M is for Mysteryvbe and Medical Devices with Dr Lori Beth Bisbey and Soum Rakshit, founder of Mysteryvibe.
Dr Soum Rakshit is the co-founder and CEO of Mysteryvibe. He did his PhD in Biomedical Engineering, and created a start up in AI recognition which was acquired by a US defense company. He then spent seven years in management consulting on large technology projects. And in 2014, Soum started Mysteryvibe to bring defence electronics and medical expertise together and create devices that solve big issues in sexual health in an accessible way. Welcome to the show.
Dr Lori Beth Bisbey: I remember when the original Mysteryvibe came out. At the time, what was most interesting was the flexibility. I was also very good quality, the texture was really nice, and was a step above some other things. But what was most special about it was the flexibility.
Dr Soum Rakshit: It’s still the same but it’s better. But the fundamentals are exactly the same with every product. What I mean by that is all of our six products, which we currently have are flexible, malleable, stretchable, and that is the key to our product design. And that’s where we spend all our time researching, customizing motor design, customizing material, science, customizing, making it really robust, really strong, so doesn’t break and no matter how many times you bend or stretch them, but also very easy for users to use. Fundamentally, that is the core of our product design. I would always say there are two applications, no matter which way you look at it. One is the health side because the reason for creating them to be malleable was to reach and deliver vibration at precise points. So that was the reason behind it. But, you know, once let’s say pain is a very big issue in sexual health, pelvic pain, elbow pain, pain after menopause or during menopause, you know, various. It’s designed by doctors to address a lot of medical things. But it’s equally very valuable from a pleasure perspective to once you overcome pain, or if you don’t have any, that’s great. Because how do you use it enhance pleasure to have orgasms, which you may not have access to other ways to improve your pleasure which you already have. So we always think of it as two things. Even though a lot of the work we do in the lab is medical and with doctors.
Dr Lori Beth Bisbey: I want to talk about that. When I first discovered Mysteryvibe, I was an early adopter. I think you guys discovered me. From a personal perspective. I was pre-menopausal. I wasn’t peri-menopausal. I was still in within the realms in my journey I wasn’t thinking about pain. Now I know that a lot of women have pain younger, but I didn’t. I was looking at the pleasure side and one of the impressive things about having a flexible vibrator is if your physical proportions aren’t the ideal female physical proportions. One of the problems that female-bodied folk have with typical sex toys is that there’s an optimum distance. If you don’t have a flexible toy and your clitoris is in one place, if you’re larger, getting to arm length might be a problem getting to your clitoris, or if you’re looking at your clitoris in one place, and your G spot and another, and the toy doesn’t have optimum flexibility, then you don’t get the sensations that the toy is meant to give. It’s frustrating if you’re not falling into average proportions. I remember the first time I tried out Mystervibe what was great was that I could get it to go exactly where I wanted it to go.
Dr Soum Rakshit: Yep, that’s exactly it. Yeah that you get to reach the point that you want to reach to.
Dr Lori Beth Bisbey: Mysteryvibehas stayed super, super flexible also so that no matter what your gender, you can find something to do with it, which is really valuable. But what fascinated me with the new iteration is that you now have FDA approval as a medical device. I’m postmenopausal and I know something about the kinds of pain that people experience with penetrative sex that we don’t talk about a lot. We talk about vaginal dryness, we talk about kind of nonspecific vaginal pain. And the solution usually is lubricants. Sometimes topical focused estrogen, which does seem to help. But I had never seen anything said about the possibility that vibration could actually help with pain upon penetration.
Dr Soum Rakshit: Yes, and this is where a lot of our work is so. So like I was saying, when we first started, we obviously couldn’t, even though the goal was to make it effective in a medical setting. We couldn’t talk about that till we had FDA, we had clinical papers, till we had evidence. So in the early years, we only asked people, you know, try it, enjoy it, tell us feedback. And that’s it. So we got our FDA in 2019. And then we started our clinical trials in 2020. Yeah, kind of when COVID started, and then we had our first of now three journal-published papers in the Journal of Sexual Medicine early last year, and we have seven studies currently running. So one of them, which is degenerative pelvic pain and penetration disorder, which is DPPD, we had 5x improvement in 12 weeks using crescendo three times a week. And that was significant because it’s the difference between living with being and living without pain. That’s the kind of study we like to do more and more often.
Dr Lori Beth Bisbey: Let me ask a couple of questions about this study. How large was this study?
