Good Neighbor Podcast: Frisco

EP 291: What Your Doctor Isn't Telling You About Pelvic Health

• Sophia Yvette

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What Makes Stefanie Long with Concept Pelvic Health a Good Neighbor?

Ever wondered why doctors just tell you to "do your Kegels" when you mention leaking during exercise? Physical therapist Stefanie Long is on a mission to transform how we think about pelvic health—and it's about so much more than just Kegels.

Stefanie, founder of Concept Pelvic Health, reveals the deeply personal journey that led her to specialize in pelvic floor therapy. Despite early exposure during her training, she initially resisted the specialty until experiencing debilitating pelvic floor issues after childbirth. "When you go exercise and you're peeing your pants, you feel like you have to stop working out because you don't want to be embarrassed," she shares candidly. "You can't jump on trampolines, you're having pain with intercourse, and it's uncomfortable and it ruins marriages, it ruins lives."

What might surprise you is the broad range of patients who benefit from pelvic health therapy. While many associate it with pregnancy and postpartum care, Stefanie treats everyone from bedwetting children to seniors with incontinence—her oldest patient was 92 and successfully discontinued diaper use after treatment. She works closely with gynecologists, urologists, gastroenterologists, and chiropractors, noting that approximately 90% of women with low back pain also have pelvic floor issues.

The most powerful message Stefanie delivers is one of hope: "You don't have to just suck it up and deal with it for the rest of your life." Countless women silently accept pain and leaking as inevitable parts of womanhood, motherhood, or aging. Stefanie is changing that narrative one patient at a time. "You can jump on the trampoline, you can play with your kids, you can run again—you can do all of these things without pain and without leaking."

To learn more about Concept Pelvic Health go to:

 conceptpelvichealth.com

Concept Pelvic Health

817-393-7020


Speaker 1:

This is the Good Neighbor Podcast, the place where local businesses and neighbors come together. Here's your host, Sophia Yvette.

Speaker 2:

Welcome to the Good Neighbor Podcast. Are you in need of a pelvic health center? Well, one may be closer than you think. Today I have the pleasure of introducing your good neighbor, stephanie Long, with Concept Pelvic Health. Stephanie, how are you today?

Speaker 3:

I'm doing excellent. Thanks for having me.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it's a pleasure to have you on and we are so excited to learn all about you and your business. Can you start off by telling our listeners a little bit about your company?

Speaker 3:

Sure. So we are a pelvic floor physical and occupational therapy clinic. We treat women who are having issues when they laugh, cough, sneeze, jump, run, go to the bathroom a million times today, low back and hip pain, anything from the midsection issues that you may be having. We also treat pediatrics. So we treat that pelvic health side of pediatrics, which is your bedwetting issues, constipation issues, having trouble potty training, type things as well. So that's, that's in general, what we do.

Speaker 2:

Now Stephanie. How did you originally get into this business?

Speaker 3:

So that's actually kind of a funny story. I've been a therapist now for 17 years and, unlike most, uh, physical therapists in the world, um, I was exposed to pelvic health um all the way back in school, which at that point in time was completely unheard of. Physical therapists at that point didn't know about pelvic health, physical therapy. It was something that you had to have been like randomly coming across, and but my school did a one one hour lecture on it and I thought, oh, that'd be fun, let's, let's go and like learn how to work with pregnant patients. And so I did. I signed up for this clinical cause. She was there in the same town. I split it with a, like a sports medicine, like everybody, every other physical therapist out there does. And I got there and it wasn't pregnant patients at all, it was a lot of pelvic pain patients. And so I was a little bit blindsided, um, where I was like, oh wait, you do what where? What are you kind of patients are you working with? By the end of it I thought, man, this is, this is cool. I'm so glad that you do it, not me. I don't think I want to do this. So, keeping going down the line, one of my bosses was a pelvic floor therapist. She kept like nudging me in the direction and I kept like resisting it. Nudging me in the direction and I kept like resisting it.

