New Documentary Explores Why Many Women Are Told Pelvic Floor Symptoms Are Normal

A new documentary combines personal stories and fascia research to explore why pelvic floor dysfunction is often normalised and overlooked.

NY, UNITED STATES, June 23, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- After a difficult birth, Sanna developed cramping in her pelvic floor that worsened over years, until she could no longer eat or use the toilet normally. By the final stretch the pain was constant, and she was told nothing more could be done - that the only option left was a stoma. Help came, in the end, from an unexpected direction - a conversation that led her to try treatment of her fascia: the continuous web of connective tissue that wraps and links every muscle and organ in the body. Sanna says the change was immediate, and that after four treatments she was free of the symptoms that had dominated her life.

The documentary The Living Body: It's time to talk about Fascia, now available on YouTube, brings together interviews with leading fascia researchers and personal stories like Sanna's to ask a larger question: are these conditions being treated too locally, when the pelvis may be part of a larger, connected system - the fascia? Interest in fascia has grown in recent years. In January 2025, an international team proposed in the Journal of Anatomy (DOI: 10.1111/joa.14212) that fascia be recognised as a distinct system of the body.

The documentary grew out of questions raised by researchers and practitioners who have spent decades exploring fascia and its role in the body. Sanna's story is one of several personal accounts featured in the film, alongside interviews with scientists studying the living body. Her experience also reflects a broader issue highlighted in national guidelines and surveys: many women with pelvic floor symptoms are told that their condition is a normal consequence of childbirth or ageing.

Sweden's National Board of Health and Welfare (Socialstyrelsen) issued the country's first national guidelines on pelvic floor dysfunction in June 2025, calling it a complex and often taboo public health problem affecting up to one in two women at some point in life. A unit head at the authority said that telling women their symptoms are "normal" after childbirth or with age is "a sign that the suffering has been normalised," and that it must not continue.

The pattern is not only Swedish. In a 2023 survey of 2,000 UK women for the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, more than half of those with symptoms never sought help - and of those, 39% assumed the symptoms were normal.

The film is part of a broader discussion about how complex health conditions are understood and treated, and whether important perspectives may still be receiving too little attention. Through stories like Sanna's and interviews with researchers, it invites viewers to consider how the body might be understood in new ways.

Watch the film here

More information here

Hans Bohlin
Fascia Innovation Sweden AB
+46 70 776 04 02
hans@fasciainnovation.com
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