All Things Sexual Wellness Episode 4 Transcript

Kelly Englemann: Welcome to the All Things Sexual Wellness Podcast, hosted by Enhanced Wellness Living, where we’re gonna teach you everything you need to know about all things sexual wellness. Hi, I’m Kelly Engelmann, host of All Things Sexual Wellness podcast. I’m a family nurse practitioner. Board certified in anti-aging and regenerative medicine, and also certified as a sexual health practitioner through A4M.

My co-host is Amanda Carter and we practice in Ridgeland, Mississippi at Enhanced Wellness Living. I’m so blessed to have Amanda. She has brought life to our sexual health program for both men and women. So we’re gonna dig into some content, but first I have a little bit of disclaimer. This podcast, we are not here to treat any health condition.

This podcast is for information only. So if you’re having some struggles and want help, please reach out to the clinic. You can reach out to us on our website, www.enhancedwellnessliving.com, or you can give us a call (601) 364-1132, or you can reach out to your current healthcare provider.

The other disclaimer is that this is adult content. If you have littles sitting around listening to this podcast, you may wanna grab your earbuds or your headphones. We do want you to listen, but we just wanna be responsible about how this content gets out. So grab those earbuds. Let’s dig in. This is gonna be awesome.

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Kelly Englemann: Well, I’m so excited to be back on the All Things Sexual Wellness Podcast, and today we have with us a special guest, Jody Joiner. I have known her for years. She’s in the wellness realm. She is a, a physical therapist that works mainly with myofascial release in helping women with women’s health issues. And our goal for this podcast is really just to open up the conversation about something that I, I hear often, and Jody, I’m sure you do too, that. You know, women are struggling in the bedroom. Um, maybe they’re having some painful intercourse. They have not even told their spouse that they’re having painful intercourse. So, you know, what are you seeing and how do you deal with that?

Jody Joiner: We actually see a lot of it. People don’t realize that there is physical therapy for the pelvic floor, and we see a lot of women that haven’t told their doctors even, you know, their OB that they’ve seen for years that they’re having. Pain in the bedroom or that they always wear, you know, a pad every day.

I mean, women don’t know that. Um, we shouldn’t be wearing pads all the time because we’re leaking. We shouldn’t be able to jump on the trampoline because we’re gonna pee on ourself. We shouldn’t have to not go somewhere. Cause you’re scared you’re gonna. Being continent or e even. I see. We see people with fecal leakage that people don’t, you know, talk about and it, and it’s real. It happens a lot more than you would think so.

Kelly Englemann: Right. So, I’m so glad you’re here so we can really dig into this topic. So before we get too deep in, tell us a little bit about yourself. You’ve been a physical therapist for over 30 years.

Jody Joiner: Yeah, right. I graduated from here in Jackson at UMC and I’ve been practicing physical therapy. I’ve done everything from inpatient to outpatient, little bit of rehab. And um, about 10 years back I started working with a friend and he got me into mostly myofascial release. And it was actually a local OB/GYN that had some pain and had told someone that told him and she wanted to know if we worked with pelvic floor pain. So that is actually how I got into really focusing on the pelvic floor. I’d already done a little bit of the incontinence type side at my other job, and so I just dove in and love it.

Kelly Englemann: That’s awesome, so let’s talk about what the pelvic floor is. So we throw that term around, but a lot of people don’t even realize they don’t have a pelvic floor. They don’t know what the pelvic floor does. So tell us a little bit more about.

Jody Joiner: Okay, so the pelvic bowl is literally a bowl full of muscles. Okay? So you have your pelvis and you have the front, the pelvic bone, and it goes back to the back to the coccyx so it’s literally like a bowl full of muscles from the front to the back and on the sides. And that bowl has a lot of jobs. You know, we don’t even know, I mean, probably 90% of my patients that come in don’t realize that their pelvic bowl is literally a bowlful muscles,

Kelly Englemann: Right.

