I was looking through the most recent research about stress incontinence, and saw this really important paper that came out of Adelaide, Australia from some of our colleagues down that way. Stress incontinence is really a severe problem that people don’t think about. They think about it more of as a hygiene problem. But when you have stress incontinence, it interferes with your life. You have trouble sleeping. It can make it difficult to exercise, so you have weight gain. You’re up in the night, trying to urinate, so you’re not as rested the next day. It interferes with your focus at work. So it can be a problem that really changes your life.
That’s the definition of stress incontinence, if it’s a hygiene problem or it interferes with your life. It’s pretty common. Close to half of the women that are 50 and up, and it’s 1 in 20 of women in their twenties, so it’s a really common problem. It’s worth looking at because all the things that have been tried are useful. Some women are able to help this with Kegels. The surgeries are still an important tool that should be used when necessary. The mid-urethral sling, 90% of people get good results with that, only 10% have problems or have it fail. But the problem is that, with the surgery, there is some risk to the nerves that are involved with sexual response. And of course diapers are a last resort.
So there’s this new thing called the O-Shot®, where you use plasma, PRP, to inject it in the right place. These authors, they combine the use of our O-Shot® with a laser. So the lasers usually go about the thickness of a business card, not much thicker than that. So it’s not a really deep laser, but it’s enough to cause some changes and improvement in the structure and the health of the tissue, especially when you combine it with our O-Shot®.
Physicians apply for training and licensing to provide the O-Shot® procedure (your patients will thank you)<—
So let’s look at what happened. I think this summarizes it the best. If you look at this picture, in the beginning, at baseline, the people who participated, 62% percent of them were frequently bothered by their incontinence, and 37% were bothered daily. But by the time they finished the study, it was more that shifted quite dramatically, so that you can see that many of them were not bothered at all or occasionally, and only 10% were daily, where it was more like 100% were either daily or frequently in the beginning.
The fun thing about this procedure is that, the procedure being both the laser and combination with the O-Shot®, is that the downside is minimal so that if it doesn’t work, you can still go to surgery. But if it does work, and we’re seeing over 90% effectiveness with either the O-Shot® alone or combined with the laser, and when it works, you see great results, with the side effect of sex getting better.
So I think it’s worth discussing this research with your physician. If you want to find someone who’s expert at the O-Shot®, check out our list of providers on our directory, those who are actually licensed to perform the procedure under the standards that we’ve come up with. So check out the research, read it, and share it with your doctor.
