Kami Abdullayeva

The conventional medical system is extraordinary at finding and fixing discrete problems. Give it a broken bone, a bacterial infection, a tumour and it will often deliver something close to a cure. Apply that same framework to chronic pelvic pain and bladder conditions, and something goes wrong. The system zeros in on the symptom and loses the person around it. This episode describes what happens when you put the person back together. Two Providers, One Room, One Integrated Conversation...

Nearly half of people presenting to a urology clinic screen positive for PTSD. That number comes from data gathered in the clinic that Shelli and psychologist Lindsay McKernan run together. It is not a statistic about edge cases or complex presentations. It is a statistic about the room. Trauma informed pelvic care, in that context, is not a specialist add-on for a small subset of patients. It is simply what good care looks like. Psychological Hand Hygiene Dr Katy Hansen has a phrase for this...

Some people arrive at an integrative health clinic having already done everything. The diet. The supplements. The pelvic floor physiotherapy. The meditation. The acupuncture. They are trying extraordinarily hard, but they still feel terrible. What tends to happen next is one of the most quietly damaging patterns in chronic pelvic pain: the sense that because the effort isn't producing the expected result, something must be fundamentally wrong with them. The Shame of Trying Hard Dr Katy Hansen...