Women with complaints of urinary incontinence will often be bothered by additional issues. They could include your pelvic organ prolapse where they have a bulging or loss of support to the organs that protrude through the vagina or often rectal incontinence, which they are often very resistant to mention, but that can frequently be treated at the same time and results in a significant improvement in their quality of life.
Patients not feeling comfortable bringing up this somewhat embarrassing subject can be a real challenge. For us that deal with urinary incontinence is specialty, it's less of an issue because very often we are receiving patients that are referred in from their primary care physicians for this complaint. But we find many of them have been suffering from urinary incontinence for many, many years and were very reluctant to address it with the physician. Again often because they are afraid of surgery or afraid that it will not be something that can be easily treated and they really miss an opportunity for years of improvement in their life and quality of life by doing so.