Jody Joiner: It’s bowel, it’s bladder, it’s reproductive, it’s sexual. You think of it just like all the o- other muscles that work in your body. It supports all your organs. It’s part of your core. So it needs to be strong. It needs to, you know, have full length. It needs to know how to correct properly. And that’s where a lot of these problems come in. Cause just like everywhere else in your body, you know, it needs to stretch, right? It needs to be strong, but it also doesn’t need to be too strong, you know?

Kelly Englemann: Yeah. And so the pelvic floor or the pelvic bowl is a lot of times where we hold a lot of our stress.

Jody Joiner: Yeah, you’re exactly right. Yeah. You know, you think it’s, um, your neck and shoulders, and we’ve learned over the, probably the past 10 years, we hold it in our gut. But what people don’t realize that you also, we hold a lot in our pelvic floor, and the part with the pelvic floor is- it just like, it can be trauma, it can happen from stress, and you not even know that you have problems down there. And then all of a sudden, women will start having problems.

Kelly Englemann: Right? And so, you know, you’ve, you’re holding, so let’s just say it’s stress. You’re holding stress in the pelvic floor or the pelvic bowl, and then you try to be intimate and it plays out as pain whether you say something to your partner or not. Oftentimes they know something’s not right.

Jody Joiner: Right.

Kelly Englemann: Oftentimes they don’t ask the question what’s wrong, and so that leads to avoidance of having sex because it’s gonna hurt for both partners. You know, I, I saw a couple a couple of years ago where he was having a erectile dysfunction because she was having pain. So his erectile dysfunction wasn’t physiological for him, it was emotional. He didn’t wanna hurt her. He wanted to have sex with her, but he didn’t wanna hurt her.

Jody Joiner: Right.

Kelly Englemann: And so it was creating problems for both of them in the bedroom. And she wasn’t even saying she was hurting. Right. But that, you know, and it kind of all came out in, in me treating both of them. And it was really cool, once we got the problem solved, to see them be able to reengage.

Jody Joiner: Right, right.

Kelly Englemann: And enjoy their lives again together.

Jody Joiner: So a lot of times that can happen. Well, there’s a lot of different reasons why it can happen, but a lot of times it happens like when women become postmenopausal or they’re breastfeeding or something that causes the pelvic floor to not be as lubricated as it normally is.

Kelly Englemann: So, so you mentioned times dry when estrogen levels might be lower. So when a woman’s breastfeeding, estrogen levels are go down because Right. They’ve already had the baby. They don’t have all the, the hormonal production coming from the placenta and the baby anymore. And breastfeeding suppresses ovarian output.

Jody Joiner: Right.

Kelly Englemann: And so they have low estrogen during that time, which creates vaginal dryness.

Jody Joiner: Correct.

Kelly Englemann: So that’s a time where they may start feeling pain and then when they feel pain, They constrict. Right?

Jody Joiner: Right. And so your body completely goes into protection mode. There was, um, a study of women and they had ’em watch just, you know, a regular kind of movie, just a happy movie. They had ’em watch a sad movie. They had ’em watch a horror movie and then a traumatic movie. You know, and the traumatic movie and the horror movie, both in both women protected themselves by tightening their pelvic floor muscles, right?

So you want that to happen because that’s how your body protects you. But what happens is you have it with sex and you protect. And so then every time you have sex, you start to protect. And your body’s really smart. Right. You know that brain is smart and it knows, and it says, uhoh, we’re gonna have sex, now I’m gonna protect you.

Kelly Englemann: And it just creates that cycle that oftentimes leads to more dysfunction.

Jody Joiner: Exactly.

Kelly Englemann: For both men and women. So how does pelvic floor therapy help someone?

Jody Joiner: Okay, so what we do is, It’s like rehab or anywhere else in your body if you kind of look at it that way. We want to have full flexibility or a full range of motion of the pelvic floor. And what that looks like. Cause most people don’t even know what a Kegel is. If it was also another study and just thought it was cool that they took women, you know, and, and they had ’em do a Kegel and only 50% of the women did it correctly.

Kelly Englemann: So let’s talk about what a Kegel is. So a Kegel is a pelvic floor. where you pretend like you’re stopping the stream of urine.

