Hi all,
I wanted to make a post in case this might be useful to anyone else suffering from prostatitis. I’m 26 years old and was diagnosed two months ago with nonbacterial prostatitis. It's honestly been one of the roughest periods of my life. However, in the past week, my symptoms have decreased nearly 90%, and my symptoms now border on unnoticeable.
While I know everyone's case is different, hopefully my experience could be useful to someone on here and could point them in the right direction.
My symptoms were a burning in the urethra, a sharp acute pain in the urethra about 3/4" in from the tip of my penis, and later on, pressure in the rectum/tailbone area, off and on flow during urination, and frequent voiding.
At its worse, the burning pain was constant throughout the day and debilitating. I was on prescription codeine to deal with pain, and became non-productive and deeply depressed.
I went to a few urologists, who prescribed me antibiotics. I went on azithromycin, doxycycline, and Bactrim for weeks, without any improvement. Finally, my last urologist referred me to a physical therapist, who specialized in pelvic floor pain.
By this point, I was extremely pessimistic and depressed, and stressed; my symptoms began to get increasingly worse with the stress. I noticed my pelvic muscles were tensing, particular with some of my new symptoms involving off-and-on urination.
Impatient for my wait to see the physical therapist, I decided to do some pelvic floor drop exercises that I read about online, to see if they would help relax those muscles. They immediately solved my issues with off-and-on urination, and frequent voiding. The burning in my urethra halved in intensity with just two days of pelvic relaxation.
As I noticed this working, I got less stressed and I think I went from a negative spiral to a virtuous feedback loop, where my stress become less and less as I gained a more positive outlook.
A week later, my physical therapist examined me and determined that my hip bones were misaligned, causing my pelvic floor to be stretched and my symptoms to occur. As far as the cases she's seen, mine was fairly straightforward, as was the treatment: a simple exercise where I pressed one leg up and the other down. It's largely now reset my hip bones into alignment. In a single day, my symptoms decreased 80%.
An interested side-effect has been an increase in the flexibility of my right knee: I've gained 30 degrees of motion in just a week, after just a week of realignment exercises.
Now - just a six days later - it's to the point that I hardly notice any symptoms, and my life is pretty much back to normal. According to my physical therapist, I'm recovering surprisingly fast and while many people's recoveries take quite a bit longer, people can ultimately recover from this condition, which appears to be in many cases a muscular-skeletal issue.
I'm posting here because a few weeks ago, I was scrambling on the internet for answers, breaking down crying, and panicking about my future. And now, I feel like I have my life back. I'm drinking caffeine and beer again, and have begun sitting without a donut cushion. My physical therapist expects I'll make a complete recovery within two months.
Last month, I found myself sitting in the waiting room of an ER for six hours, and was sent home with pain medication, with no answers. Now, I realize I could've laid down on the floor of the waiting room, did a simple exercise, and gotten rapid relief in a day - more than the codeine prescription I was ultimately sent home with.
If you're reading this and haven't tried physical therapy yet, and your tests have come back negative for bacteria, I'd recommend you consider pelvic floor tension/pelvic misalignment as a possible cause and maybe try to find a physical therapist who specializes in pelvic floor issues. They can be hard to find, but could be well worth it. I'm driving 90 minutes to my appointments, but am more than happy to make the drive.
I should end by saying that I think prostatitis is a collection of various issues, and ultimately, your solution will depend on the particular cause in your case. This may not help, especially if the cause is bacterial. But if you haven't investigated whether there might be a skeletal-muscular cause involving pelvic misalignment and/or pelvic floor tension, I'd recommend checking it out, especially if you have non-bacterial prostatitis.