A recent study has made a promising case that sex toys should be utilised as a form of medical treatment.
It’s international masturbation month this May, so the news that health experts are finally beginning to recognise the health benefits of self-pleasure, especially for women, is a timely development.
Researchers at the American Urological Association recently dove into an in depth review of previous studies surrounding the use of vibrators and how they effect female health.
The authors of the review hope that one day, doctors will be prescribing sex toys as part of their standard treatment recommendations.
“Only recently, the stigma of women using vibrators for sexual pleasure has started to fade,” the authors wrote on the research paper they published. “However, it still remains a societal taboo and is surrounded with anxiety despite a variety of potential health benefits from its use.”
So the researchers went trawling through archives of scientific papers by PubMed, clinicaltrials.gov, Ovid, and the Cochrane, searching keywords like “sex toy woman”, “pelvic vibrator”, “sexual stimulation vibrator”, “vaginal vibrator” “vibrator pelvic floor”, and “vibrator incontinence”.
The authors then cut the 549 results down to just 18 papers to focus on, and they found some pretty compelling evidence surrounding the therapeutic qualities of self-pleasure.
“Among the identified studies, vibrators were considered as an accepted modality to enhance a woman’s sexual experience and positively correlated with increased sexual desire, satisfaction, and overall sexual function,” they wrote. “Vibratory stimulation improved pelvic floor muscle strength, vulvodynia, and improved incontinence.”
Just another reason to get out there and enjoy the rest of masturbation month (and every month after that)!