Speaker 3:

Um, and it wasn't until I had a baby and had a ton of issues after that I really realized how much it impacts your life. Um, you know, like when you go and you exercise and you're peeing your pants, um, and you can't, you feel like you have to stop working out because you don't want to be embarrassed. You can't jump on trampolines. Um, you can't. You feel like you have to stop working out because you don't want to be embarrassed. You can't jump on trampolines, you can't. You're having pain in the pelvis region, like pain with intercourse, and it's uncomfortable and it ruins marriages, it ruins lives. It's just a really embarrassing situation. And suddenly I'm a part of this group and I had the benefit of knowing that there was pelvic floor therapy because, again, at this point there's no Instagram influencers, there's no TikTok at all, but I knew from my previous experience that this existed, so I sought one out and it changed my life. And from there is when I decided that I needed to help other women.

Speaker 2:

And what is the most common misconception you come across in your industry?

Speaker 3:

I think that probably the biggest misconception is that it's all just Kegels. I mean we get that from doctors, people like lay people, people in the community, like we'll have doctors tell their patients, or patients ask the doctor like, hey, can I go to PT? And they say, oh well, just do your Kegels and you'll be fine. And that's not what pelvic floor therapy is. Pelvic floor therapy is a mix of hands-on treatments. It's a mix of, like nutrition and looking at you as a whole system, because the pelvic floor connects to so many different things. And looking at you as a whole system, because the pelvic floor connects to so many different things. It's a lot of functional rehab, the things that you're dealing with. We're working on those things so that you can better coordinate the pelvic floor so that it works well as a whole system, and so very rarely do we actually use a Kegel for that.

Speaker 2:

Now we know marketing is the heart of every business. How do you market your business?

Speaker 3:

and who are your target clients. So you would think again, like I thought most of our clients would be pregnant or like early postpartum. But in fact I mean, those are clients, absolutely no doubt. But we also have your pediatric side of things, right. So that's anywhere between three and 11. We have the adolescent time period that are dealing with, like pain with tampon use, pain with intercourse, so they're not pregnant because they can't even have intercourse. Then you do have the pregnancy postpartum. But then we also have a very wide number of like 35 to 55 year olds as well. So we kind of run the gambit of women's, like just women's care, from birth all the way through the end of your life. My oldest patient was 92 and she improved and she got better and she no longer had to wear a diaper. Uh, she chose to wear a panty liner just because and we gave it to her because she's 92. And if she wants to, then that's fine. Um, but who we market to is obviously gynecologists. Um, those are a big uh referral for us. Um, we also we also look to urologists and gastroenterologists as well. We also look to urologists and gastroenterologists as well.

Speaker 3:

Chiropractors we work really well hand in hand with chiropractic care. A lot of times, these women with low back pain I think the statistics is actually like 90-ish percent of women with low back pain are also having pelvic floor issues, and so where are these women going? But the chiropractor and neither of us can treat everything on our own, and so it's really nice balance to be able to refer back and forth to them so that we can have really good holistic like care. So that would be probably our biggest. We talk, we. I will talk to anybody, though If somebody wants to know about pelvic floor therapy and how it can help, then I'm all for it. We talked to CBD distributors and I've had conversations with realtors about their wives and things like that. So now.

Speaker 2:

Have you ever thought of had it being your own podcast?

Speaker 3:

Oh gosh, that would be adding so much more to my plate that at this point in time, I am not ready to do and what is one thing you would like our listeners today to remember about concept pelvic health?

Speaker 3:

What I would like for the listeners to know is that there is help available, that you don't have to deal with these issues. This is something that we are taught from a pretty young age. Is just something that happens to you and you have to just suck it up and deal with it for the rest of your life. And that is not true. You can jump on the trampoline, you can play with your kids, you can run again. You can do all of these things without pain and without leaking, and I just want, really, really want, people to know that.

Speaker 2:

And where can our listeners go to learn more about Concept Pelvic Health?

Speaker 3:

website is wwwconceptpelvichealthcom. Our Instagram is at concepttherapy, and those would probably be the two biggest places you can look for us. We're on Facebook as well, but the two biggest ones are our website and Instagram.

Speaker 2:

Well, Stephanie, I really appreciate you being on the show. We wish you and your business the best moving forward.

Speaker 3:

Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

Speaker 1:

Thank you for listening to the good neighbor podcast. To nominate your favorite local businesses to be featured on the show, go to GNP Friscocom. That's GNPriscocom, or call 469-221-9345.