How clinicians explain anatomy today — and what breaks

Somewhere in most pelvic health appointments there is a moment where treatment stops and explanation starts. A finding needs to become a picture in the patient's head, and the clinician reaches for whatever is within arm's length. This post is about what gets reached for, what each tool is genuinely good at, and where each one gives out — an argument about the appointment itself, ending with an invitation to tell us where it is wrong.

The plastic model

The default, and not by accident. It is tangible, always on the desk, and for bony landmarks it is excellent — a pelvis you can hold tilts the way a real one tilts, and patients can touch it.

Where it gives out is everything the specialty actually treats. A moulded model shows one fixed arrangement, usually bones-forward. The muscle layers a pelvic-floor PT most needs to point at are either absent, fused into one painted surface, or hidden behind structures that do not come off. It cannot isolate one muscle, cannot show an interior view without disassembly, and cannot switch between what it shows and what this patient needs to see.

The hand drawing

The most adaptable tool in the room and the cheapest. A quick sagittal sketch can be exactly as detailed as the explanation needs, drawn at the pace of the conversation.

Its failures are quiet ones. The drawing is only as accurate as memory and a biro allow, it varies from appointment to appointment, and at the end of the session it usually goes in the bin — along with most of the understanding it carried. The patient takes home a memory of a sketch of a memory.

The phone search

Fast, and sometimes the only way to get an actual image into the room. But an image search is unvetted by design: the result may be a different projection than the explanation needs, labelled for a different audience, or — familiar to anyone who has searched a symptom with a patient present — alarming in a way that derails the appointment entirely. The clinician ends up curating search results in real time, which is work the appointment does not have time for.

The printed diagram

The only one of the four the patient keeps. That matters, and it is why handout folders exist. But a printout is generic where the finding is specific, passive where understanding is active, and flat where the anatomy is emphatically not. It answers "what does this region look like in general" — rarely "what is happening in my case".

And, often: nothing at all

The fifth tool deserves naming because it may be the most common: hands, gesture and vocabulary, unaided. Skilled clinicians are genuinely good at this — analogy is a craft, and a well-chosen image ("a hammock", "a dome that descends") can do real work. But it asks the patient to build a 3D structure they have never seen from words alone, in a region where the words themselves are unfamiliar or embarrassing. The clinician cannot check what picture actually formed. Adherence then rests on an image nobody can inspect.

What "built for the appointment" would have to mean

Running the same failures in reverse gives a specification. Fast enough that reaching for it costs seconds, not the appointment's momentum. Specific enough to show the structure in question, alone, from the angle that makes it obvious. Speaking both languages — precise terminology for the clinician's thinking, plain words for the patient's understanding — without losing its place when switching. Consistent between appointments, so the explanation given in week one is the explanation recalled in week six. And on hardware the clinic already owns, because a tool that needs procurement is a tool that stays theoretical.

That specification is the product brief we are building against, and every line of it traces back to one of the failures described above.

The pattern

None of these tools is bad. Each was simply built for a different job — manufacturing constraints, art supplies, search engines and print runs all optimise for something other than this appointment, this patient, this finding. What they share is the gap: nothing on the desk was designed for the two minutes where a clinician turns understanding into adherence.

Open this structure in the viewer

That is the gap we are building PelvicVision into. But we hold the previous paragraph loosely: so far it is reasoning from the tools, not evidence from clinics — and the honest next step is to test it against people who run these appointments every day.

The invitation

If you are a pelvic-floor physiotherapist, we would like twenty minutes of your time. Not a sales call: a structured interview about how you explain anatomy today — what you reach for, where it works, where it fails you, and what you have improvised instead. Your answers shape what we build next, and where we are plainly wrong we want to know early.

Two things we will never ask about: your patients, and anything that could identify them. The interview is about your tools and your workflow, nothing else.

Write to us here and mention the interview, or join the early-access list on the home page and say the same in the "what do you use today" box — that box goes straight to the founder.