Your Secret Support - and how to improve your sex life!

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We use it every day as soon as we get out of bed, and in fact many people use it when they're asleep too. It's one of the most neglected muscles in our body but when it fails to do it's job properly it can make our lives a misery!

I'm talking about the Pelvic Floor.

The pelvic floor is a sheet of muscles that support all the contents of our pelvis: which means -

• The bladder
• The rectum and it's faecal contents
• and in women, the uterus and ovaries too

When the pelvic floor lets you down then controlling your urine can be a challenge when coughing, sneezing, straining or even just standing up! For those with loose bowel motions, a weak pelvic floor means that soiling your pants can be an embarrassing problem which may lead to social isolation as well. And when the bottom literally falls out of your pelvic floor, your uterus will often fall out too leading to a utero-vaginal prolapse!

Most of these condition are preventable by good personal care. For most people this means a lifelong approach to daily pelvic floor exercises and being aware of:

• Avoiding constipation and/or straining with a bowel motion
• Avoiding persistent heavy lifting
• Treating chronic coughs and straining
• Watching your weight and losing it if you're too heavy

So how can I improve the strength of my pelvic floor?

The first thing to do is to identify which muscles they are. After all, if you haven't used them for decades it's highly unlikely you know where they are in the first place! My suggestion is that the next time you go to the toilet to pass urine, try to stop mid-stream. When you do that, you're using your pelvic floor muscles and they are th emuscles you need to focus on.

Once you've identified them, it's time to exercise them. That's simple:

Squeeze and hold for 5 seconds and then relax - don't forget to include the muscles around your back passage too! Repeat for 5 slow squeezes and try to repeat three or four times a day. It's that simple and you can literally do these exercises anywhere and no-one will know what you're doing!

If you keep this up then after a few weeks you'll be aware that control of your urine will improve. And for ladies, as your pelvic floor muscles get stronger you'll be able to squeeze your vagina as well which brings me to the bit about your sex life .....

Sniffing out Urinary Tracts Infections -UTIs

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The Olfactory, or "smell" are of the brain, is thought to be one of the oldest parts of our brain from an evolutionary point of view; hence an unexpected smell can take you back decades to an event long forgotten, but stored away in that mysterious part of your thinking apparatus! I was reminded of this when reading about "stinky urine" and how it can raise the suspicion that an infant may have a urinary tract infection.

One of the lesser delights of being a parent is changing diapers/nappies, and most of us developed the skill of knowing "what was in there" often reflected on how your baby was health-wise. You can all probably remember that if your baby was breast fed that the day after you introduced cows milk or some solid foods, then when you came to change their diaper the next time, it was a "whole new experience"!

As a GP I learned that the sense of smell was always a quite useful tool - the smell of stale alcohol was always a dead giveaway, as was that of tobacco smoke in teenagers hair/clothes! But it was also helpful for diabetics who weren't looking after themselves and for wounds that were becoming infected.

And if an infant was unwell, I always listened to "Mum", because in the great majority of cases, "Mum" was always right, and if she said her infants urine smelt a bit strong, then it was time to get a sample to send off to the lab for investigation. Now the scientists and researchers have confirmed this thanks to Marie Gauthier, MD, from the Department of Pediatrics, Sainte-Justine University Hospital Center, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Although their findings cannot to be said to be certain proof, the presence of "malodorous urine" should raise the suspicion of a UTI, and further investigation should be undertaken.

With the increasing aged population, the incidence of incontinence is also on the rise, and many of these older people rely on the use of incontinence pads/pants every day, and they too are at increased risk of UTIs. For them, we need to use our noses and our brains to make sure that they are diagnosed and treated appropriately too, because a urinary infection can become a life-threatening event.

Hopefully this is some information that you wont sniff at! 

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