The Effect of an Individualized Impairment-based, Orthopedic Physical Therapy Intervention (IOI), on Muscle Stiffness, Pelvic Floor Function, and Pain in Women With Chronic Pelvic Pain

When patients make their initial appointment at the private outpatient pelvic health office, they will be informed about a study looking for participants with pelvic pain that includes 4 weeks of free physical therapy care. If the patient is interested they will be given the researcher's email address and phone number to make appropriate arrangements. Once the potential participant contacts the researcher they will take part in a prescreening phone call. This prescreening call will assess their willingness to enroll in the study and ask preliminary inclusion criteria. This prescreening is necessary to allow participants to be taken off of the therapists' regular schedule and go onto the research schedule, allowing therapists to fill vacancies in their schedule if appropriate. If a participant emails or leaves a message, the researcher can call them to initiate the prescreening phone call. Potential subjects will be called a maximum of 2 times and up to 2 messages will be left for any potential subject that voiced interest by initiating contact with the researcher.

If the individual does not wish to participate after hearing more details from the researcher or for some reason does not meet inclusion criteria, the only information collected from the prescreening phone call will be gender, age, race, ethnicity, and reason for exclusion so that the number of patients that were screened compared to the number of patients that were enrolled, per the CONSORT guidelines, can be tracked. No further data will be collected or recorded from this call as it is intended to assess interest level and inform potential subjects that they will be scheduling with a researcher instead of a clinician. Individuals who contact researchers showing interest in the study from physician referral will also provide their contact information in order to schedule their first appointment with the researchers.

The information collected for prescreening or scheduling will only be shared with a small group of researchers in an encrypted file on a password protected computer. This file will be saved separately from any data collected by the study of enrolled participants. Enrolled subjects will be coded with a participant number as to not cross-identify with any record of contact information saved with the individual's name.

An ABA single-subject research design will be used for this study. Participants will undergo 3-5 sessions of baseline testing based on the stabilization of the dependent variable, with two visits per week until stabilization. If stabilization of two of the three dependent variables (NPRS, muscle stiffness, and PPT) can not be met then the participant cannot continue into the intervention phase of the study. Then the participants will undergo four weeks of intervention, two times a week for a total of 8 intervention appointments. Dependent variables will be collected one and two weeks after the last intervention ends to establish if there is a continuation of the data trend without intervention taking place.

15 women with CPP will be recruited as previously discussed. The participant will also be asked to wear a mask during the testing procedures and wash your hands before starting the session. First, we will take the participants temperature and ask if they have any symptoms of COVID-19, prior to each appointment. The researcher(s) will wash their hands with soap using methods recommended by the CDC before and after the research sessions. If hand washing is not available, we will use and ask them to use hand sanitizer. The researchers will also limit the number of research team members present to one treating member.