer a number of solutions that can help you regain control of your bladder — and your life.
While laser technology isn’t necessarily new, ongoing refinements in how we deliver the laser energy has broadened its applications considerably, which includes vaginal health.
If your incontinence stems from a lack of bladder support in your vaginal walls, we offer MonaLisa Touch® vaginal rejuvenation. With our MonaLisa Touch CO2 laser, we deliver a fractional pattern of laser beams into your vaginal tissue to spur a collagen response. As the protein responsible for the support of your tissue, this collagen response helps to strengthen your tissue, including the tissue that supports your bladder.
Each treatment takes just five minutes for us to administer, and the technology is completely noninvasive, which means there’s no downtime afterward. We recommend a series of three MonaLisa Touch treatments, which we space apart by six weeks to allow time for your body to respond.
Another great weapon in the war against a leaky bladder is good old-fashioned exercise. By targeting your pelvic floor, which is the muscle group that provides the underlying support for the organs housed in your pelvis, we can improve your bladder control. Through exercises like Kegels, we can show you how to “muscle up” the support of your bladder to prevent leakage.
Another therapy that garners great results is electrical stimulation, which is particularly effective for nerve damage as well as a weakened pelvic floor. By delivering a mild electrical current into your support tissues and nerves, it allows you to gain better control over your bladder.
If you’re experiencing a prolapse in your bladder, which means a weakening in your vaginal walls has allowed your bladder to shift down, we can insert a pessary to restore it to its proper position. Bladder prolapse is fairly common among women who have given birth or who have passed through menopause.
Rounding our list of options is a bulking agent that we can inject into the opening of your urethra, which can help prevent urinary leakage.
As you can see, there is a light at the end of the incontinence tunnel. To restore your quality of life by eliminating a leaky bladder, contact our office in Carson City, Nevada, at 775-318-3909 or request an appointment using the online scheduling tool.
