It's Her House built for women's health, and we're talking about innovations that are shaping the future of women's healthcare, answering under researched topics, and at the end of the day, fueling a better quality of life for women. I'm Melissa D'Elia, and after years of frustration, venting to my mom, and trading horror stories with friends, I'm so excited to see awareness and investment actually transforming how our bodies are understood, how we're diagnosed, and how women are cared for. In each episode, we share stories from real women like you, your mom, your sister, friends, and we interview experts who are tackling women's health challenges head on.
Anonymous:So, I used to have very easy, no problem periods, never really had cramping, you know, mild cramps. Sometimes I maybe take an ibuprofen, go about my day, be fine. And then that all changed. I started having very irregular periods, very heavy periods, and very painful cramps. And I put up with it for a while because I just figured maybe I'm getting old and this is a change I have to get used to or something.
Anonymous:And then I finally made a doctor's appointment. And when I got to the point where the only way I could sleep through the night was I would set an alarm to take ibuprofen every four hours because if it wore off, I would wake up in horrible pain and not be able to get back to sleep. So went and got an ultrasound, and it showed that my IUD had shifted, it was out of place, and that I had three fibroids in my uterus. And so I asked him, I was a male doctor, what I do going forward? Can I have another IUD? Like, I didn't think that was an option because of what happened. And his response was that I can have another IUD that it's rare, but sometimes they just move for no reason. So I had the IUD put back in, but then the cramps started again, and just as painful as before, maybe even more painful. So I basically told them they had to remove this because I figured it clearly moved again, which it had. The doctor told me that fibroids just cause mild discomfort and that lots of women have them and don't even know they have them and they're not really a problem until they get really large.
Anonymous:So at that point, I'm like, I wanted to see how my periods were without an IUD that was out of place. And next period came and I was in pain again. So I went back and I actually brought my boyfriend with me because I figured he could also tell them basically be like my witness to be like, yeah, she's never been in this much pain before because I just I felt like at my other appointments, it was just kind of brushed off. So basically my options at that point from them were either hysterectomy or to go on the pill and just not get a period. I chose that.
Anonymous:And at the time it felt like a complete savior because I was just so tired of being in pain and just wanted to move on. Now I have started to look into some other options for more of a long term solution.
Melissa:I'm sure many of our listeners can relate to the woman's story that we just heard. Period pain, while predictable, is still miserable. I've tried the pain pills, heating pads, and they help, but I never really feel like myself when I'm on my period. It impacts my quality of life. It impacts my work. It impacts my relationships and my overall happiness.
Melissa:Today, we're speaking with Amy Gaston of Her background spans education, athletics, marketing, investing, and she and her team at are developing science backed solutions for menstrual wellness. It's not a pill, it's not surgery. is leveraging nerve stimulation to solve the agony of period pain and heavy bleeding.
Melissa:Her energy is contagious and I'm thrilled she's leading the charge at OhmBody because in addition to the solutions, they're also on a mission to bring awareness to just the miserable symptoms that so many of us deal with. So Amy, thank you. I'm super excited to have you on the show and I'd love to hear just a little bit more about you, your role at OhmBody, who you are as a woman personally and professionally.
Amy:Well, Melissa, first of all, thank you so much. That was such a kind introduction. We're so, so honored to be here. Yeah, and just to talk about OhmBody and just the state of menstrual awareness, I think is the right way to put that. So thank you again for having us.
Amy:Me, yeah, I'm the VP of Strategic Growth, which just is a fancy way of saying that I get the really incredible privilege of telling the stories of our clinicians and our engineers and the incredible work and development that we've done at OhmBody. Personally, I'm a former college athlete, former teacher. I've worked in college athletics. But really, at the core of who I am, my greatest desire is to leave a legacy that's better than what I stepped into. As a child free married woman who has chosen that, I pour myself into young women and helping to mentor and to guide and maybe share a little bit of the things that I've learned through the forty years of life.
Amy:And so it's such a privilege for me to now sit in a role that specifically has the ability to fundamentally change the way women, and especially young women, experience menstrual pain. I just turned 40 a couple months ago, and I approached 40 very much in a mindset of like, this is not the downhill turn, this is an on ramp. Like, how do we live the next twenty, thirty, forty years of my life in an upward trajectory? And I think there's a movement of that, right? And in millennials right now, I'm an elder millennial, but in the millennial space of like, no, no, no, we're just getting better and we're just getting started.
