Mayo Clinic Health Manager
Get free personalized health guidance for you and your family.
Get Started
About our e-newsletters
- Free e-newsletters
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- We do not share your e-mail address
Housecall, our weekly general-interest e-newsletter, keeps you up to date on a wide variety of health topics with timely, reliable, practical information, recipes, blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts and more. Our biweekly topic-specific e-newsletters also include blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts, and other useful information that will help you manage your health.
Housecall Archives
Mayo Clinic Housecall
Stay up to date on the latest health information.
What you get
- Free weekly e-newsletter
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- Recipes, tools and other helpful information
- We do not share your e-mail address
Treatments and drugs
By Mayo Clinic staffMild cases of enterocele may require no treatment. Surgical repair may be most effective in more severe cases, particularly when enterocele is accompanied by other types of pelvic organ prolapse. Nonsurgical approaches are also available if surgery would be risky for you or if you want to bear more children.
Nonsurgical treatments
These approaches include:
- Vaginal pessary. A silicone, plastic or rubber ring or device inserted into your vagina supports the bulging tissue. Pessaries come in a variety of styles and sizes, and finding the right one for you usually involves trial and error. Your doctor will measure and fit you for the device and teach you how to insert and remove it. You'll need to remove the pessary regularly and clean it. Or, if you leave the pessary in place, your doctor may have you come in periodically to remove and clean the pessary and examine your vagina.
- Estrogen therapy. If you're postmenopausal, your doctor may recommend estrogen therapy, such as a vaginal cream, gel or tablet. Estrogen therapy corrects thinning of the vaginal lining that occurs after menopause and helps keep a pessary from irritating dry vaginal walls.
Surgery
A severe or extremely uncomfortable enterocele may require surgery. The surgery is designed to repair the hernia and relieve signs and symptoms of the enterocele.
In most cases, the surgical approach is through your vagina. In this procedure, your surgeon puts the prolapsed small bowel back into place and tightens the muscles and ligaments of your pelvic floor.
Surgical repair of an enterocele is more common when other prolapsed organs, such as the uterus, bladder or rectum, are involved. In those cases, hysterectomy and repairs of the cystocele and rectocele can be done at the same time as the enterocele repair.