Jody Joiner: Exactly.

Kelly Englemann: And contracting those muscles. Exactly. So what you’re saying, 50% of women can’t isolate those muscles necessary to produce the right activity for a Kegel exercise. Correct?

Jody Joiner: Yeah, because what people don’t realize it’s, you are stopping the flow of urine, but there’s three different parts to that Kegel, you want, there’s the pinch that starts, that closes. And then you want the squeeze. And then you have to have the lift.

Kelly Englemann: Right.

Jody Joiner: Okay. So a lot of women are stuck in that lift position and we don’t know it. You think of young athletes, the a volleyball player that stands in that position ready to get the ball. You think of, um, someone that’s had pelvic floor trauma before. Know, someone that’s been abused or molested. Right. And they’re gonna start out in that position.

Kelly Englemann: Interesting.

Jody Joiner: You know, so it’s being able to perform the pelvic floor contraction fully, and then of the other 50% that couldn’t do the pelvic floor or the kegel correctly, they were actually doing a Valsalva, which they’re pushing kind of just the opposite of what they should be doing.

Exactly. Which pushes your organs out, which causes a lot of those problems that we’re talking about, right?

Kelly Englemann: Yeah. So that’s fascinating. I will say it, you know, doing Kegel exercises for the pelvic floor is important. You know, and I say people, the hardest thing about doing a Kegel exercise for most is just remembering to do the Kegel exercise.

Right, right.

We’ve probably all been told as females to do them. So I say, do your Kegel exercises at every red light. So every time you’re at a red light, that’s your cue to do your Kegel exercises. If you find yourself going to the bathroom, you know, test yourself out, can you stop your flow of urine when you’re going to the bathroom? That would be a good sign, right? That you can do a proper Kegel.

Jody Joiner: It is a good sign, but, um, you wanna make. Your pelvic floor’s really smart, so you wanna do it like after you go to the bathroom. Okay? Okay, so tell me more. Because to properly go to the bathroom, you want your pelvic floor muscles to relax, right?

Okay. So if you go in there and you’re contracting them and you’re already someone that does it wrong, you know what I’ve been saying? So you’re kind of, you know, teaching that brain. So you really want to go to the bathroom.

Kelly Englemann: So empty your bladder.

Jody Joiner: Empty your bladder, and then when you’re done, then act like you were gonna stop the flow of urine. And that’s way you’ll be able to know, you know, if you’re performing it correctly. Another thing to think about, okay, and this is interesting because you always hear, strengthen your pelvic floor. Yes. The most important thing though, that is what we’ve realized is most of the ladies we treat have tightness.

Kelly Englemann: The opposite…

Jody Joiner: yes. Okay. So the problem is, is I want you to be strong. , but I want you to be strong in that full range of motion. And what we don’t realize is that most of us don’t have full range of motion of the pelvic floor because we hold everything tight and we live in that sympathetic right fight or flight.

Everything is fast and we chest breathe. So when you diaphragmatic breathe, and I like to say 360 degree breathing, cause it’s not just into your belly when you breathe in. And your belly expands. Your pelvic floor actually drops and opens up kind of, you can picture like pinball slippers every single time you breathe. And because we lack that, we create a lot of the decreased, let’s say the motion in the pelvic floor.

Kelly Englemann: Right. So which ultimately decreases blood flow to that area. Exactly. Which contributes to the vaginal dryness, which contributes to the pelvic pain. It is a big cycle. So one of the things that we teach in our practice, and I know for sure Jody, you do as well. is those deep breathing exercises.

Jody Joiner: And I love that you just said that cause that is a great way to increase the blood flow. Yes. To this area, which also helps prevent some of that dryness.

Kelly Englemann: Yeah. So I’ve been treating female health since my very fir, you know, the very beginning of my career back in 1997. And it’s evolved over time.

You know, I was in a traditional OB/GYN practice. I loved it. Um, but we had very conventional ways of treating and the more I got into more of the hormone management, nutrition management, and really listening to these women and what was creating their dysfunction, you know, now we have way more tools in our toolbox to treat pelvic floor dysfunction, vaginal dryness, as you mentioned, incontinence, whether that’s urinary or wow fecal, right?

