Understanding Bladder and Bowel Control

Tonight we’re going to talk about bowel and bladder control primarily, so Dr. Graves and I both actually trained together at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. And we’ve been each practicing for close to ten years and we’ve had five years of urology training in residency and med school before that. And the topic tonight is something that we do have a lot of focus in and enjoy taking care of and have specialty in. 

So really we’re going to be dealing with two main things: that’s problems with number one and number two, so issues with urinary control and bowel control today. And actually I still remember one of the main reasons I went into urology was because I wanted to help people with quality of life issues. And often having issues controlling either urination or your bowels can be embarrassing and difficult to talk about. And a lot of patients I’ll even deal with for other reasons and they just don’t want to talk about it because they’re just embarrassed. But it’s very common and as patients even young patients can have issues but as we get older they can become more prevalent, but we want to create awareness about it and let you know that you can talk to your physicians, doctors and urologists about it and there are solutions and it’s not something you have to live with. 

So just a quick outline of what we want to talk about today is understanding the bladder and bowel control better today, the care pathway for these different treatment options. And then we can also talk about how medtronic has different treatment options such as inner stem, another type of treatment called neuro, and we’ll discuss those in detail and then we’ll open it up for some questions. So if you’re having bowel and bladder issues you’re not alone, it’s very common and one in six adults can have an overactive bladder. And we’ll discuss what that means so OAB is often referred to as overactive bladder. 

So you have about 37 million Americans who have an overactive bladder and that’s where you have urinary frequency, urgency, difficulty with controlling urination when you want to, and that can even have incontinence where you actually can have urinary incontinence and lose control of your urine. And then one in 12 adults can have fecal incontinence and that’s loss of control of having a bowel movement so that can be very distressing for patients. And this is quite common just to compare there’s 12 million patients in the U.S with vision problems and 17 million patients with asthma so it’s even more prevalent than that.