(Pilot) Is Masturbation a Menopause Hack?

Recent headlines suggested the totally free home treatment known as masturbation could alleviate menopause symptoms. We examine and discuss the study that sparked all the excitement.

We take a moment to remind you that while this is a medical discussion, it is not providing a diagnosis or treatment or any medical advice. The only way to get a diagnosis, treatment or medical advice for your particular condition is through a discussion with your doctor.

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This episode was produced and edited by Erin Stein. Music: “All We Live For (instrumental)” by Wolfclub licensed through Audiio.com. Intro and outro edited, and video created, by Ian Mayer. The Savvy Patient logo by Amanda Spielman.

References:

Lehmiller, Justin J. PhD; Graham, Cynthia A. PhD; Ferrall, Louise BS; Mendelson, Emily A. MA; Prine, Merissa S. MS. The role of masturbation in relieving symptoms associated with menopause. Menopause 33(4): p 384-394, April 2026. DOI: 10.1097/GME.0000000000002675 https://journals.lww.com/menopausejournal/fulltext/2026/04000/the_role_of_masturbation_in_relieving_symptoms.4.aspx

Heinemann K, Ruebig A, Potthoff P, Schneider HP, Strelow F, Heinemann LA, Do MT. The Menopause Rating Scale (MRS) scale: a methodological review. Health Qual Life Outcomes. 2004 Sep 2;2:45. DOI: 10.1186/1477-7525-2-45. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC516787/

TRANSCRIPT:

Gillian Goddard: Here's a little sampler of what we're going to do on the Savvy Patient Podcast.

Erin Stein: So, Gillian, there have been some news stories about salacious activity, easing menopause symptoms, a free pastime, if you will, called masturbation.

Gillian Goddard: They have indeed.

Erin Stein: So, is this a thing? I mean, the selling point is that it's a free service you can do for yourself.

Gillian Goddard: Well, that is very true. You definitely can do it for free all alone. All of these news stories were based on a study called "The Role of Masturbation in Relieving Symptoms Associated with Menopause" by Justin Lehmiller. And that appeared in the November, 2025 issue of Menopause, the Journal.

Erin Stein: Mm-hmm.

Gillian Goddard: Basically, what they did was they took surveys of like 1500 women and they asked them about a laundry list of menopause symptoms, you know, hot flushes, night sweats, difficulty with sleep. 

Erin Stein: Why can't I find where the scissors are?

Gillian Goddard: Yeah, exactly. That's brain fog, by the way. And so, they asked them if they experienced all these symptoms. And then they ask them about a whole host of different things that one might do to alleviate these symptoms. Things like, I don't know, take hormone therapy. Or exercise. Take supplements. Or sort of quote unquote natural remedies.

Erin Stein: Remedies. Was wishful thinking on the list?

Gillian Goddard: It was not, but I think “nothing” was on the list. But one of the things they asked the women is whether they use masturbation to alleviate their menopause symptoms.

Erin Stein: It is self-care.

Gillian Goddard: Sure, sure.

Erin Stein: There is a world where it makes sense. Sometimes I'm like, you know, I don't need to exercise. If I do this and get some blood pumping, maybe a little adrenaline going, and then I'm good, right?

Gillian Goddard: So that was actually their theory, not so much the adrenaline, but the blood pumping. What their theory was, was that when you masturbate, you increase blood flow to the vulva and vagina, and that that increased blood flow would help keep the tissues of the vulva and vagina healthy, would keep the cells sort of plump and lubricated.

Erin Stein: The dreaded moist.

Gillian Goddard: Yeah, plump and the dreaded moist. They love to use the word plump in all of this medical literature. And that that would actually potentially alleviate what we refer to as genitourinary symptoms of menopause. So, this is like vaginal dryness, one of my least favorite medical terms, vaginal atrophy.

Erin Stein: Ooh, that's a good one. All of these terms are pretty bad.

Gillian Goddard: They are really all pretty awful. And so that's the theory on why masturbation might be helpful for perimenopause symptoms. So, what “shocked” me most about this study is that of the 1,500 women they talked to, a full 13.5% of premenopausal women and 9.7% of postmenopausal women actually admitted to using masturbation as a way to treat their menopause symptoms.

Erin Stein: And good for them for trying. But did it actually improve anything other than I would have hoped their mood?

