There are over 25 million Americans who experience some form of urinary incontinence.
While it can affect people of any gender, a higher percentage of people with vaginas report issues with their bladder, especially over the age of 50.
This condition is not only isolating, but it’s also disruptive. You may feel that you can’t appreciate the present moment or enjoy your favorite activities since you’re constantly distracted by the feeling and fear of losing bladder control with a cough or sneeze.
At Regain Functional Medicine + Aesthetics, we can help you enjoy life again with urinary incontinence treatment in Leawood. We identify the root cause of your condition to develop a personalized treatment plan that offers benefits in both vaginal rejuvenation and urinary incontinence.
To learn more about urinary incontinence and how we can help you regain control of your life, read this article.
Table of Contents
To save you a scroll, you can use these links to help you find the information most pertinent to you:
- What Is Urinary Incontinence?
- The Types of Urinary Incontinence
- The Causes of Urinary Incontinence
- The Process at Regain
- Hormone Replacement Therapy
- VTone
- O-Shot
- Morpheus8V
Alternatively, you can skip the reading and go straight to the source to talk with a member of our team about your options for vaginal rejuvenation and urinary incontinence.
What Is Urinary Incontinence?
Urinary incontinence is the accidental—or uncontrollable—leaking of urine. It can range in severity from mild (occasional, slight losses of urine like when you sneeze or laugh) to severe (frequently losing moderate amounts of pee).
Types of Urinary Incontinence
Not only does this condition range in severity, but there are also several types of urinary incontinence as well, including:
- Stress incontinence: Leaking from pressure on your bladder. This is most often experienced when coughing, sneezing, or lifting heavy objects.
- Urge incontinence: An intense and urgent need to pee immediately, often causing you to pee before you reach the toilet.
- Overflow incontinence: The inability to completely empty your bladder when you pee, which can lead to frequent leaking.
- Mixed incontinence: A combination of stress, urge, and overflow incontinence.
Causes of Urinary Incontinence
There is a reason women seek urinary incontinence treatment in Leawood more than men—their bodies go through more transformations and hormonal fluctuations, which can cause pelvic floor dysfunction.
Pelvic Floor Dysfunction
Your pelvic floor stretches from your pubic bone to your tailbone, providing support for your bladder, bowels (large intestine and colon), and other organs as well. It assists in daily bodily processes such as:
- Helping with vaginal contractions during sex by redirecting blood flow to the vagina.
- Relaxing your urethra (the tube that allows pee to leave your bladder) and anus to remove waste from your body.
- Supporting pregnancy and vaginal childbirth delivery.
- Squeezing to stop urine and bowel movements.
- Allowing you to control when you go to the bathroom.
Your pelvic floor works naturally, contracting and relaxing as needed, and you typically don’t even need to think about it or its function.
But if the muscles are too tight or loose, it can cause pelvic floor dysfunction, which results in sexual health problems, and urinary incontinence.
The following can cause a weakened pelvic floor:
- Pregnancy and childbirth: Growing and delivering a child puts a lot of strain on your pelvic floor muscles, causing them to weaken after giving birth.
- Obesity: Excess weight, especially when stored in the abdominal area, can add pressure to your muscles, even causing them to stretch out and weaken over time. In addition to urinary incontinence treatment in Leawood, we also offer a weight loss program to improve your overall health.
- Injury: Your pelvic floor stabilizes your back muscles, diaphragm, and abdomen (also known as your core). Injuries to these muscles can strain your pelvic floor, leading to pelvic floor dysfunction and urinary incontinence.
Hormonal Changes
Women especially can experience urinary incontinence during transformative life events like pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, perimenopause, and menopause. These moments affect your levels of estrogen and progesterone, two key hormones that regulate the following:
- Urinary tract health
- Heart and blood vessels
- Mucous membranes
- Pelvic muscles
- Relaxation
While pregnancy and childbirth cause estrogen and progesterone to fluctuate, you can expect them to rebalance, eventually. Often, it can take up to a year for your hormones to return to pre-pregnancy levels.
Perimenopause and menopause mark the end of your menstrual cycle and a permanent drop in estrogen. This factor causes pelvic floor dysfunction by making vaginal tissue lose elasticity and lubrication, thus weakening the muscle support.
A decline in estrogen and progesterone can also result in vaginal atrophy, and the subsequent thinning and drying of the vaginal walls. This dryness and inflammation can cause urinary issues like recurring infections and incontinence.
