FAQs

What is Women’s Health Physical Therapy and Occupational Therapy?

The treatment of pelvic floor dysfunction is a specialty within physical therapy and/or occupational therapy, involving the evaluation and treatment of problems that are often related to the pelvis, specifically the pelvic floor muscles that form a sort of bowl in the bottom of your pelvis.

When your pelvic floor has weakness or an imbalance due to normal events like pregnancy and childbirth or as a result of an underlying condition such as endometriosis, it can lead to pelvic or low back pain, urinary problems like incontinence or difficulty voiding, bowel problems like constipation and bowel leakage, and sexual problems like pain or discomfort with sex.

Unfortunately, many general practitioners not specializing in pelvic floor therapy often can’t see the whole picture and will tell patients to simply “eat more fiber”, or “have a glass of wine before sex”. At Form and Function Pelvic Health, Women’s Health PT and OT is all we do! Because of this, we take getting to the root of pelvic dysfunction very seriously, because we know how intimately it can affect someone’s day-to-day life, as well as their body image and close relationships.

What Can I Expect My First Session?

Our therapy sessions begin with a comprehensive evaluation that not only allows us to understand your story and the specific problems that you’ve been dealing with, but also get to the heart of how these symptoms have been affecting your life. This evaluation includes walking you through a detailed pelvic health questionnaire to allow you the time and prompting questions to really flesh out the details of your symptoms. We then delve into some of the behavioral components that may be contributing to your discomfort or symptoms, such as your habits which can affect bladder and bowel health.

Your initial evaluation also includes a physical assessment which allows us to assess your posture, check for diastasis recti, and evaluate your ability to effectively engage your deep core muscles, among other things. We’ll then perform an internal pelvic floor muscle assessment if warranted, assessing the strength and coordination of your pelvic floor collectively, as well as discerning if you have pain in individual muscles within your pelvis.

From here, we establish a treatment program that can include a combination of education for behavioral changes, skilled manual therapy, and exercises to help you strengthen the areas specific to your needs.

Together, we can help you stop leaking, overcome pelvic pain or painful sex, restore confidence in your body after birth, and get you back to exercising and doing the things that you love!

Where are you located?

We have two office locations convenient to the greater Pittsburgh area! We are located in Mt. Lebanon Township, 6 miles south of Pittsburgh, PA. Our office space within Roots Chiropractic and is easily accessible from Pittsburgh including the neighborhoods of Sewickley, Bethel Park, Squirrel Hill, and Monroeville, and is only about 30 miles from Steubenville, OH..

Our north office is in the Bradford Woods/Cranberry area, and is convenient to the North Hills, Glenshaw, Moon, Sewickley, Robinson, Cranberry, and Monroeville and Irwin.

What is the Free Complimentary Phone Consultation?

We want our clients to feel in control of their health care, and confident that they are pursuing what’s best for themselves and their family when it comes to taking on the commitment of starting a new therapy program. Because of this, we offer free 20-minute discovery phone calls.  This will give you the opportunity to discuss your symptoms and goals with us and ask questions as to how we may be able to partner with you in addressing these concerns. Even if you’re just curious about exploring what pelvic therapy entails, we would love to spend the time with you sharing about what we do. Please click here to set up your phone consult!

Do you offer any telehealth services or in-home sessions?

There are many educational and behavioral components to pelvic health, and using a virtual platform can be a great start to teaching patients to listen to their bodies and realize the areas of weakness and dysfunction that may be affecting their health. Using behavioral modifications and education regarding ergonomics, nutrition and relaxation/breathing techniques, as well as beginning a personalized home exercise program, we are often able to improve pelvic dysfunction over a remote platform.

That being said, in-person evaluation and treatment offers the highest quality effective therapy treatment, allowing the use of skilled manual therapy as well as hands-on assessment of musculoskeletal dysfunction, especially of the pelvic floor muscles.