And so when I think about what does a person need, and physical therapy oftentimes plays into that, you know, we refer a lot of our patients over to you for that purpose of getting that pelvic. Number one, having them learn their body, right? Having them learn what their body’s actually doing and how it is responding or not responding to activity, going to the bathroom, having sex, those kind of things, but also using the right tool to restore.

So if it’s a blood flow issue, we’re gonna use something like acoustic wave therapy. If it’s more of a, the pelvic floor needs to be strengthened or toned after childbirth or trauma, then we’re gonna use radio frequency technology. And sometimes it’s a combination of both. Right, exactly. Or a combination, I should say, of three things. Sending them to physical therapy, working on blood flow, and also working on, um, the strength of the pelvic floor using something like radiofrequency.

Jody Joiner: Right. Yeah. And I think that’s a great combination because then they’re learning to make sure they’re doing it correctly and then they have the ability to continue and strengthen.

Kelly Englemann: So when you take in a patient, your intake for that patient. Cause I have to think that there’s a lot of apprehension with bringing this topic up to their healthcare provider because they may not realize. You know, a resource or maybe they’re fearful of what that treatment plan may look like. Right?

Jody Joiner: Right.

Kelly Englemann: So let’s walk through what a typical treatment plan. Say I send a patient to you for pelvic floor and I usually just say, let’s evaluate and treat. And you know, oftentimes there needs to be dialogue between that provider and the physical therapist to give better history or, or understand things a little bit better as far as what the outcome needs to be. But what will a patient walk through when they come into the practice for their first physical therapy appointment?

Jody Joiner: Okay. The great thing about where I work to specialized physical therapy is our rooms and the atmosphere is really good. I mean, you know, everybody has separate rooms. You’re not in a big gym where everybody is, you’re in your own room with your own physical therapist, and we have an hour where you can really sit down and talk about things. Everything’s one-on-one.

Kelly Englemann: So these rooms are, are really like massage rooms.

Jody Joiner: Exactly.

Kelly Englemann: They’re set up very comfortably, very, you know, private. And to your point, it’s not a traditional PT place, right? Where you go in and everybody’s in a bay.

Jody Joiner: Correct.

Kelly Englemann: And yeah, so it’s very private atmosphere.

Jody Joiner: Right. And it also, you know, just to let people know when you come in, people don’t know what you’re there for. I mean, we see necks, we see backs, we see TMJ, I mean, so, right. People aren’t looking at you. I mean, we see men and men really get freaked out because they think everybody’s looking at ’em and they’re not. Cause nobody has any idea what you’re there for. So you’ll come in, you know, and we’ll kind of talk about your things.

It’s kind of interesting most physical therapists that get in the pelvic floor love it. You know? So we’re usually pretty easygoing. And when you start talking, you know, you realize, okay, you know, this is okay. And I tell you I’m gonna ask some questions that normally you don’t talk to, but I want you to feel free that you can talk to me about whatever.

And so we’ll just kind of start out, start with your history and find out, you know, Um, you know, what you drink, there’s so much education to physical therapy because you may be causing some of it, you know, with coffee, with caffeine. And as you know, so much of the stuff with your gut right, is so huge with the pelvic floor because, so constipation, yes.

Kelly Englemann: Bowel. So what you’re talking about is inflammation in the gut will affect the way the pelvic floor reacts. Exactly. So the things that you’re eating will impact the way that you respond. day to day, but also respond to therapy. Exactly. If you’re still eating those inflammatory foods, then you may see result temporarily, but in between sessions, it kind of fires back up.

Jody Joiner: Right? Right. Exactly. And so we’ll talk about all that. And then we do do a, a physical assessment. You know, we look at your strength, look at all those different things. And there are ways to not do things internally. You know, we have some people at first that aren’t as comfortable and we may have to like take a little more time, but in a perfect setting, we.

