If you suffer from a leaky bladder, you’re probably familiar with that feeling of embarrassed trepidation when you get a severe cough, go to a good comedy show, or god forbid, get invited onto the trampoline!
If you don’t know this feeling, you might be interested to know that 1 in 20 women aged 20 suffer from bladder leakage – called urinary incontinence – and this increases after childbirth and around menopause, increasing to 60% of women by the age of 60. So it is incredibly common, and is possible, even likely, that you might experience it in your lifetime.
To treat bladder leakage, we took on ThermiVa, a revolutionary treatment that uses radio frequency to gently heat tissue to rejuvenate collagen, without discomfort or downtime. Myself, Marilou and Marjorie have already treated many women for bladder leakage using ThermiVa, one of my favourite cases being with Marie*.
Marie had suffered from a leaky bladder when coughing and sneezing since her second pregnancy 30 years ago, so had a vaginal sling surgery 7 years ago to treat it. While it helped initially with the stress incontinence (bladder leaks while coughing, laughing and exercising), she now found that when she needed to pee, it would come on very urgently, and she would need to get to the bathroom straight away. She tried medications but couldn’t tolerate them, and had basically given up and just wore pads, as she didn’t want to go for surgery again.
When I saw Marie for the first time, she had travelled a long way, and needed to stop for the bathroom every 15-20 minutes along the way. We discussed her options, and decided to try the O-Shot first, and plan for ThermiVa if we needed more change.
At her 6 week review Marie had experienced a 90 – 95% improvement! We tried a second O-Shot to see if we could get that number up to 100%, unfortunately there was no improvement with this second treatment. Our Cosmedicine Nurse, Marjorie, then treated her with ThermiVa – she had an instant result which gave her a 99.9% ‘relief score’. During Marie’s journey, our team received a message from her that read “I have been released from what I thought was a lifetime disability!!! And it was painless!!” – and this is exactly why we love what we do!
Until recently, there was a big gap in the available solutions, ranging from pelvic floor exercise, water restriction and anticholinergic medications (which dry everything else up too!) at the ‘less invasive’ end of the spectrum, with surgery the next step for anyone that could not tolerate these or get relief from them.
In the last 2+ years, we have been getting great results in treating urinary incontinence non-surgically at The Face Place, with either the O-Shot or ThermiVa. If you are suffering from urge incontinence, I would suggest trying ThermiVa first. This treatment is also great for vaginal tightening and because our fabulous nurses do the treatment, your wait time won’t be as long (I’m currently booked up for 3 months). For best results, we suggest having 3 ThermiVa treatments, spaced 1 month apart… if you would like to watch Marjorie performing the treatment check out the video on our ThermiVa page.
*name changed for confidentiality
Happy reading – Dr Cat x
