Credence Therapy Notebook
 Not a clinic and not a waiting room: one woman's record of pelvic health physiotherapy, the exercises that actually work, and how long they take.
Pelvic health physiotherapy, what it involves and how long it takes.

Getting seen

Between appointments · 3 threads

Referrals, waiting lists, and the appointments where nothing happened.

Almost nobody arrives in pelvic health physiotherapy quickly. The threads here are from the part before treatment starts: asking for a referral and being talked out of it, sitting on a list for most of a year, self-referring and not knowing whether that was allowed, and turning up to an assessment nobody had described in advance.

What tends to move things along

Read across this section and the pattern is not that persistent people get better care than polite people. It is that specific people do. The posts where something changed are the ones where the reader arrived with a written record instead of an impression: how many times a day, on which activities, since when, and what has already been tried. A three-day bladder diary does more in an appointment than any amount of insisting.

The second pattern is that people underestimate the routes open to them. Several readers here were told their only option was a GP referral in a system that in fact allowed self-referral, and several others found that the waiting list they were quoted was the general musculoskeletal one rather than the pelvic health one. Asking which list you have been put on is a question worth ten minutes of your appointment.

The guides that go with these threads are getting referred to pelvic health physiotherapy, waiting times and what happens at an assessment. If the appointment itself is what is worrying you, the internal examination covers consent, chaperones and declining it.