Palpate the muscles in your pelvic floor. And I tell people, it’s just like the, the entrance to your mouth, right? I mean, you know, it’s the entrance to your muscles and this is how I can test them and I can feel what they do. I can feel if they’re tight and you’ll know. I mean, you know, if I press on the muscle, you’ll be able to say, oh, , I do feel pressure or I feel burning or I feel whatever you feel, you know, we don’t try to create any kind of pain, but I’m able to feel if you’re, you know, using the three layers of muscles, you know?

Right. Or if you’re pushing when you are supposed to be lifting or if you’re not relaxing. When you’re supposed to be relaxing.

Kelly Englemann: Right. So with that information, you can develop a treatment plan. Mm-hmm. . And typically when they’re doing a treatment plan, how often will they come to physical therapy to be treated?

Jody Joiner: It, it’s great if they could come weekly. We like to do once a week. Um, but sometimes there is a little more separation in between. You know, you have mothers that come in that are just, you know, had a baby and they have two more, and, and life is hard, you know? And I understand. You can’t do your homework as good, so sometimes we’ll put two or three weeks in between and we’ll give you enough to do to where you can work on it, you know, because a lot of what we try to give you is a lot of functional stuff.

Like if you’re lifting kids or you’re breastfeeding. You know, we like to talk about positioning to have proper bowel movements is a big thing. Like people don’t realize, you know, you, you really let your muscles relax and you do a lot more of your breath work to have a proper bowel movement. You know, not to push with your muscles because if you push with your muscles, it actually doesn’t allow the sphincter to work and they’re right. Once again, we create a lot of these prolapses and, and different problems that we have

Kelly Englemann: Absolutely.

Jody Joiner: By not knowing.

Kelly Englemann: Speaking of positions, you know, I had a case many years ago, I had not yet gotten so deep into functional medicine at the time, but I had a, a female that I was treating, and this is back when I was still doing a general GYN work and she was getting a little bit older. She was in her sixties, I think, 65 ish having some vaginal dryness and some pain with intercourse. And of course we addressed the hormone issues, but I, I spent some time talking to her about positions and just giving her some ideas about different ways of engaging in intercourse with her husband. So the next time she came back, her husband came with her and I thought, oh, this is not good.

And, and he sat down and he goes, Do you know why I’m here? And I was like, I, I really don’t. Help enlighten me. And he said, I just wanted to personally come in and thank you for spending the time and helping her understand how her body works and giving us some fresh ideas because everything’s great now.

And so, and I’m sure you hear stories like that, but that has stuck with me for a long time because that’s really the whole point. You know, the whole point is to get them back to functionality, get them back enjoying, um, engaging in sexual activity. Yes. Whatever that looks like for them. So that, you know, that relationship is enriched. Right?

Jody Joiner: Right. Yes. Yeah. And we even see people, um, that can’t have sex, that haven’t, you know, get married, you know, and I saw, I’ve seen actually several people now. It’s, you know, it’s been over a year or five years and they’ve never had sex.

Kelly Englemann: So when, so these are newly married? Yes. Newly married. They did not have sex prior to marriage.

Jody Joiner: Correct.

Kelly Englemann: Waited to have sex prior to marriage, and they can’t then after marriage, they’re not having sex because of pain.

Jody Joiner: Exactly, yeah. And so a lot of times these, your people are, so, it’s just good to think about, you know, if for a female, if you cannot wear a tampon, that’s not normal. So that’s another situation that you need to know, okay. You need to see pelvic therapist to kind of help you learn to relax because that pelvic floor needs to be able to open for intercourse and it needs to be able to contract, you know, to be able to have, um, an orgasm or to enjoy sex properly.

Kelly Englemann: So Jody, this podcast has listeners locally, but also we have listeners in other areas. If someone wanted to pursue pelvic floor therapy that’s not in our area, cause you’re local, you’re, you know, specialized physical therapy, two locations, easy to access. But what would people look for, um, when they’re looking online in their area to make sure they’re using a physical therapist that has training in pelvic floor work?

