Every Sunday, Dr. Rachel Ostrow, MD — a board-certified urogynecologist — opens one letter from our readers and writes back in full. This week’s letter came in an envelope with no return address. We’ve changed the name. Everything else is exactly as it was written.
I’m 61. I have three grown children, six grandchildren, and a husband of 37 years who I still find handsome when he doesn’t know I’m looking.
I haven’t been on a trampoline since 2019. I haven’t sat through a whole movie without excusing myself since about the same time. I keep two pairs of underwear in my handbag. I laughed at my grandson’s birthday party last month and then I sat down on the grass and cried because I couldn’t make it inside in time.
My doctor gave me a prescription called oxybutynin. It made my mouth so dry I couldn’t swallow toast. It made me forget my daughter’s middle name in the middle of a phone call. I stopped taking it after nine days.
I don’t want to go back for another one. But I also don’t want to keep saying no to things I used to say yes to. What are you supposed to do when the pills work but they take pieces of you with them?
— “M.” · Somewhere in Ohio
I have read your letter three times. Once as a doctor, once as a daughter, and once as a woman who was on that grass with you.
I need to tell you two things immediately. The first is that what you are describing has a name — urge-incontinence with detrusor overactivity — and it affects roughly one in three women over sixty. You are not weak. Your pelvic floor is not broken beyond repair. You are experiencing a chronic, treatable, chemically-driven overactivity of the bladder muscle that has been ignored by mainstream medicine for the better part of a century because it happens, primarily, to older women.
The second thing I need to tell you is this: you were right to stop the oxybutynin.
→ See what I’ve been quietly using with my patientsWhat that pill was actually doing to you.
Oxybutynin belongs to a class of drugs called anticholinergics. They work by blocking a neurotransmitter called acetylcholine — not just at the bladder, but at every cholinergic receptor in your body. Including the ones in your salivary glands. Including the ones in your brain.
Which is why your mouth went dry. Which is why you couldn’t remember your daughter’s middle name. And — here is the part that keeps me up at night — a 2019 JAMA study of 195,000 women demonstrated that chronic anticholinergic exposure raises 10-year dementia risk by roughly 30%. Your body knew, M. It was warning you.
“You were not being difficult. You were being wise. The pill was taking pieces of you.”
What I’ve been recommending instead. For eight years.
There are three plant-derived compounds that have quietly built a body of peer-reviewed evidence for calming an overactive bladder — without touching your brain, your salivary glands, or your memory. I have been recommending them to patients at my clinic in Cleveland since 2016. Every one of them, until recently, had to buy three separate bottles from three separate places at three different (poorly-standardised) doses.
So last year I did what I’d been putting off for a decade. I worked with a small GMP-certified US formulator and combined all three, at studied doses, into one small daily softgel. I called it Dryse.
- Pumpkin seed extract — 500mg. A 2019 double-blind Japanese trial (Nutrients): women taking 500mg/day saw daytime urgency episodes drop by 79% at 12 weeks. The mechanism is bladder-detrusor tone modulation — the exact receptor pathway the anticholinergic drugs use, only without touching your brain.
- Soy-germ isoflavones — 60mg standardised. A 2021 Kyoto meta-analysis showed 60mg/day of soy-germ isoflavones restored oestrogen-receptor tone in the urethral and bladder submucosa in post-menopausal women — effectively rebuilding the tissue that thins after menopause and causes both stress leaks and urgency.
- Magnesium glycinate — 200mg. Bladder smooth muscle is exquisitely magnesium-dependent. A 2020 UK trial: 200mg/day reduced nocturnal void frequency by a mean of 2.1 trips per night in women over 55.
What happens in the first 60 days.
M., I will be honest with you. This is not a pill you take on Monday and feel by Wednesday. Bladder tissue rebuilds slowly and gently — which is a feature, not a bug, because it means the changes hold.
Most of my patients tell me that around week 3 they notice the daytime urgency has quieted. By week 6, they can sit through a whole film. By week 12, they are back on trampolines, back at yoga, back to sneezing without a mental audit of what they had to drink today. One patient, 68, sent me a photograph last month of herself jumping on a bounce-house with a grandchild. I had it framed.
“This is not a pill that takes pieces of you. This is a pill that gives them back.”
Who Dryse is for. And who it is not.
Dryse is for women (and men) over 45 with occasional to frequent daytime urgency, occasional leaks, or 1–3 nightly bathroom trips, who would prefer a gentle food-grade nutrient stack over another anticholinergic or beta-3 script. It is not a substitute for pelvic-floor physical therapy if you have significant stress incontinence, and it is not to be combined with prescription OAB medication without your doctor’s knowledge. If you have blood in your urine, painful urination, or a sudden change in symptoms — please see a urogynecologist before ordering anything.
What’s in the launch bundle.
A single amber-glass bottle of 30 daily softgels — a full month at studied doses — plus three digital resources I personally wrote for my patients. All three are yours FREE with any Dryse order today:
FREE
FREE
FREE
And if it doesn’t work — if inside 60 days you don’t feel meaningfully drier and calmer — you email us and we refund every dollar. Keep the bonuses.
Every bottle ships in plain unmarked packaging. There is no product name on the outer box. Nothing on the label anyone would recognise. That was a decision I made because a patient of mine cried in my office once about the mail carrier knowing what she took. She was right too.
→ Order Dryse today · $59 launch priceWith warmth, and a little fire,
Dr. Rachel
Rachel Ostrow, MD · Board-Certified Urogynecologist · 19 years · 4,100+ pelvic-floor consults
“Bounced with my grandson last Saturday. No pad. First time in five years.”
“Slept eight hours without getting up. I’d forgotten what that felt like.”
“I haven’t thought about a bathroom in three weeks. That’s the whole review.”
60-day money-back guarantee · Ships from the US · Free shipping · Plain unmarked box
Editorial disclosure: The Second Half may receive compensation from products featured in this column. Dryse is a dietary supplement. * These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Consult a physician before using if pregnant, nursing, on hormone therapy, on anticholinergic OAB medication, or under 18. Blood in urine, pain on urination, or sudden onset of symptoms deserves a specialist’s evaluation. Results vary; testimonials illustrative.