Dr Soum Rakshit: The study was 30 patients. There is another study running, which is 300 patients. Then we’re doing a study with NHS, which is a more multi-site randomized clinical trial, which has been around for three and a half years, it’s a much longer process to do multi-site randomized. Then wider is more feedback. So we have 100,000 users who use our products, and that feedback, which is even more important than the study design is obviously from, from my evidence, formal evidence perspective, but really, you know, we will never be able to do a study with 100,000 people because it’s just too expensive. So getting that out there in the hands of people and getting feedback, was the key to improving that crescendo to is so much better everywhere. the other thing is, the fundamentals are really simple. So all vibration does is it improves blood flow. And that’s it, you know, it is not anything complicated. So if you apply vibration to your back like a theragun, it improves back pain, right? So it’s not doing anything different in the genitals. If you apply vibration to your pelvic floor, right, you have pain, it helps with alleviating that pain, because it gets lots of blood flowing, oxygenated blood going to that area and enriching that area and making it addressing the issues there.Also blood flow creates arousal. So that creates lubrication. So all of that is linked. And it’s quite simple. And that is the basis, which is already clinically proven. So we work on that. We piggyback on that, existing clinical literature, which says that 100 hertz is a really typical frequency, this frequency of vibration can help with sexual dysfunction, because it can help with increased blood flow, addressing pain, creating arousal. And this has been proven in you know, decades of study. So that is the reason why we can create these devices without having to do the underlying medical research.
Dr Lori Beth Bisbey: You have a device for men to help with erectile dysfunction which is especially important for people who cannot take the medications like people who have had heart attacks and also helpful for those recovering from prostate cancer.
Dr Soum Rakshit: Our goal was to look at how big an impact a device can have on the percentage of the population. The number one sexual health issue is female sexual pain can be in various areas, I think it’s like 86% of moms. And then almost everyone after menopause, it’s number one. That’s why we started with crescendo, then the number two sexual health issue in terms of numbers is erectile dysfunction is 50% of men, and could be young men or psychogenic, it could be older men after prostate cancer, it could be you know, things that happen in life, like, like you said, heart disease, diabetes, a lot of things can lead to it. So So that’s quite common. So that’s why our second device was to tackle the second biggest sexual health issue.
One is to understand what already exists. setting aside pills because obviously, pills can’t be taken by everyone and have side effects. So if we just look at devices, the main solution was vacuum pumps, which is a good solution. But the problem is, you have to it’s a two-step process. You have to use the pump to get the blood in the penis, then you have to take it off and put a ring, a constriction ring at the base of the penis, and it doesn’t work for everybody. And the problem with a circular ring is it holds the blood but it also makes it difficult to ejaculate. It’s really difficult to figure out what will work by buying online or in a shop. Two is comfort. Often, it was uncomfortable to have a very tight ring. No one really had looked into perineum stimulation. The perenium has 5000 nerve endings. But again, an area which hadn’t been looked into so. And then there was another element, which is helping the partner have arousal at the same time. So if you have a plastic ring, it doesn’t, it obviously holds the blood, but it doesn’t do anything for the partner. So so there were all of these things that we wanted to merge together to create the device. And what we did was come up with this really malleable material, which is a composite of lots of different plastic resin, polycarbonate moisture, at a certain temperature over molded to hold that and maintain that flexibility without breaking. To make it very adaptable, malleable, it obviously still wouldn’t fit 100%. But it would easily fit to 90% by stretching enough to adapt to big penis girths. But be equally good at constricting, so adapts to smaller penis girths. So that was the first step. The second step was having a gap in the bottom to allow semen to pass through. So that was a very challenging step because we had to make it robust enough that even with the gap, no matter how many times he pulled, it would never break. Then the third element was the perenium stimulation and really big power. And then the fourth element was the stimulation of the vulva, labia, and clitoris by having a very powerful 360 vibration at the front.
Dr Soum Rakshit: For people who haven’t tried any of these from a pleasure perspective, they’re good strong devices, you know, I mean, they’re good, strong devices, the bendy bit is great, but also the strength, the power that you can get, a lot of times.
Dr Lori Beth Bisbey: When we talk about pleasure devices, and people who like a big whack of power will always talk about going for magic wand type devices, which are like really big, but you actually get pretty equivalent power in a very small space. So don’t be put off by the fact that it doesn’t look like that, right? That it’s not a big whacking device that actually is an amazing amount of power in these devices in these toys, and so well worth investing. They are more expensive but they last forever as well.
The texture and feel is lovely, and, and the longevity, and they do different things. So it’s, it’s, I always think, and sometimes people forget this, it’s always good idea to have a few different types of toy, because you don’t know what’s actually going to provide the best stimulation, even when you don’t have problems. If you’re just doing this for for pleasure enhancement. You don’t know what’s going to provide the most fun type of stimulation. So it’s always worth having a variety.
