Hello, I’m Dustienne [Miller] and and I’d like to talk a little bit about what pelvic floor physical therapists do.

I myself am a trained orthopedic physical therapist, as are most of my colleagues who go into the pelvic floor physical therapy, and we look at the whole body in terms of what is causing pelvic floor symptoms. These symptoms can be:

  • pain
  • weakness
  • a combination [of pain and weakness]
  • leakage
  • pelvic organ prolapse

Basically anywhere from here to here, we’re going to treat. We’re going to treat bowel, bladder, sexual dysfunction.

I have turned Sally the skeleton around so that you can see what’s happening at her pelvis. This is the sacrum, this is the triangular bone the base of the spine.

Underneath that, connected to that, is the tailbone of the coccyx. And then above that is the lumbar spine. We have two sides of the pelvic girdle.

And the pelvic floor muscles are connecting from the tailbone to the pubic bone in the front, and then from the two sitz bones, creating a diamond-like shape.

So we’re not only looking at the musculature itself in terms of the pliability comparing side to side, but we’re also looking at strength and pliability of all of this.

We’re looking at how someone walks; how the health of somebody’s hip joint is; the muscular imbalances in the front
versus the back of the hip; what’s happening in the low back; what’s happening in the sides—there’s a muscle right here called the “QL” that can sometimes cause issues between the ribs and the pelvis.

So we look at the global picture: is someone having a different walking pattern after having an ankle sprain that may have set them up for something in the pelvis?

So I just wanted to offer a little bit of an overview for people who may be confused about what pelvic floor physical
therapist do as compared to orthopedic physical therapist. We continue to treat ortho; we just have another additional
lens looking at the pelvic floor.

If you have any more questions please feel free to email me or give me a call and also check out the link to Deborah
Goldman’s wonderful podcast that she did explaining pelvic floor physical therapy.

Thanks!