Jody Joiner: The, um, we actually have gone a lot of our courses through Herman and Wallace, which is a, a. I guess I would say women’s health, but now they do male and female pelvic health. Right. And um, you can actually go online and look online and they have a great list of all of their therapists and you can put the location where they located. Yep. And those are really some good, good training. You can also do the same thing through, I guess the physical therapy association.

Kelly Englemann: So what you’re saying is your traditional training for physical therapy doesn’t give you the skillset to treat pelvic floor work necessarily?

Jody Joiner: Correct.

Kelly Englemann: There’s typically additional training, um, that you would need to do in order to fully understand the pelvic floor and treat patients in a way that, that they would need to be treated.

Jody Joiner: Yes. Yeah. You don’t really learn much in school at all. This is, it’s you learn a lot more after.

Kelly Englemann: We’re hands on, right? Yes. Awesome. And then we also have providers that listen to this. Podcast. And as far as being a provider in healthcare, you know, are there some things that providers could do better in the way of assessing their patients or question asking cause oftentimes they’re not coming in necessarily for this complaint. Um, I especially think about our GYNs that are doing pelvic exams and um, some of the primary care clinics that do pelvic exams are there things that would be signs that using pelvic floor physical therapy would be a solution for?

Jody Joiner: I think we’ve gotten too used to thinking that, you know, if a woman wears a pad and they’re having some leaking and stuff, like that’s normal. But really that doesn’t have to be, I mean, you know, so I think it’s, you know, if someone tells you they’re having a lot of leakage and stuff, and I’m not, you know, I know that y’all, y’all have a lot of great, you know, different things now on the market that help with it, but I think it’d be great to send them to pelvic floor physical therapy, but to learn, you know, what your pelvic floor does and how you can help it. Because stress incontinence and all that kind of stuff, it has a lot to do with the ability of your pelvic floor to, to have that rebound. You know, and to know when your pelvic floor needs to relax and when it needs to tighten.

Kelly Englemann: You know, it’s interesting. What I have found in treating female sexual health is that oftentimes they would never complain about pelvic pain, but they typically will ask about bladder issues.

Jody Joiner: They do.

Kelly Englemann: And I didn’t realize how distracting having a bladder that doesn’t function properly, whether that’s frequency and urgency, um, or leakage. How distracting that is for a person, right? I had a patient that I was treating recently that has been my patient for years, and I would often ask myself, why does she keep coming back?

Because I give her this advice and she goes about her way, and then she comes back and she’s forgotten. I feel like we’re having the same conversation over and over. Well, it turns out she was having severe bladder leak. She was wearing a diaper. And once we, I don’t even know how we got into the conversation about her pelvic floor because that’s not why she was seeing me, but we treated her with Votiva for a pelvic floor result, completely resolved. She’s not wearing pads. She doesn’t wear a diaper. Completely resolved. She can now sit and have a conversation, retain, remember, she’s making progress now in her general health that she was just not able to make before.

Jody Joiner: Part because they’re worried about, you know, where they’re gonna find the next bathroom.

Kelly Englemann: Yes. So, distracting it. It is distracting. So I would say, you know, if that’s something that you’re struggling with, you know, the number one reason women go into nursing home facilities as they age is because of lack of bowel and bladder continence. And so we need to be treating this in our thirties, forties, and fifties with the technology we have today.

There’s no reason why we should be suffering with that. And we certainly don’t wanna let it progress into our sixties, seventies, and eighties and require hands-on care when we could be at home.

Jody Joiner: Right. Yeah. And I, I think another good thing is when women talk about dryness, You know, is to, to ask, you know, are you having pain with sex? Or, you know? Yes. And then knowing that, you know, if, if the physician, you know, wants to give like maybe an estrogen cream or something, but they may need to relearn how to relax their pelvic floor, you know, while they’re having sex. And, and it’s hard. It’s not something you can just tell someone, go home and, and relax. Have a glass of, of wine. You know, it, it really is.

Kelly Englemann: It’s an automatic response. It is. It’s a neurological tightening is an automatic neurological response. It has to be retrained. Right. And just like you would retrain from a stroke with a physical therapist. Yes. Right, right. I know that’s an extreme case. It’s the same concept. It is for the brain. The brain has to relearn how that pelvic floor should be working.

