Do you feel frequent urges to urinate, or cannot control it
You may be the doubtfully potential patients of irritable bladder syndrome.
Ms. Bak (in late 20s) avoids taking a bus or a subway train for fear of making mistakes because she feels frequent urination. So she makes a rule to go to the bathroom before going outside, or like take a subway train. She has to get off the train when she feel a sudden urge to urinate. So It is next to impossible to use public transportation, especially a bus. Even during a long distance driving, she needs lots of rest stops for her frequent urination. She suffers from the problem only at outdoor. She became nervous, cannot control it.
Irritable bladder syndrome is quite common disease. As a research result, over 30% of the 40s have the irritable bladder syndrome, and 48.7% of the 20s or 40s women show the related syndromes of bladder irritants. However, most people who have the problem, do not open or hide their troubles, and are in torment by themselves. They need to get to a doctor right away, and get early treatment.
Irritable bladder syndrome causes more frequent urges to urinate because bladder's overactive sensory nerve makes bladder muscles' contraction regardless of intention. The syndrome includes nycturia (urinate frequency), enuresis/nocturia (urination at night), urgency (difficult to control urination), urgency urinary (small amount of urine with a sudden urge).
As soft-hearted persons tends to be more sensitive, the irritable bladder syndrome tends to make bladder weaker, and more sensitive. On the basis of an oriental medical theory, the bladder weakens when it turns to be cold. In other words, the syndrome occurs because of the weaken bladder's response from its cold condition.
The one of the reasons why a bladder becomes sensitive is its overact to an expansion (hyperesthesia), or overactivity of detrusor. In addition, psychological reasons has more impact on the syndrome. Depression with severe stresses cause imbalance among the autonomic nerves that regulate/adjust bladder functions, so results in the syndrome.
The syndrome seriously damages on the quality of daily lives, for example 60% who suffer from the syndrome refrain from going out, 45% avoid using public transportation. It causes the syndrome sufferers uncomfortable 4.3 times more than the other. The people who don't have sex due to the syndrome reach 50%. Besides, some people complain of depression from feeling shame and stresses, and other emotional disorders. Medical treatment needs to be essentially required, especially for women because the bladder problems is closely connected with those of the uterine, so the syndrome can results in infertility.
Anticholinergic administraion is its major western medical treatment, which suppresses bladder contraction. For the therapy, 3-month-drug-treatment is performed. If no improvement with the drug, patients are diagnosed with the intractable bladder irritants syndrome. However, the drug still needs to be taken continuously even with some improvement. Any scientific or academic information that how long the drug effect lasts after stopping the drug dosage. Doctors stop the drug treatment depending upon only their own experiences, and just watch the improvement/progress.
Therefore, many studies have been performed about the improvement after stopping the drug treatment on patients who have some positive responses to the 3-month drug dosage. The results of those studies show that the urination syndrome comes back after 1 month. And the syndrome develops severely, so 35% patients want re-treatment. For the reason, doctors suggest continuous drug treatment because the side effects of the drug dosage is not serious.
What is the reason of the recurrence/relapse after the drug stop? The drug functions only for temporary inhibitory of the syndrome, but for the fundamental cure.
With the limit of the drug treatment effect, oriental medical therapy focuses on curing the fundamental reasons, and the oriental approach minimizes the potential recurrence. As the recent oriental medical paper ('Clinical Result Analysis on Irritable Bladder' - Director So-young Jung of In-Ae Oriental Medical Center), the oriental medical treatment achieves 85.15% improvement, and complete recovery reaches 43.08%. It is considerably greater gain than the normally known effect (70%).
The oriental medical approach solves the fundamental problems, Dr. Jung says. The treatment as the oriental method covers both aspects, one is physical treatment for cold and weaken bladder, and the other is psychological one for feeling anxiety and restlessness. It doesn't stop temporarily the symptoms, but searches the problems and fundamentally cure. So the body's vitality is recovered, and the recurrence is minimized.
Therefore, the oriental medical cure can be the alternative treatment for the fundamental improvement before scientifically or academically perfect medicine is found, and performed.