Tell me if this sounds familiar to you. You finish peeing, you're at the urinal
you zip up and before you know it you got some more urine dribbling out ah that is just
the worst and let me tell you you're not alone I hear this complaint all the time.
I'm Dr. Rena Malik, urologist and pelvic surgeon, and today we're going to talk about
that annoying urine dribble that happens after you finish peeing.
so what do we call this little bit of urine that dribbles out right after you pee
that's called post void dribble and when you look at the data there's a number of studies
that have been done to kind of assess how often this happens and they range anywhere between
five percent of the population to almost 58 and i bet it's much more common than five percent
based on my experience so there's a couple theories as to why this happens the first
thought is that if you have some abnormality in the p tube or the urethra that causes maybe
a narrowing then urine can get trapped behind that narrowing and you'll pee out whatever you
can across that narrowing and then that urine will come out later after you've completed
that stream and used all the strength that your bladder has to push the urine past it the second
thought process that i think is probably more common is prostatic urethral trapping and
what that is is that the prostate is a walnut shaped organ that sits underneath the bladder
around the pee tube and over time as i've talked about in many other videos specifically my recent
one on benign prosthetic hyperplasia it can get larger and as it gets larger it can be harder to
pass urine across this area and then that urine can get trapped and what happens when you pee
is they kind of really understand this is that men have two sphincters one is at the bladder neck
which is right where the bladder connects to the p tube and one is right underneath the prostate
and so when you finish peeing that bladder neck closes but if you have not completely released the
urine through the prostate the external sphincter can also close and then you get urine stuck there
and as soon as that external sphincter opens that remaining urine will then dribble out and as i
mentioned in that last video bph is so common it happens in up to 80 of men 70 years or older you
can imagine this is happening quite commonly and lastly there's what we call idiopathic or we're
not really sure why this happens the thought process is there's probably some neuromuscular
dysfunction of the muscles around the urethra or the bubble cavanosis or ischiokavernosis muscles
and these muscles typically contract to help propel urine forward and when they become
weaker which can happen with age or with certain neurologic conditions it's going to be harder to
propel all the urine forward out to the tip of the penis when you're trying to urinate so what
can you do about this super annoying problem well if it's due to a narrowing of the urethra you may
also notice that your stream is kind of weak that sometimes it doesn't come out very strong and you
have to strain or push or you might even notice that your urine kind of comes out in a splayed
stream and goes out in different directions if that's the case make sure you make an appointment
with the urologist so we can evaluate you for the presence of a stricture and talk to you
about options for treatment you can watch my video reacting to johnny knoxville who got a urethral
injury during one of his crazy stunts and i talked a little bit about the treatment for that there
if you have an enlarged prostate there's a lot of different symptoms you might notice
you might notice that you are going again having a weak stream or having to strain or push to urinate
you might notice that you have to wait a little bit for your urine stream to start
or it starts and stops also you might notice some frequency like you got to go more often than usual
or urgency like gotta go gotta go and very commonly you might notice that you're waking
up a lot at night to urinate and i've made videos on a lot of these things including bph
as well as nocturia and so you can check those out if you want to learn more about them
if you're having those symptoms make sure you see a urologist and get treated and you will notice
that if you treat these problems a lot of the times that post void dribble or that little bit
of dribbling gets better as well now if you don't have any other problems besides this little bit
of dribble then you may fall into this category where you're having some muscular dysfunction
and it's causing this dribble to happen so what can you do the first thing that you can
do is very easy and you can do right after you urinate so it's called bulbar urethral massage
and so what that is is you take your fingertips about an inch behind the scrotum and you push
upwards towards the base of the penis and while applying pressure and that'll help milk that
urine out and do that once or twice right after you urinate to get that little bit of urine out
you can also stretch squeeze or shake the penis to help get that urine out as well another thing is
doing pelvic floor muscle exercises or very simply known as kegel exercises and i've made a video
about this before but i found that it's really hard for men to do kegel exercises one because
no one really teaches you how to do them and two it's actually kind of difficult to know if you're
doing them correctly so there's a couple things i tell men one it's like the feeling of stopping
the urine flow when you're peeing but you don't want to do them when you're actually peeing and
the other thing that i've heard people say is it's like you're trying to lift your penis up without
touching it so you're trying to use your muscles to help lift your penis up against gravity so when
you do these exercises you want to do them for about five seconds squeezing and then five seconds
relaxing you really want to make sure to have that relaxation because otherwise you can get really
really tense in those muscles and create more problems if you have any sort of pelvic pain or
pain with ejaculation or testicular pain i don't recommend you do any of these exercises without
talking to a urologist or a pelvic floor physical therapist first well i hope you guys found this
educational and helpful let me know what else you want to learn about i'm dr rena malek
urologist and pelvic surgeon and always remember to take care of yourself because you're worth it