PT Center for Women

“Why do I hurt so much?” is a question I hear nearly every day. The answer is chronic pain, which tends to tamper with your quality of life. At the present time, there is no known cure for chronic pain. No test to diagnose it. No pill to cure it. No procedure to fix it. No surgery to remove it. This blog is merely a commentary on chronic pain and for a better understanding of your particular situation; you may need to have several conversations with several healthcare providers. The negative consequences of chronic pain are certainly astounding, to say the least. However, patient advocacy groups and patients themselves have demanded better care. Better care starts with a better understanding of the problem. And a better understanding begins with research. Chronic pain often co-exists with other conditions: fibromyalgia, painful bladder syndrome, chronic fatigue syndrome, chronic pelvic pain, TMJ pain, irritable bowel syndrome, dysautonomia, depression and anxiety often times go tog...

Pelvic pain dysfunctions are a silent disease. Many young women (as well as older women) suffer from pain in the pelvic region causing pain with intercourse, tampon insertion and sometimes light touch.  Most of the women that come to see me about their pelvic pain have seen at least five doctors prior to physical therapy. The majority of them have been told somewhere within their search for treatment that they should just relax and have a glass of wine. This is very upsetting to a physical therapist, knowing that this type of pain and dysfunction is musculoskeletal and can be treated with traditional PT techniques. It just happens to be in a very delicate area of the body. This area has muscles that are similar to other areas of our body. They can become very tight, and this tightness can be treated with appropriate techniques. The reasons patients have pelvic pain can include: A gynecological problem Painful periods Muscle spasms Injury to the area No matter what t...

It seems like it’s a weekly occurrence in my practice to field this question: My back has been hurting ever since I had my baby. Did my delivery have something to do with it? Is it the way I hold my baby? There is a little bit of a trick to answering this question: women want to know if any one of a number of variables surrounding the delivery has influenced how their back feels at the present moment. Problem is, variables happen every day, and so it is really hard to pinpoint any one of them and to say, “That’s it! That’s the root cause of the pain!” Even so, women will ask me about a wide variety of potential factors that may or may not contribute to their back pain: epidurals, duration or intensity of pushing, C-sections, posture, rapid labors, perineal tears, and weight gain. They also ask me about the way in which they are breast or bottlefeeding their babies, how they hold and carry them, and sleep postures after baby arrives. Let’s take a look at several of these factors in ...

Short and sweet, many people don't know about the breadth of treatments offered by a physical therapy practice that specializes in pelvic pain and pelvic muscle dysfunction.  And it goes way beyond that. "Of course we treat the pelvis," said Connie Strey, a physical therapist at PT Center for Women in Appleton, "but we also treat fibromyalgia, pregnancy, osteoporosis, lymphedema, and cancer as well." Strey, a passionate provider who speaks really, really fast, went right to her role with your pelvis. "If you've ever been to a physical therapist (PT), you know we're about restoring function: good range of motion, good strength, get you to where you can do the things you want to do," said Strey. "But the pelvic floor, those fast and slow muscles, they're in a private area, a lot of taboo with incontinence and pain with intercourse, so we don't talk about them as much. But we should." And she does. "The pelvic muscles are us...