Author: Lyle Danuloff, Ph.D., Consulting Staff Psychologist
It’s time to take a closer look at the truth about bedwetting and what can be done about it.
When parents take their children for annual wellness checks, their doctors are usually stumped about how to help their patients with bedwetting, (enuresis.)
Why can’t doctors help? Because bedwetting isn’t a medical condition, and, therefore, training about this condition is not provided in medical school.
And because the point of view doctors hold and the resulting mainstream thinking they generate is that bedwetting goes away on its own and that’s it’s really no big deal.
Or because drug companies have determined that they’ve got a profitable market in bedwetting with a drug made for seizure patients. They want doctors to prescribe it, and well-meaning doctors often do. They just don’t want to disappoint patients and their parents.
Bottom line: Doctors cannot offer any real answers or remedies. It’s their blind spot.
Thinking Outside the Box
Let’s look at another example of a longstanding blind spot. Not so long ago when it came to menopause, doctors weren’t taking women’s complaints seriously. Even further back in history, many women were thought to have gone mad and were institutionalized. Fortunately, the “madness” was traced to the major physiological changes taking place in the brain during menopause, which gave rise to a new point of view. In fact, recent studies have flipped in its axis ALL of the previous medical theories related to menopause.
Kudos to the doctors who opened their eyes and did critical thinking outside the box with menopause, making effective treatment options for women front and center these days.
And kudos to Dr. Roger Broughton for his groundbreaking sleep study that paved the way for a proven and effective bedwetting treatment program to end bedwetting, rather than dismissing it or medicating it unnecessarily.
It’s All About the Sleep
Dr. Broughton is a neurologist and sleep researcher out of Canada. In 1968, he conducted a ground-breaking sleep study involving bedwetters of all ages. He pinpointed that bedwetting isn’t a condition of the body—it’s a condition of the brain. An inherited gene causes a sleep disorder classified as a parasomnia, with bedwetting as a symptom. It’s an abnormal and unusually deep sleep which blocks the connection/signaling betweem the brain and bladder at night. Dr. Broughton called this type of sleep a “disorder of arousal,” which he equated to a sleep deficit.
When our founder, Barbara Moore, discovered Dr. Broughton’s study, she leapt from her chair. She felt she “stumbled upon” the miracle she was seeking, but really, it was due to years of tireless research long before the internet became available.
She then met with doctors and researchers aligned with Dr. Broughton‘s outcomes, and thus began their “critical thinking journey,” taking them outside of the box of the limited paradigm, and leading to the development of a cure for bedwetting—starting with Barbara’s own daughter as Bedwetting Treatment Center’s first success story.
That same cure is what she, her daughter, and her team of experts have been providing to families across the US for over five decades.
It’s Time to Break Free
It’s time to break free of the cycle of trying fruitless suggestions to end bedwetting: Medication, constipation protocols, chiropractic adjustments, palate expanders, tonsil/adenoid removal, tongue tie correction, fluid restriction, etc. The list parents have tried is extensive and exhaustive, and it’s all inside the box!
It’s time to break free of the years of waiting and hoping that bedwetting will go away. During those years, there’s a lot of energy spent thinking about bedwetting, a lot of money spent on excessive laundry or pull-ups, a lot of failed attempts to end it, a lot of missed experiences for children like sleepovers, camp stays, and college dorm living, and a lot of frustration, anxiety, shame, and heartbreak within the whole family dynamic.
And remember—your child has a sleep deficit. With this disordered pattern of sleep, they cannot and will not be able to achieve healthy, restorative, nourishing sleep.
While most doctors still operate in the blind spot when it comes to bedwetting, many doctors refer their patients to us. And many patients in our care through the years have been children of doctors—from heart surgeons to pediatricians to specialists of every variety, including urologists.
What did they discover? That a guided program which provides a pivotal sleep pattern change equals freedom from bedwetting and the start of a whole new life for their children—good sleep each night, and a dry bed each and every morning!
