By Sarah Parker,

Pain in women’s health is something I am quite passionate about as pain is something that I have lived with my whole life and something that even specialist Doctor’s could not help with. Their recommendations across the board with period pains is to either wait until you get pregnant (and I haven’t even decided if this is something I want) or go for surgery (NOPE!).

Pain is a funny one - someone once decided to label what was “good pain” and what was “bad pain” when in fact pain is neither of those things. Pain just is. It’s a way for our fantastically intelligent brains to get our attention - and it works, right? However, although it gets our attention we don’t seem to know what to do with it when it calls, and if Doctor’s can’t guide us then we are just stuck in a pain cycle not knowing a way out.

Pain is never purely physical, it is never purely chemical and never purely emotional or environmental. It is all of those things. Our brains are survival beasts if we let them and they are constantly using every tool they have to assess external and internal situations, understand them and then express them to you so that you can make change where necessary. But what’s happened along the way (in our society and it’s expectations of us) is that we have forgotten the language of our body and learnt to ignore/numb-out the signs of communication in order to get on with the life that is expected of us - work, money, bills, relationships, education, social, food, exercise, beauty…

All these things are important to us as humans living in the 21st century, but our bodies weren’t made to function with this level of stress. Our bodies struggle to process and excrete the constant influx of stress hormones and the inevitable increase in toxins (caffeine, alcohol, drugs, processed foods, over-exercising, chemicals in beauty products - even our own metabolic waste is toxic if we can’t excrete it). When we can’t excrete our hormones, or we have an excess build-up from toxins that is when the pain begins.

Period pains come for a multitude of reasons, and therefore it’s important to look at your whole life. So, what can you do?

A pelvic health physio appointment will give you space to discuss your symptoms and bowel function, and I may offer you an assessment of your pelvic floor (the pelvic floor muscles provide support to the pelvic organs and control your bladder and bowel movements). The good news is that any lack of communication between the abdominal and pelvic floor muscles can be treated. Aside from just working on the floor, we can work with abdominal massage to help with transit of stool, this technique has been shown to help manage abdominal pain and increase the frequency of your bowel movements and I can also share positions for toileting that may make bowel movements easier and more comfortable. So, I can get you on the road to excreting the necessary, but also reducing the overload by providing diet and lifestyle guidance to help you get to a pain-free cycle - once you get into a rhythm then you’ll never look back!

So book a Pelvic Health session with me, or book a place on the two hour “Healthy Hormones” workshop I’m leading in partnership with Naturopathic Nutritionist and Medical Herbalist Marion Colledge on the 5th of March; one more cycle of pain is one too many.