Oof.

Well, obviously, very painful, very uncomfortable, and so they began limiting the use of that, and you... diagnosing interstitial cystitis as true as more of a diagnosis of exclusion, 'cause they had all of these women that, that seemed to have the symptoms of interstitial cystitis but had no true bladder wall impact.

And so over the years, what has kind of happened is we have lumped a lot of women into interstitial cystitis, but at the same time, the rate of diagnosis, you still hear from anywhere to 10 to 30 years where these women get diagnosed constantly with recurrent UTIs, get antibiotic, antibiotics, and nothing is helping.

Nothing is making the difference, and they're still suffering.

So imagine the worst UTI that you've ever had.

Painful burning, pain, burning, frequency, and, but imagine it never goes away, and that is interstitial cystitis.

As a result, though, because we have muddied the waters by lumping people in by diagnosis of exclusion, because we have so much going on in the pelvic region, they're like, "Well, you don't have endo.

Oh, this is exciting.

[laughs] Like, who doesn't have some sort of psychosocial stuff going on in their brains, right? So, like, in, in my perfect world, like, you're gonna see a therapist, and here's some, you know, hormonal options or some therapeutic options that are, that we can work on.

I agree 100%.

Like, you have to, you have to separate the idea of arousal and desire, essentially, because if there's a problem with th- you know, you desiring your partner, let's say.

You know, just like Dr. Milhouse mentioned, this is really a bi- biopsychological approach, a clinical model that really should be followed, because we need to address the biology, the psychology, the relationship status.

It all needs to be addressed in one, because is it the arousal's your biology? If that, if that's being affected, then you need to get to the re- root cause of that.

But if, you know, you're over here and your arousal might be the problem, that might be, you know, a psychological problem that you might need to address.

I actually did a course, it, I think it was at the American Physical Therapy Association meeting, and in this course, the subject that they were discussing, the psychologist was discussing in this particular course, she had not been able to have sex.

But the fundamental root of almost all of these is the lack of hormones or the, uh, relative in- effect of, uh, the declined hormones.

Can you help us understand what actually might be happening in the body in these cases?

Yeah.

So there are a lot of things when you get to that point.

So that's the worst part is how we do the testing.

So I'm sure many women have gone into the doctor said that they think that they have a UTI.

They've done the little dipstick test in office.

They prescribed you some antibiotics, sent out your dipstick test for culture or your urine out for culture for further culturing.

SSAV.

Interesting

... just horribly painful, um, very debilitating, and back then, it was a condition that most clinicians considered all in your head.

And so my aunt had to get really creative and started looking for alternatives, and her and my mother went to some random natural products conference, grabbed some bottle of aloe vera, took the whole thing, and, like, slept through the night, which is unheard of for an IC patient that has to get up and void 'cause frequency is a hallmark symptom.

And, and so as a result, we, you know, safely...

You should not do that because the aloe vera that's naturally in the health food stores is not safe for long-term use in a high dosage.

So the aloe vera that you find in the health food store is meant as digestive aids and to just act as kind of a support for the gut.

It is not meant to function the way that we create.

Yeah.