Why the Bladder/Prostate/Visceral Symptoms?
The visceral branches arise from S3 and S4 and occasionally S2 and go to the bladder, rectum, and vagina and communicate with the sympathetic plexus. Muscle branches S4 supply the levator ani, coccygeus, and external anal sphincter. Injuries to the nerve supply to these areas causes symptomatology that resembles infective or inflammatory processes of pelvic viscera, thus is often misdiagnosed as Chronic Prostatitis and Interstitial Cystitis. Thus, by the time we treat these patients, they have often received many rounds of antibiotics and anti-inflammatories. Furthermore, altered innervation to the sympathetic and somatic sphincter of bladder can cause incomplete emptying, which is a common cause of infection. Perhaps this nerve entrapment creates an environment which allows the infective process to take hold. And it is these secondary infective processes that are mere manifestations and reinforcing contributors to a primary functional and anatomical impairment or pathology. A changed
