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