Jody Joiner: And a lot of times, like say prolapse or leakage and stuff, it’s not just that your pelvic floor is weak. I think what’s important is knowing that we do so much education, you know, like we, we are talking about with the breathing and stuff.

If you do surgery and you’re gonna give the patient a sling or you’re gonna do something like that. Okay? Nine times out of the ten, the reason why your surgery may not last is cause they’re gonna go home and do exactly what they were doing before. Before. So if I can teach them the pressure management techniques, then your surgeries are gonna have a lot more success.

Kelly Englemann: That’s good. That’s a really, really good point, Jody. So let’s talk about how women can start the conversation with their spouse. They’re having pelvic pain and like I said, I feel like the spouse knows something’s not right. You know, the energy’s not there. Right. But it’s not being said. So what would you say to that?

Jody Joiner: I think a lot of times it’s hard with a woman to be able to say that, and a lot of times I think that it’s great. Like we tell the husbands to come, you know, I want the husband to come to physical therapy with them so I can help explain it. They’re, um, I guess, you know, to say that it. It’s not you that’s hurting me cause it’s not.

It’s, it’s how you are protecting from them. So that is hard to say and it’s hard to, for me to just tell you just how to relax. Right. But it, it, it is learning. To let your body know that it’s okay, you know, I hear that you’re hurting and I’m gonna figure out way what I can do to help you relax. So it’s, it’s thinking about the breathing and maybe, you know, more foreplay, making sure that you’re lubricated, making sure that he’s lubricated often during intercourse.

Kelly Englemann: Yeah, and I oftentimes find that, you know, men really want to be part of the solution. And when they don’t understand the problem, it just creates an element of frustration, right? So oftentimes being willing to have that conversation, being willing to bring them. I’m the same way at my practice. I say, bring your spouse, you know, this is a lifestyle we’re creating, and the more information they can have, the better they can support you, and the more you can walk it out together, whatever it is.

And so I would just encourage our listeners to take that time to have that conversation, even though it may be difficult to talk about in the beginning. , it can oftentimes lead to the best outcome. Right.

Jody Joiner: And then they don’t feel that you’re rejecting them because, right. You’re not interested.

Kelly Englemann: Yes. When you think back to the fifties and sixties and seventies, it was always the woman had a headache.

Right? Right. It became this just an excuse. Right? Well, this is not an excuse. No. You know, it’s real. It’s really does. It’s real. It does happen. It’s an automatic response to the body for whatever reason. Whether that’s birth trauma, whether that’s prior sexual trauma, whether that’s, again, just where you hold your stress, right.

It could be as simple as that. Or to your point, activities when you were younger playing volleyball or certain sports activities that just force that position that just has never been retrained. Yeah. So whatever reason you’re having that pelvic floor challenge, reach out. If you can’t talk to your spouse right away, talk to your healthcare provider. Um, get to tools and resources. We will definitely post in our show notes how to reach specialized physical therapy and some additional information about pelvic floor dysfunction. But don’t be afraid to speak out.

Jody Joiner: Right. There’s a lot of information out there, a lot of education, and you don’t have to . Live with pain with sex and leaking and female, all these female issues that we’re told that we have to live with. They’re not normal.

Kelly Englemann: So, Jody, for our locals out there that wanna reach out to specialized physical therapy, I know that it requires a physician prescription or a provider prescription. Nurse practitioner, PA or physician writes a prescription to come to see you. But if they wanted to reach out and ask questions or look at scheduling, how do they do that?

Jody Joiner: So they would call Specialized Physical Therapy. It’s (601) 420-0717 and our website is specializedptms.com.

Kelly Englemann: Thank you so much, Jody, for joining us today. Thank you for having me. Thanks guys for listening.

I hope this information really sparked some interest and curiosity in you. If you liked what you heard, please follow us on your favorite podcast platform. Again, you can reach out to us at Enhanced Wellness by the web, www.enhancewellnessliving.com. And then of course you can give us a call at(601) 364-1132.