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WHAT'S IN A NAME [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2023-06-09
When looking for information, online, about Kegel’s, and, coming from my clinical experience that Kegel exercises do not seem to make much difference with incontinence, and, then finding out who actually developed them, it made a lot of sense as to why they are not more successful or effective.
The pelvic floor exercises were developed by Margaret Morris, a British dancer born in the late 1900s, who developed specific movements for mentally and physically challenged children, along with those for athletes and pregnant women. Morris said “ … the more normal you make people feel, the more normal they become.” She developed whole body exercises to create “ … a sense of freedom … from enhanced control of our body’s mobility ...” (quote from the Margaret Morris website)
One online site says it is difficult to do Kegel’s correctly. The Mayo Clinic says Kegel’s are “ … less helpful for women who have severe urine leakage when they sneeze, cough, or laugh … “ or have a too full bladder.
Morris published her book Maternity and Post-Operative Exercises twelve years before Kegel. She described the pelvic floor exercises as part of the whole-body point of view. Sever years before Kegel, she published another book, Training for Childbirth from the mother’s Point of View, encouraging women to squeeze their pelvic floor muscles.
Kegel, according to Wikipedia “invented” the exercises as an alternative to surgery. He published his “findings” in 1942, after eighteen years of “research. He poached the idea from Morris, ignoring how her exercises worked in totality, creating a body in balance with itself, with muscular integrity throughout.
On a different tangent, the annals of anatomy are littered with names, mostly men’s, describing some anatomical landmark, and putting the name on it as ownership, not only of the name, but maybe, implying ownership of the organ. One forever has a Fallopian (courtesy of Gabriel Fallopious (16th century), instead of a uterine tube, or Bartholin glands (the Danish anatomist Caspar Bartholin the younger being responsible for that in the 17th century), instead of greater vestibular glands. And, there is the Pouch of Douglas, not really a pouch, more a dead end at the bottom of a woman’s body where fluids collect, originally dissected by James Douglas, a Scottish anatomist from the 18th century.
I don’t have issues with naming overall, though I do prefer the more accurately descriptive names, so much easier to learn, but it does seem odd to me, that we, as women, walk around with reproductive system body parts with men’s names on them.
So, how about we change the name of Kegel’s to Maggies?
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