Amy:Part of that is how we care for ourselves now, right? And how we're experiencing, I'm in perimenopause, you know, I have friends that are still menstruating regularly and haven't hit that quite yet, but how do we do that better so that as we enter the second half of our lives, we can be the very best version of ourselves?
Melissa:Totally resonates with me, this concept of ramping up and really your quality of life. And so, again, periods are clearly recurring and and the symptoms we've been taught to deal with or manage, but the options, they've been limited. Right? This kind of, you know, feels like a silly question because I think most women are familiar with extreme menstrual symptoms. When you first joined OhmBody, how did you know there was a market for potential new solutions?
Amy:So OhmBody is the women's wellness division of a parent company called Spark Biomedical. Three incredible male founders who've been using this technology in a myriad of other spaces. So our very first device is FDA approved to help treat opioid withdrawal symptoms. So individuals who are withdrawing from opioids are in a hyper hyper fight or flight state, and so we utilize our technology to help balance them and to bring them back down to a safe level so that they can process their withdrawal without all the symptoms and their body fighting it, right? So they've been doing that for a really long time.
Amy:And then looking at that same sort of stimulation around the work done at the Feinstein Institute and the neural tourniquet, and that was specifically looking at traumatic blood loss, bleeding disorders, trauma during surgery. So the idea of like, we know you want to keep as much blood in your body as possible, that's how you stay healthy, right? So they began to look at that work and we licensed the twenty years worth of research and work out of the Feinstein Institute in order to apply it to the technology we were already doing and looking at how we prime platelets in order to better clot the body during trauma.
Amy:And while they were at a hematologist conference, a female hematologist came to them and said, You know, should really consider women with von Willebrand disease who heavily menstruate to see if your device actually works, right? Because it hadn't been done in human studies yet. Because it's hard to test traumatic blood loss in a clinical study because you're like, how do you you don't want to, like, create trauma, right? Because that's unsafe and guidelines and all these things. So it had been done in animal studies, but not human studies. And so our founders were like, Okay, let's see what this does. And so they actually went in thinking, let's just test to see if we can regulate blood loss, if we can promote more efficient clotting.
Amy:And the results in that, not only did we see a great reduction in heavy menstrual bleeding so in the cases of our clinical patients, we saw an average of 55% reduction in blood loss, but they also then saw these reductions across painful period symptoms: cramping, bloating, gastric upset, anxiety, sleeplessness, mood swings, hunger, mood stability. Like, all the pieces that we all know very well, they were like, Wait, woah, this is so And our founders kind of looked at each other and they're like, we don't have a blood reduction product. We have a menstrual support system. Like that's what we have is a heavy, menstrual support system. But as dads of daughters, they only have daughters, which is so fun. And some of them young daughters, our chief science officers' daughters are like 12 and eight, so they're like right on the verge of menstruating.
Amy:They began to really understand like, oh, one in three women suffer from heavy menstrual bleeding. That means they bleed over 80 milliliters every time they have a cycle, which is actually not a lot. It's only like just over a quarter of a cup, about five tablespoons.
Melissa:It's helpful to have even a measurement.
Amy:A measurement. Yeah, and so realizing, okay, one in three women, twenty six point two million women in America suffer excessively enough that they miss eight point nine days per year due to their menstruation. And so they really thought, Oh, there's a not only is there a market, but there's a great need for education. And so they developed this brand, this division within the company. So these men really felt like they shouldn't mansplain periods to women, and so they sought someone who could sort of stand on stage and share the message, and so I am so fortunate to be the person that I selected to do that. And so it wasn't hard once you get into it to realize and you know this, there are significant gaps in women's health and significant gaps in understanding.
Amy:I was told a stat the other day, seventy eight percent of girls in school learn more about the anatomy of a frog than they do their own bodies. That's wild. So when I tell a room full of women, one in three women are heavy menstrual bleeders and if you're bleeding over 80 milliliters per cycle, there's a good chance you're heavy menstrual bleeding and you should probably talk to your doctor. You should see the eyes of these women. They're like, Wait, what? And then you can see them start to process like, How much did I bleed in my last cycle?
Amy:And what is interesting is because we haven't educated women and quite frankly men even of what our bodies are actually doing, right? We're not small men. What you learned in anatomy class was probably just about the baby in the womb, and that was pretty much the only distinction between men and women that you were getting in your high school anatomy class, if you took anatomy and physiology at all. So there's these gaps that exist because there's a lack of education, right?
Amy:And so I'm so proud to be at a company that said it's not just about offering a solution, but we have to educate women that there's a problem anyway. Because when you go to your doctor while they ask you, tell us when your last cycle was, they're not saying, Tell us how much you're bleeding.