Other Causes of Urinary Incontinence
While your pelvic floor strength and hormone levels are 2 major causes of urinary incontinence, other factors can contribute, including:
- Constipation
- Certain medications
- Urinary tract infections (UTIs)
- Nerve damage
- Caffeine
- Chronic cough
Regain Control: The Process for Urinary Incontinence Treatments
In Leawood, all it takes is a free consultation and a simple conversation to help you find relief. Here’s what you can expect at Regain.
Consultation
You sit down with Laura Klostermann-Feld, our Director of Functional Medicine, who is also a highly trained Urologic Nurse Practitioner and a board-certified Family & Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner. Her expertise gives her a unique and compassionate understanding of not only the negative effects that urinary incontinence has on your physical health, but mental as well.
She creates a safe, open space where you can discuss the onset of this condition, how you have attempted to manage it, and any other health concerns that may be connected to urinary incontinence.
Next, she reviews your medical and surgical history, asks about your lifestyle, and reviews your current medications.
ICIQ Questionnaire
The International Consultation on Incontinence Questionnaire (ICIQ) is a short-form assessment that helps us determine the severity and type of urinary incontinence that you have. It asks the following:
- How frequently are you experiencing symptoms?
- How much urine do you leak?
- How does this impact your everday life?
- When do you experience urine leaks? (when you cough, while you’re asleep, etc)
After this thorough consultation, Laura determines the best urinary incontinence treatment in Leawood for you, and develops a personalized treatment plan to help you regain control of your bladder and your life.
Our Urinary Incontinence Treatments
Our treatments range from rebalancing your hormones to strengthening your pelvic floor to improving overall vaginal health. We can combine our urinary incontinence treatments in Leawood for best results.
Bioidentical Hormone Replacement Therapy
Hormone replacement therapy replenishes your levels of estrogen and progesterone to improve vaginal health and urinary incontinence. This therapy also relieves other symptoms of declining hormones, like:
- Insomnia
- Night sweats
- Hot flashes
- Irritability
- Vaginal dryness
At Regain, we only use bioidentical hormone replacement therapy (BHRT), which are hormones that have been derived from plant sources like wild yams or soy. These are chemically similar to the hormones our own body produces, meaning there’s a lower risk of side effects than pharmaceutical, non-bioidentical hormones.
BHRT is also a treatment for vaginal pain. With restored estrogen production, vaginal tissues regain their natural lubrication and elasticity, often alleviating discomfort and improving sexual function. This targeted approach addresses the root cause of the problem, fostering a return to a more comfortable and fulfilling life.
VTone
VTone is not just a urinary incontinence treatment in Leawood; it can also improve sexual function and vaginal tightening. This noninvasive treatment uses a small vaginal applicator to strengthen your pelvic floor through gentle electromagnetic pulses, mimicking the effect of pelvic floor exercises like kegels.
We usually recommend a series of 6 treatments over 6 weeks to achieve the best results.
O-Shot
The O-shot (also known as the orgasm shot) is a drug-free treatment for urinary incontinence. It uses your own body’s healing powers to improve vaginal lubrication by enhancing circulation, stimulating tissue regeneration, and reducing inflammation.
The process involves taking a sample of your own blood from a donor area, like your arm, and spinning it in a centrifuge to separate platelets from the rest of your blood. Platelets are rich in growth factors that help your body heal and repair itself. Once we have the platelet-rich-plasma concentrate, we inject it into specific areas of your vaginal tissue like your clitoris or upper vaginal wall.
For your comfort, we use both a topical anesthetic and a clitoral block to keep this treatment essentially pain free!
The O-Shot serves as more than a urinary incontinence treatment in Leawood. It also improves your sex life, resulting in enhanced sexual sensation and more intense orgasms.
Morpheus8V
You may have heard of Morpheus8 for tightening skin on your face and body, but did you know it can also improve vaginal health as well? As it turns out, collagen and elastin are 2 proteins in your body that can do more than minimize fine lines, wrinkles, and sagging skin—they can improve vaginal laxity, function, and dryness as well.
Morpheus8V combines microneedling with radiofrequency (RF) energy to create micro-wounds in your skin and deliver healing to deep layers of tissue. This process stimulates your body’s natural healing abilities to boost collagen and elastin production as well as neovascularization—the production of new, tiny vessels that increase blood flow to the vaginal tissue.
Before we begin, we apply a numbing cream to keep you comfortable. Within 3 to 4 sessions, you can experience rejuvenated and restored vaginal health and reduced symptoms related to urinary incontinence.
Regain Control With the Team at Regain
You don’t have to let your bladder control you, not when you trust our team to help you find the best urinary incontinence treatment in Leawood.
To get started, you can try our treatment planning tool or request a consultation.
