Alan J. Wein, MD Professor and Chair. Division of Urology University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine Chief of Urology Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

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		Are these patients' needs being under-treated and not being addressed?

Jump to bottom of the page Well, my impression is that they're not addressed for two reasons. One reason is that unless people are specifically asked, they won't volunteer that they have symptoms of overactive bladder for the reasons that I just said. They assume that "Well, nobody's really interested in this. They probably don't know very much about it. I don't think that there's much in the way of treatment for it." And perhaps they're even a little embarrassed to bring it up because incontinence, voiding symptoms in generally, have always been sort of a closet item. In other words, people don't like to talk about it because it's embarrassing to them. So that's one reason. The second reason is that I think that we in the specialties - urology, urogynecology - haven't been very good at putting out the information to the primary care physician about how to go into a very simple evaluation of those symptoms, and to give them an algorithm that they can use to treat patients with suspected overactive bladder, along with the caveats of who not to treat so they're not going to do anyone any harm. I think that for those two reasons, yeah, we haven't done as good a job of treating it or, turn it around, many people go untreated.

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