Melissa:Or Tell us about your cycle.
Amy:Tell us about about your your Yeah,
Melissa:How we're managing it.
Amy:That's right. And so if your mom was a heavy menstrual bleeder, your grandma, your aunt, your sister, you all bleed the same, then in your world that is normal. But just because it happens doesn't mean it's normal. And it was really quickly very easy to see, oh, there's a gap and we can help fill the gap in this space.
Melissa:And so the pain, the heavy bleeding, how does the nerve stimulation of your first product work?
Amy:At OhmBody, we use what we have coined transcutaneous auricular neurostimulation. So that's just a fancy way of saying we're going to target the auricular branches, meaning the branches of two nerves around your ear. So auricular means around your ear. And we're going to do that transcutaneously, meaning we're going to do that on the two pads that are non penetrative and they're just two sticky pads. One goes in front and one goes behind. And we're doing it at a very, very low voltage, like tiny, tiny, tiny. And there's a bunch of little changes that help you customize the voltage to you. It should just feel like a gentle stimulation, kind of when your foot falls asleep and you get that like slight tingle. That's about a stimulation that you should feel. So we target two specific nerves.
Amy:The first is your trigeminal nerve and that we target the branches in front of your ear for that. And that nerve is specifically designed to help you manage pain. So it's your pain management nerve. The other nerve that we are stimulating is your vagus nerve. Your vagus nerve is the only cranial nerve that leaves your brain, touches different organs in your body, and then signals back up.
Amy:It's kind of a superhighway of information. So what we specifically do is twofold. The first thing we do is by stimulating your vagus nerve, we're actually able to send signals down to the spleen. Your spleen is really important in your body. It houses anywhere between 20% to 25% of your body's platelets at any given time.
Amy:So what's a platelet? A platelet, its job is his only job is to make sure you don't bleed out. So when you cut your finger, when you the reason you're not just gushing blood over and over is because platelets show up, they clot, create a thrombin, and they hold all your blood in you, and you get a scab, know, all the things that happen there. So that's actually happening all over your body at any given point. So if I sit here and I slap my hands together really hard, platelets have just shown up to the insides of my hands to just deal with internal injury that I've just caused.
Amy:So platelets, as you can imagine, when you're bleeding from your uterus, platelets serve a very important role in ensuring that you don't bleed out. And so what we're able to do is by sending signals down to your spleen, we're actually able to change your platelet and prime it in such a way so that when the body calls it to a point of injury, in this case, the shedding of your uterine wall, they're going to show up and they're going to clot faster, stronger, and hold longer. Now, because we're not activating the platelets, we're not saying clot. So there's no worry about pre clotting, causing clots. All we're saying is we're just kind of supercharging them in a way that says, hey, platelet, when the body tells you it's time to do your job, you're going do that really, really efficiently.
Amy:So in our clinical studies, we saw on average in our first pilot study fifty five percent reduction in the amount of blood loss during menstruation in heavy menstrual bleeders and a twenty percent reduction in the number of days they were bleeding. So for some of our patients in our study, they have a disease called von Willebrand disease. It's a pretty common bleeding disorder among women where these women can lose up to a liter of blood every time they menstruate and can bleed for days on end, fifteen to eighteen days. I mean, can just bleed and bleed and bleed. So
Melissa:I don't think we need to explain how that is disruptive to your life.
Amy:Disruptive to your life. You're anemic. These women are receiving transfusions, and some of those women in that cohort saw up to a seventy percent reduction in blood loss because they were just so far from the baseline of what was normal. And so that's the one side of OhmBody and what we do, which is pretty significant. The other side of the coin is that by stimulating the trigeminal and the vagus nerve together in sort of our patented blend of frequency, we're actually able to balance the autonomic nervous system.
Amy:So one of the reasons women feel like crap during their period I didn't learn this until I worked in this field is that your body is in a state of fight or flight. During menstruation, your sympathetic tone, which is your fight or flight side, is elevated. Because whether the world tells us this or not, when your body's going through menstruation, your body's dealing with a trauma. It's having to send resources because if you I always say this for heavy menstrual bleeders specifically. If you bled that much from any other part of your body, you'd be in the hospital receiving treatment.
Amy:I mean, some women bleed that much, right? They're changing their tampons every two hours. They're going through seven, eight, nine tampons a day, having to double up. That's a real situation for millions of women across the globe. And yet, we're telling them, Hey, take this little pill.
