“When I see patients after they’ve read the book
I can often see a change in their faces”

This is a book that helps patients empower themselves in their own healing. With this book, patients learn how to gain control over their chronic pelvic pain. It is not a hocus-pocus solution; it is a long-term program that must be adapted into one’s daily routine. I have witnessed firsthand how patients willing to change their behavior have been able to find healing…When I see patients after they’ve read the book I can often see a change in their faces. To understand that we have the ability to affect our own healing process can be life changing.

Ragi Doggweiler, MD
Associate Professor
Director of Neuro-Urology and Integrative Medicine, Division of Urology
University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN

“This has truly become the “Bible”
for patients who suffer from pelvic floor muscle dysfunction”


After reading over the 6th edition of “A Headache in the Pelvis,” all I can say is “Wow”…Drs. Wise and Anderson have done it again! This has truly become the “Bible” for patients, both men and women, who suffer from pelvic floor muscle dysfunction. The book demystifies a condition that is so frequently overlooked and often mistreated in clinical practice. It empowers the patient to be their own caregiver; while it encourages partnerships with clinicians who can be tremendously helpful in the patient’s path to symptom improvement. “A Headache in the Pelvis” is on the top of my recommendation list.

Robert Moldwin, MD
Author, The Interstitial Cystitis Survival Guide

“For five minutes I was pain free, utterly relaxed.

It was the beginning of the way back…”

….One gloomy 5am in the winter of 2006, unable to sleep and trawling the net yet again for some explanation of the chronic condition that had made my life a misery, I came across an extract from a book with the ugly title A Headache in the Pelvis. Here, after two years of expensive consultations and invasive medical tests, I found at last an accurate description of my plight.

The authors David Wise and Rodney Anderson listed 23 symptoms, which would tend, they said, “to take on a life of their own”. I had 16 of them, including back pain, constantly changing abdominal pain, frequent nocturnal urination and fierce twinges in legs and perineum. They called it Chronic Pelvic Pain syndrome and concluded: “The effects on a person’s life have been likened to those of heart attack, angina, or Crohn’s disease. Sufferers tend to live lives of quiet desperation. Anxiety, depression and ‘catastrophic thinking’ are the norm.”

I was hugely cheered on reading this. ….. For two years I had oscillated between the conviction that I had cancer, or that my condition was psychosomatic…As each medical test indicated that I didn’t have cancer, I expected I’d quickly feel better. I didn’t…... The doctors proposed to tunnel a motorway through my prostate and permanently open the upper of the two sphincters that controls urination. This wouldn’t alleviate my pains, which they didn’t understand or seem concerned about, but I’d pee better, they thought.

I rebelled. None of the medical tests had indicated problems with my prostate. On the net, many women seemed to have the condition. And now, in A Headache in the Pelvis, I read: “95 per cent of patients with prostatitis do not have an infection or inflammation that can account for their symptoms . . . the prostate is not the issue . . . We have never seen a satisfactory surgical intervention for these pains.”

What to do? I had given up on official medicine. Its drugs made me sick. Its operations threatened my manhood without promising relief. … Now A Headache in the Pelvis talked about years of stressful overachieving, sitting at a desk and an embattled mental attitude that had led me to tense the muscles of my pelvic floor so that they had atrophied and were pinching the nerves that crossed them from bladder, penis and prostate. … I was definitely suffering enough. And growing curious. On your back, allowing your breath to establish its own pattern, eliminating all words from your mind, you focus on tension in the body and just, well, nothing, let it be. You go to meet the pain itself, and again, let it be.

It took many months…I shall remember for the rest of my life the day when, from the dry, knitted tension of my forehead, a great warm wave rose up and crashed across my chest and limbs, sweeping everything before it: thought, tension, pain. For five minutes I was pain free, utterly relaxed. It was the beginning of the way back…” -- The Times of England