How can GPs help their patients
This article in the "What Your Patient is Thinking" series appeared in the BMJ in October 2021.
GPs and other health professionals can find more information in our leaflet about how to deal with paruresis when they first encounter it
UK Paruresis Trust has recently become an accredited CPD provider. We’ve developed a paruresis training session which we can deliver to health teams virtually (via zoom) in around 30/45 minutes. The session gives some medical information and outlines how devastating paruresis can be to an individual’s self esteem. We then make recommendations, based on our experiences and on the experiences of the many people who have attended our workshops, about the best, and worst, ways to handle a consultation with a person who has paruresis.
Are you part of a health team who might welcome the opportunity to have a paruresis training session? Do contact us if so at admin@ukpt.org.uk.
These two articles from the Royal Australian College of GPs report on the latest thinking on paruresis and parcopresis, and outline ways in which GPs can help sufferers.
You can be assured that the health information on this website is evidence-based information that you and your patients can trust. UK Paruresis Trust has achieved the Patient Information Forum’s independently-assessed quality mark for health information – the PIF TICK.
The TRIP medical database and Healthinote use PIF TICK to verify health information, so UK Paruresis Trust can be found on both TRIP and Healthinote resources.
Paruresis and the Disability Discrimination Act
Nursing Times Article
An article from The Nursing Times where Andrew Smith, chair of UK Paruresis Trust, explains what paruresis is and how people are affected by it
Intermittent self-catheterisation for managing urinary problems
A significant minority of cases of paruresis are severe i.e. they cannot pee away from home, and they experience retention even there. Their day-to-day life is very stressful, so much so that it interferes with effective therapy. Such cases find either temporary or permanent relief from symptoms by learning clean intermittent self-catheterisation. Just knowing that the catheter is in one’s pocket as a fool-proof last resort, can in some cases eliminate enough of the anxiety to allow the individual to do without it. The catheters are disposable, single-use, sterile, and self-lubricated. In our experience infections in men are rare; however infections among women are more common for physical hygiene reasons.
It should be recognised that urinary retention by such individuals is absolute: the effect of the autonomous nervous system being to relax the detrusor and close the internal sphincter, hence however full the bladder, the sphincter will stay closed.
The following article by continence nurses makes the case for personal control of self-catheterisation in order to enable a normal daily life. As such it can enable an individual to undertake a therapeutic process of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy; also to undertake air travel since without a catheter, the individual would be in retention until arrival at a safe destination such as a hotel.