Gillian Goddard: Well, and mood changes can be a menopause symptom. So, of those women who reported using masturbation as a way to manage menopause symptoms, so we're again talking about 13% and roughly 10% of pre- and post-menopausal women, 20% of that group said that it was actually helpful. That means, by the way, that 80% of women said it wasn't helpful.

Erin Stein: When you see these studies, this is percentages of this group. Like, 13% of 1500 is not very many people. 

Gillian Goddard: Right. Ten percent of 1500 is 150 people, right?

Erin Stein: Yeah, so then, the headlines on the newspapers often use it. They're like, well, you know, whatever percent of menopausal women, and it's not of all menopausal women, it's of the hundreds that were in this survey, and that's it.

Gillian Goddard: Yeah, that's right. That's right. And not even all of them. It was like this subset, right, of these 1500 women. So, if you do the math, it was probably about 200 women who had actually tried using masturbation. So not a whole lot. And then only 20% of those women, so 40 women, found that it was helpful. And the other 160 did not find it to be helpful. Yeah.

Erin Stein: That's rough. That's a rough result. So, I mean, it is relaxing. If you're doing it right, I should say. There could be some user error in this activity, I suppose. But I think most of us know how to do it in a way we find satisfying.

Gillian Goddard: And so, they actually asked the women what symptoms it was helpful for. And we talked about what symptoms they thought it was going to be helpful for. That was vaginal dryness and painful sex, those kinds of things. But the things that the women said that they found masturbation most helpful for was not those symptoms, not vaginal dryness. They said it didn't help with that at all. But instead, what they said was that it helped them fall asleep. Big surprise.

Erin Stein: I mean, yes, I think that makes sense.

Gillian Goddard: That it helped with mood swings. And again, I'm going to say that's not unique to menopause though.

Erin Stein: Yeah, yeah.

Gillian Goddard: But 80% of women who use masturbation said it did nothing for their menopause symptoms. The other thing I think this gets at is that it's a self-reported survey. We're just asking women whether or not this is something they've tried and does it work for them. These women weren't randomized to masturbate or not masturbate. Can you imagine recruiting for this study? It's a little bit like being in that Seinfeld episode.

Erin Stein: Actually, maybe we would all volunteer for this study. I don't know.

Gillian Goddard: Well, I don't know. You could get randomized to the no masturbation group. Then you'd end up like the Seinfeld episode about being the king of the castle.

Erin Stein: Amazing. Just to pause on that for a second, because I feel like we're going to talk about this a lot, the randomization of in studies and why we want randomization, why that is better than not randomizing.

Gillian Goddard: So, when you treat people or offer people a solution to their symptoms, they may perceive that their symptoms improve just because they've been given a treatment. It's called the placebo effect.

Erin Stein: I was just going to say the placebo effect, which is a real thing.

Gillian Goddard: it's completely real and it's actually quite effective. And there will be times in the future when we will talk about just how effective the placebo effect is in some of these trials. And so, what you want to do is be able to compare a group of people who used some technique or got some treatment for their symptoms to a group of people who didn't get that. So, in this case, what you would want to do is take 1500 women and randomly assign them to either be in the group that uses masturbation. And if you were going to be really diligent about your scientific design, you would give them specific instructions about how frequently you would want them to be masturbating. And then you would have a group that you either told to do their usual behavior or you might give them another behavior that you wouldn't expect to have the same effect.

Erin Stein: I would also think that really, they should pick one symptom at a time to be studying. Like if you are experiencing this symptom, then masturbate and see if it does anything.

Gillian Goddard: So anytime you're studying symptoms, like people reporting symptoms, anytime you just need someone's self-report or where somebody's self-report is sort of the only way to measure the outcome. You want a validated tool, a tool that's been tested and been shown to yield the results that say what we think they say. Does that make sense?

Erin Stein: Yes. But I think by tool, we don't mean something you can get at Home Depot. Mean like a survey, a rating scale, something that's been used in multiple studies and been verified and all that stuff.

Gillian Goddard: That's exactly right. It’s not a screwdriver. In this case and in the case of many, many studies regarding menopause symptoms and things that improve menopause symptoms, they use something called the menopause rating scale or the M-R-S.

Erin Stein: Mmm, not to be confused with the MRS degree.

