How to pelvic floor audience
South Island clinical psychologist-turned-comedian Nicola Brown has a few health concerns, and concerns about health. John Pearson reports.
Alady’s inside bits falling outside isn't something to be sniggered at, right? Wrong. Ah, right. Take it from Nicola Brown as one who knows. She suffers from a condition known as pelvic organ prolapse (POP), and has placed it front and centre in her new comedy show, which recently premiered at the Good Times Comedy Club in Christchurch. Right, let’s get the uncomfortable but necessary medical exposition out of the way.
Pelvic organ prolapse is when organs in a woman’s pelvis – uterus, bowel, bladder or the top of the vagina – slip down from their normal position and bulge into the vagina. It causes pain and discomfort, and can be debilitating simply by preventing women from living a normal life: lifting a bag, playing a sport or even going outside their home. Brown says about 50% of women will suffer from POP, (or become “POP stars” as she puts it), at some point in their lives. Her show – called Space Invaders because three of her own pelvic organs are not in the spaces they should be – seeks to make people aware of POP, and get them talking about it. Oh, and be funny at the same time.
How does she find using comedy to tackle so weighty a topic? “Humour is key to making things palatable,” she says, “because we can all relate to the stories I tell on stage. You don't have to have been through the same experience to have your own version of that kind of thing. But who doesn't know a woman who's got – ‘hushed tones’ – woman’s trouble?”
Although POP is the focus, Brown’s hour-long show does have a variety of other themes: keeping things spicy with her wife of 28 years; the crocks-docs-and-birkenstocks trope of lesbian footwear; and misguided online romeos, whose gaydar is clearly on the blink, invading Brown’s digital spaces.
Brown uses a variety of anatomically correct dolls and crocheted models to illustrate her points and gags about her shifting insides, passing them around the audience for closer inspection. But it’s still an intensely personal presentation to make in front of a room of strangers, with the possibility that it might be met by tumbleweed silence: what she refers to as “pelvic flooring” her audience. “It’s very exposing, and very intimate,” Brown says. “Is this something that's going to be of interest to people? Is it something that they’re just going to squirm in their seats over?”
But her Christchurch debut went well. “I felt like people were really with me,” she says. “And I had quite a few men come up to me afterwards to say how much they’d learned, and reassuring me that they had really enjoyed it.”
Nicola Brown brings Space Invaders to the Dunedin Fringe on March 19 and 20. Tickets are available from the Fringe website, and the show will return to Christchurch later this year. Follow her @ItsNicolaBrown to find out when. If you are concerned about pelvic organ prolapse, she recommends you contact a local pelvic floor physiotherapist.
It is estimated that more than 260,000 New Zealanders are using medicinal cannabis to treat chronic pain.
Auckland-based medicinal cannabis company Cannabis Clinic says there has been massive growth in the industry since it was legalised in 2020 – and there is a billion-dollar opportunity for further growth in a market like New Zealand.
Cannabis Clinic co-founder Dr Waseem Alzaher says his business has had to hire 19 new doctors in the 12 months to keep up demand for its services and the business is on track to triple in size.
What has your venture set out to achieve?
Cannabis Clinic is a medicinal cannabis clinic that talks to people about the issues they are having and whether medicinal cannabis can help.
The doctors prescribe them a solution that is appropriate for them in the form of oils, topical ointments, in tea form or medical grade vaporisers, and that product is shipped out. We’ve been busy sending cannabis by post all throughout New Zealand for the past few years.
The primary thing we deal with is pain, and we have people who have mental health issues such as anxiety, and a lot of people with sleeping problems that use it. Medicinal cannabis helps bring the body back into balance, and we prescribe for younger people through to those wanting end of life care. I’m a doctor by training and a lot of people were telling me about how they were getting judged and blocked from being able to access this new medicine. It was interesting the stigma people were experiencing around it, so that was really the driving factor in terms of starting the clinic in 2020.
We were the second clinic to set up in the country, and we’ve seen almost 40,000 people since we began.
How big is the clinic today?
We have 32 doctors at the clinic, we have seven nurses, and about 25 people in the non-clinical team between the administration, booking and shipping, marketing and technology teams.
We have hired 12 new doctors over the past 12 months and are looking to bring more doctors on this year. We have clinics in Takapuna, Nelson, Hastings and doctors all around the country offering online consults.
How much time and money have you invested?
Basically my life in time, it has been all engulfing and encompassing, and we put in $1000 to start off with and have bootstrapped the whole thing. It now pays for itself.
What’s the opportunity for your business?
There are so many people out there struggling and not getting the care that they need. Our health system is struggling to keep up, it’s going down under in terms of keeping up, both from general practice and the public health system, and the flow on effects we see [are] people not getting the attention they need or results they are after, and they are coming to us looking for alternatives. As that becomes worse, we’re seeing more demand, and that’s driving our growth.
The market is massive. The illicit cannabis market is thought to be worth at least half a billion [dollars] here in New Zealand, some people who would need to be on a medical market, and there’s a lot of people who haven’t used cannabis who would benefit from that being an option. We see it continuing to grow exponentially. It will continue to grow at a faster rate as GPs start prescribing it.
In three years’ time you will be...
We will continue expanding. We’ve grown incredibly fast over the past three years from literally myself, our other business director and one other doctor, to now over 70 people, and we’re looking to triple our capacity over the next 12 months. That’s a major task, but we’re up for the challenge. We are looking for another 40 doctors this year.
Our consults start at $99, and become a package of medicine and consultation. Product is usually $200 a month.
We want to take what we have developed and see it implemented overseas, taking our learnings from New Zealand and showing the world how it can be done, because there are other countries going through similar changes, and others that will be in the future. We’ll have hundreds of doctors over the next three years, and plan to expand into other areas of health.
Most helpful piece of advice you have ever received?
Believe in yourself and your ability to make change. It’s not easy putting yourself out there, saying ‘We are going to revolutionise how people see healthcare’ through the work that we do. When you put yourself out there you can put yourself in some awkward and difficult positions, and risk as well, so you need to dig deep and believe in yourself, otherwise you’ll question whether you want to do this, or if there is an easier option.
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