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Dr Catherine
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Boy
8-15 years

We have tried everything from bed alarms to medication & patches and still cannot get my 9 year old boy to stop wetting the bed every single night. We have also tried drinking more water at the start of the day and limiting fluids after school onwards but still no luck. We have seen a specialist but have ran out of solutions.

It must be incredibly frustrating and disheartening when you feel like you have tried it all and still your son continues to wet at night. Alarms can be pretty tricky to implement and while they do not necessarily work for all children, its important to not give up straight away. The time it takes for children to achieve dryness when using conditioning alarms can be anything from a few weeks to a few months with about 10-15% of children experiencing some relapse – when this happens you need to reintroduce the alarm treatment and repeat the process. For some children it can take up to 3 cycles. It would also be worthwhile speaking with a continence advisor before re-introducing the alarm as the more support and guidance you receive the greater the chance of a successful outcome. There are some more alternative methods that have met with different degrees of success. Please keep in mind however that these have not received the same level of research support as conditioning alarms or medications. Hypnotherapy has been successfully used to help individuals either hold their urine overnight or wake up and go to the toilet. This can be used on its own or in combination with the conditioning alarm. Your best point of contact for hypnotherapy is the Australian Hypnotherapists’ Association http://www.ahahypnotherapy.org.au/, which has branches in each state. More recently researchers have found links between particular foods and nighttime wetting - if this is something you would like to explore further there is information on the DryNites website. All the best! Kind Regards, Dr Cathrine