Causes And Treatment For Pelvic Pain

I would say that from a cause perspective, as far as pelvic pain, if you look at pelvic inflammatory disease, it's related really to sexual activity. Number of sexual partners, onset of sexual activity, because usually that's related to one of three potential vaginal infections.

If you look at painful periods, or dysmenorrhea, a lot of times you see that in our younger patients. And you can have primary dysmenorrhea, which is usually less than 20 years of age. And there's usually no etiology for that. There's not really a cause for that. And then over the 20-year age category, you can see secondary dysmenorrhea, which usually has a cause. And that could be related to, like, cervical stenosis, endometriosis, adenomyosis, pelvic congestion syndrome. Those all can be related to secondary dysmenorrhea.

The endometriosis in general, that is related to the implantation of either the endometrial stroma or glands outside of the endometrium. And that can happen anywhere in the body.

I think when you look at the treatment options as far as pelvic pain goes, you look at the fact that you want to treat it kind of as fluidity in regards to the woman's reproductive life. And it depends where they are in that reproductive life, as far as what you're going to do. But for endometriosis, it could be treated medically. And initially, you could try to treat it medically from that perspective. If that's not efficient, or controls her pain from that perspective, then you can look at surgical options.

For the painful periods or dysmenorrhea, you would treat that with medications. You can try over-the-counter, non-steroidal medications like Motrin and Advil or Aleve. And then if that doesn't work, you can try other prescriptive medications from that perspective.

And then when you look at pelvic inflammatory disease, you're really trying to treat the infection. And by treating the infection, you're trying to prevent the adhesion formation inside the pelvis. Because once the patient forms adhesions, there's nothing to really treat that, short of surgical intervention.