What Happens During a Pelvic Exam to Check for Urinary Incontinence?

During a pelvic exam to check for urinary incontinence, the physician looks for movement of the bladder and uterus. In the video, Kevin Windom, MD of the Sharecare Advisory Board explains the steps to determine the cause of urinary incontinence.

Transcript

00:00

So when a woman comes in my office for urinary incontinence, the first question is, do you leak urine when you cough and you sneeze?

00:06

Or is it leaking with like, oh, my god, I've got to go the bathroom. I can't make it in time. There are two different causes of those problems.

00:14

The first thing you do in an exam on a patient who's being worked up for urinary incontinence is just to make sure they don't have a bladder infection.

00:21

The second thing is I want to make sure they're emptying their bladder all the way. So I'll ask them to empty their bladder and then one of my nurses will scan their body just

00:27

to see how much urine is left in their body after they empty. And then lastly, you do a pelvic exam. And in a pelvic exam, I want to see the support of the bladder.

00:33

Does the bladder stay where it is when they cough or when they bear down? Does the bladder fall? Does the uterus fall?

00:39

Is the urethra, which is the tube going into the bladder, is it stable or does it move? And those are the things you look for.

00:46

And depending on what the problem is, you can kind of tailor make what you need to do to fix this patient. Sometimes they need surgery, sometimes they need exercises,