Gillian Goddard: Womp, womp, womp. I know, I wonder how long it took someone to come up with that acronym.

Erin Stein: Probably not long and they are probably very pleased with themselves. I probably would be as well pretty pleased with myself.

Gillian Goddard: Yeah, and so that's what they use in this study for women to report their symptoms. But I think one of the things that our conversation about this is really important because we see this over and over and over again where one tiny little aspect of a study, and in this case, it truly was one small aspect of this whole survey that they did of these women. One really small aspect of the study gets pulled out because it's clickbaity. And then the media picks up on that. And then all of sudden everywhere you go, you're being told that masturbation treats menopause symptoms.

Erin Stein: It is clickbaity and it is fun to talk about. 

Gillian Goddard: We're having a blast.

Erin Stein: But the headlines made it seem like there were results that were positive. You know, some of the headlines were, masturbation is a menopause hack. And the free pastime, that could reduce symptoms of menopause. They're suggesting that it does and it really didn't.

Gillian Goddard: This is always a challenge in the media. They want to cover a positive story. They want to give you a tip or a trick or a hack or a secret that they're letting you in on that that's what they want to cover because they know it's what keeps your eyeballs on their website. And that's really what they're trying to do.

Erin Stein: I mean, I would like a tip or a trick or a hack.

Gillian Goddard: To me, when I start seeing headlines like that, it immediately sends me back to the source literature. And so often it's a situation like this where one piece of a study has been pulled out, one tiny aspect of something has been pulled out and spun in a way to make it sound better than it is. And so, I think we have to turn a somewhat skeptical eye on a lot of what we see in the popular press and on social media.

Erin Stein: Yeah, and we both, full disclosure, studied journalism in college. And ideally you do draw people in with an attractive headline and then you tell them about the whole study and what it actually said and more actual information they can use. The different problem these days is a lot of us just read headlines.

Gillian Goddard: Right. A lot of us just read headlines. And there's also this push to get your medical information on social media where you get, you know, a 90 second snippet of someone talking about a study or a headline or what have you. Mean, you and I both know that journalists and others are really these days pushed to promote their own work.

Erin Stein: Yes. But now there's just a lot of people on the internet pulling information and talking about it. And some of them are applying some rigorous standards and some are not. So, the other thing I think that we will probably talk about in almost every episode of this podcast is just because there's one medical study.

Gillian Goddard: Yeah.

Erin Stein: It does not mean there are any conclusive answers. The thing about science is that it has to be repeated, it has to be replicable. Yes, that's a big word to say aloud. Even if this one study did find something promising, and sometimes there are studies that have something promising come out of it, it has to be done another, I don't know how many times, but many times.

Gillian Goddard: Has to be replicable, yes.

Erin Stein: Before it's accepted as, yeah, that medication or that treatment or that whatever actually does that thing.

Gillian Goddard: Exactly, exactly. And one of the issues with menopause is that many of the questions we'd like to have answers to there hasn't been rigorous research done. It costs money to do research. That's a topic that people don't like to talk about, but it costs money to do research.
And there hasn't been a lot of funding available to do the kinds of research we would like to do surrounding women in menopause. And there's been such a reticence in the last 20 years after the Women's Health Initiative study to focus resources on studying menopause. And so, we're just starting to see the beginnings of some interesting research being done. And it's going to take some time to really amass a body of research that's really reliable and helpful.

Erin Stein: Which is ridiculous. What percentage of the population are women dealing with these things? Something like half. So, are there studies about masturbation that are informative? I don't know.

Gillian Goddard: To my knowledge, there is not a broad body of literature about masturbation for menopause symptoms.

Erin Stein: I think generally it's recommended as you said a mood booster and a relaxation technique. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that.

Gillian Goddard: Look, I say this a lot about a lot of things. It might help, and it's probably not going to hurt.

Erin Stein: Again, if you're doing it right, don't hurt yourself. Yeah.

Gillian Goddard: Fair, fair. So, whatever the topic, we'll look at it like this. We'll break down the research to help you figure out what we do and don't know.

Erin Stein: Yeah, and we don't know a lot, I'm going to be honest. Although we do know, like we personally as women know a lot, but the scientific establishment, as we just discussed, has not validated or confirmed these things in a scientific way.

Gillian Goddard: We know a lot about our experience. We'll discuss.

Erin Stein: So, thank you for listening.