Inside the Box
A podcast for women and professionals alike, hosted by mums and Women's Health Physiotherapists, Kat, Tash, and Caitlin. Established and driven by our desires to share our passion for educating and empowering women to better understand their bodies, in particular - what's inside their 'box'. Amongst ourselves, real-life patients and leading industry experts, we’ll unpack a variety of topics including pelvic floor dysfunction, pregnancy, exercise, birth, postpartum, sexual pain, endometriosis, leakage, prolapse and beyond.
Inside the Box
More than a feeling: Vaginal laxity, the research and what it means for your patients with Taryn Hallam
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Welcome back, and what a way to kick off Season 4!
Taryn Hallam first joined us back in 2022 to talk birth choices, an episode that went on to become our most downloaded of all time. Now she’s back to open Season 4, bringing the research on a topic that deserves far more clinical airtime than it gets: vaginal laxity.
It’s a condition that affects more women than most clinicians realise, and yet it remains under-asked, under-assessed, and under-discussed in clinical practice. Taryn has done the work of pulling together what the evidence actually says and making it accessible for clinicians who want to do better by their patients.
In this episode we cover:
•What vaginal laxity actually is, why it happens, and how common it really is in clinical populations
•The distinction between somatic and psychogenic sexual disorders and why it matters for how we assess and communicate with patients
•The relationship between vaginal laxity and pelvic floor changes, including levator hiatal size and levator ani avulsion
•The important nuance in the data: 98% of women with vaginal laxity had a vaginal birth, yet 89% of vaginally parous women had no laxity at all. So what does that actually mean when a patient asks whether her birth caused this?
•Why the direct correlation between levator hiatal area and laxity sits at just ~23%, and what that tells us about the limits of a purely structural model
•Vaginal laxity as a symptom, something experienced rather than objectively measured, and how that should reshape clinical conversations
•The role of sensory signalling and processing, both peripherally and centrally, in how laxity is experienced
•Why lubrication matters, and the interesting finding that laxity appears more prevalent in pre-menopausal women
•Why PFMT seems to help, even though the research tells us it can’t reduce a distended levator
•Neuromodulation and TTNS: could the mechanism be normalising sensory processing through sacral nerve roots rather than producing structural change?
Whether you’re a clinician or a woman who has experienced symptoms of vaginal laxity yourself, or you’re simply curious about the topic, you’ll find plenty here that’s relevant.
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