Mind Over

Matter (MOM): Healthy Bowels, Healthy Bladder

More than 60% of older U.S. women suffer from urinary incontinence, bowel incontinence, or both. In addition to reducing women’s quality of life, these conditions may also increase the risk for institutionalization when women become unable to care for themselves at home. Fortunately, many women’s symptoms can be reduced or even cured without medication or surgery.

Mind Over Matter (MOM): Healthy Bowels, Healthy Bladder, is a free program, proven to help older women avoid or improve symptoms of incontinence (bladder and bowel leakage). It was developed in 2019 by the University of Wisconsin and the Wisconsin Institute for Healthy Aging after a 2017 study showed that its techniques work.

The reason the Mind Over Matter program is so effective is because it builds skills and self-efficacy to make behavior changes that have been proven to improve bladder and bowel health. Doing pelvic floor muscle (Kegel) exercises, changing fiber and fluid intake, and changing toileting practices have all been proven to improve bladder and bowel symptoms in research studies.

The free workshop includes three, two-hour sessions on Zoom. The program has shown that 71% of participants had lasting improvement in bladder symptoms and 55% had lasting improvement in bowel symptoms three months after completing the Mind Over Matter workshop.

Participants will learn how to relax, strengthen and coordinate the pelvic floor muscles that support the openings of the bladder and bowels. Many women have heard of Kegel exercises, but may not know how to do a pelvic floor muscle contraction correctly. Learning how to relax those muscles is an equally important component often overlooked.

Participants learn a combination of strategies for preventing or improving incontinence, including understanding how the bladder, bowels, and pelvic floor muscles work together; building confidence to set and achieve goals; learning to do low-impact pelvic floor muscle exercises (Kegels) while seated; adjusting fluid and fiber intake to improve bladder and bowel function; as well as how to seek care from health professionals for solutions and specialists if symptoms continue.

It’s not difficult, and if you seriously wish to improve or prevent incontinence issues, this free workshop will show you how.

by Michael Meza, MD, MezaCare

We all know our bodies change with age. But what we sometimes forget is that as we age, our bodies are less able to process medications safely, often leading to less benefit and more side effects or adverse drug events. Many medications depend on normal functioning kidneys and liver, but also appropriate water and fat content to move into the tissue being affected. And many medications need close monitoring to see if they are working properly and not causing more harm than good.

Monitoring of medications should occur at any age, but as we get older, it’s even more important to pay attention to our prescriptions and even our over the counter medications. We should not only read about the potential side effects, but know what the goal is for each medication, when it benefits us and when the benefits have been reached. We should keep a list of all our medications, know what they are for and discuss them with our healthcare provider at each visit.

Unfortunately, as we age, we tend to take on more risks with medications than when we were younger. These risks could include different adverse drug events including falls, cognition or memory loss, low blood pressure or other complications.

This is why healthcare providers should consider deprescribing medications for older adults whenever possible. Deprescribing is the concept of decreasing the number of medications, including Over the Counter medications in patients who are getting older or who are at greatest risk of adverse drug events. Every medication should have the maximum level of benefits with the least risks. Taking our age into consideration and applying these concepts could be critical to your health. As a Health Care provider, I constantly look at the potential for “drug-drug interactions, duplication of therapy (two or more medications