Kegel Blog womens vaginal health, incontinence, sexual health

Here is a short biography on Dr. Arnold Kegel, who developed the Kegel Exercises for incontinence treatment in women:

Arnold Henry Kegel was born in Lansing, Iowa, in 1894, and studied medicine at the University of Illinois, from which he graduated with a medical degree in 1916. He did surgical training at the Mayo Clinic between 1917 and 1921. He subsequently returned to Chicago, where he established a busy practice, frequently performing thyroidectomies He played a prominent role in the famous “baby-switching” case in Chicago in 1930: he used the relatively new techniques of blood typing to establish the claim by one set of parents that their baby had been given to another in error. In later years Dr. Kegel continued to perform thyroidectomy under local anesthesia, certainly up until the 1950s, but progressively concentrated on nonsurgical approaches to gynecologic problems, namely urinary incontinence and sexual dysfunction. He invented what may have been the first example of biofeedback, which he used clinically to develop improved tone and awareness in the pelvic musculature in women. His name is associated with exercises designed to improve urinary incontinence and sexual dysfunction by developing the pubococcygeus muscle. He died of an aortic aneurysm in 1981.

For many years there were very few adult incontinence treatments for people to choose from. As a matter of fact, the most common treatment was invasive surgery to tighten a damaged PC muscle. However, all that changed in 1948 with the discovery of the exercises by Dr. Arnold Kegel.

Rather than go through the process of major surgery–your PC muscle is located just below the pelvis–Dr. Kegel found that by simply contracting this muscle over and over, your PC muscle will regain its strength and elasticity. If your PC muscle has been stretched due to childbirth or simply by incontinence brought on by the aging process, these incontinence treatments can provide you with welcome relief. By using a Kegel exerciser and putting your muscle through these exercises on a regular basis, incontinence becomes a thing of the past. Today’s adult incontinence treatments really do work since the exercisers are designed to provide resistance specifically to the PC muscle. Exercisers isolate your PC muscle so that it can be worked properly to alleviate this uncomfortable condition. With so many adults experiencing incontinence–perhaps you are too–it is really worth your time and money to invest in adult incontinence treatments. The exercises can and do work, and do not take very long to do every day. It only takes a few minutes to perform them and soon you will find you are no longer worried about this debilitating condition.

I wonder if the good Dr. ever knew the other reasons in addition to incontenence why millions of women sing his praises.