If I have overactive bladder, I’m gonna need surgery. Well, the answer to that is no, not necessarily. There are multiple ways of treating overactive bladder. Certainly medications are the first line that we use. We also ask that you try to do your pelvic floor muscle exercises and watch what you’re eating and drinking because your behavior can make your symptoms better or worse.

The other question that I’ve been asked is, I leak a small amount of urine when I cough, laugh or sneeze, so I must have overactive bladder. No, that’s not the case. An overactive bladder is a symptom of your storage tank, that’s what I call your bladder, contracting when you have no control over it and that’s why you’re leaking. When you leak that small amount when you cough, laugh, sneeze, that’s your faucet, and I call your faucet, the urethra, the tube between the bladder and the outside, not staying closed completely. They are treated differently.

There are no medications for the leakage when your urethra doesn’t stay closed. What you need to do is be a little bit more diligent with your pelvic floor exercises and try not to get too full. So you should be urinating every two to three hours whether you feel like you need to urinate or not. For an overactive bladder, it’s most important that you watch what you’re eating and drinking because acidic foods can aggravate the bladder further. With an overactive bladder, we start with the medications, but second line and third line treatments involve Botox and InterStim, which will be discussions for another video.

If I have an overactive bladder, I should drink less fluid. Well, that is certainly not true. Let’s start with the understanding that our bodies are made of 60 to 70% water. So when you ask how much water should I drink? Well, the standard is eight eight-ounce glasses of water a day. That’s about two liters. Another way of thinking about it is a half an ounce to an ounce for every pound that you weigh. So for example, if you weighed 150 pounds, you’re gonna drink somewhere between 75 and 100 ounces of water. Water is very important for our overall health. So you cannot restrict your fluids and expect that any of your urinary symptoms will be made better by doing that.