Urinary incontinence and pelvic floor

Urinary incontinence means any involuntary leakage of urine. Even one drop! One drop can become a lake if we don't start acting. If you cough, sneeze or laugh and you can't hold your urine it's the best to visit a specialist who can check if your pelvic floor muscles work right. There are variety of causes and types of incontinence, I will keep it to those problems connected to pelvic floor.

Help yourself:
My favorite book, simple, great, funny and very helpful is by Pauline Chiarelli Women's Waterworks: Curing Incontinence. You can buy the book or you can download it for reading on your computer (a pdf file is password protected against printing). As doctor Chiarelli says on her website :
The good news is, incontinence can be cured or greatly reduced at any age! By following a simple pelvic floor exercise program, otherwise known as kegel exercises, you can regain control and never again suffer its embarrassment.

Visit a specialist:
Ask your family doctor or your gynecologist to refer you to a physiotherapist specializing on incontinence.
All health providers (Maccabi, Clalit etc.) offer good and cheap courses for mothers to be including pelvic floor exercises and incontinence prevention. Situation in Israel is that unless you have a problem in your pregnancy, your doctor won't send you or tell you about these courses because they are simply ignorant in this matter. Every pregnant woman should go through these courses and ideally through each pregnancy simply because she might not remember all the goodies from the previous one.
The situation will change soon (but probably slowly), there is already a program in which fyzios will educate doctors about the need of prevention and education about pelvic floor muscles during pregnancy.