Amy:Hey, we could do an ablation. We can take your uterus out. Those are the options we're giving women as opposed to being like, Oh. So you're in this fight or flight, right? Your sympathetic tone is through the roof for lots of women.
Amy:And that's why you cramp, you have mood swings, you don't sleep well, your body feels inflamed, right? There's all these physiological reactions to your sympathetic tone being out of balance. So what we are able to do through our stimulation, we're actually able to raise your parasympathetic relax tone. And so by helping the body kind of balance back out, we actually help the body experience menstruation in a more relaxed state, in a more calm state. We're not keeping you from menstruating.
Amy:We're not keeping you from ovulating because we know that healthy menstruation is so vital to the health of a woman, not just to have babies, but just to like function properly. And so what we saw in our clinical participants was a 40 plus percent reduction in gastric upset, a 40 plus percent reduction in cramping, a 30 plus percent improvement in mood stability, plus decreases in anxiety, sleeplessness, cravings. And so when your body is able to experience it in a more relaxed state, we're now addressing why you cramp. We're not just masking it the way that, you know, over the counter medication can do and heating pads, and those are all great. But across the board, what we saw was an increase in quality of life, which is really what's important.
Amy:Our tagline at OhmBody is because life doesn't stop when you start. And Melissa, you're a busy woman. I'm a busy woman. We've got busy women all over the place, right? And busy looks different to everybody.
Amy:But while I would love to sit under a cozy blanket when I'm in straight and have a heating pad and drink a cup of tea, I do not have time for that. I would assume most of your listeners don't either.
Melissa:Exactly. And even if that is comforting, it is still painful, right?
Amy:Yes, I'm still managing pain.
Melissa:Yes. Feeling like I'm going to throw up or I have to cancel because I don't know if I'm going to be able to stand up straight at the event.
Amy:Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Melissa:Or whatever your example is.
Amy:So but to your point, for millennia, women have just been told this is what it is. I mean, you know, like, this is part of being a woman. I don't know how many times I've been told that.
Melissa:I think all
Amy:All of us.
Melissa:Before of us as well.
Amy:Before us as well. Has all heard. Well, this is just I'm so sorry. I know, sweetie. It's so painful, but this is part of being a woman. This is Eve's curse or blah blah our burden and blah blah blah.
Melissa:It's so hard being a woman.
Amy:Yeah. And I say this a lot sometimes. I am just like, you know, if men bled from their penises once a month, we'd already have a solve.
Melissa:If they bled from their penises once a year.
Amy:Once a year, we'd have a solve. And so and that's not a knock to men. Like, it's just they don't know. And and I say this a lot. People solve problems that matter to them.
Amy:And so as we think about how do we continue to close gaps in women's health, we have to have women in the seat. Exactly. Have to have women at the table to say this is an actual thing we have to talk about. I will say this, and I know they wouldn't mind me saying this, but, you know, our co founders, when we were looking at is this marketable, is there a market, whatever, this was pre me. They were sitting around the table with a bunch of we have like 60 plus percent of our staff, of our team as women engineers, clinicians, researchers, they're phenomenal. But they're sitting around the table and one of our co founders said, well, the pill reduces heavy menstrual bleeding by 40%. Is it really worth 10% more?
Amy:And they had to look at him and say, But the pill has side effects that are just worse. And everyone experiences differently, right? Like, I have a vivid memory of being a year into my marriage happy, we just bought a house, blah blah blah, and I'm weeping, driving down the street of the city I'm living in, calling my doctor, and my nurse practitioner is like, Are you having suicidal thoughts?
Amy:And I'm like, I don't think so, but I can't stop crying, I don't know why I'm crying. And I just, this pill made me crazy. I was crying when I was happy. Was crying when I was sad. Was crying just to cry.
Amy:She literally was like, I need you to immediately stop taking your birth control.
Melissa:I think really what I'm hearing, the first part is recognizing and communicating what your menstrual cycle is like and the symptoms that you're having with your medical professional. For any listeners out there, you know, if you're crying all the time because you're happy and sad, you're never crying, if you have heavy periods or your period is every few months, the best thing to do is understand your own body and talk about it.
Amy:And I will say this, if you have a gynecologist or OB who just, I don't even want to say the word, maybe dismisses you or says, Hey, is normal. Your body's balancing, your body's regulating. And you know that's not true, I would strongly encourage you to find a new provider because there are great ones out there. Great, great providers out there who are listening and learning and who are continuing to educate themselves and understanding their own deficiencies and understanding and are seeking guidance. So this is not a knock to OB, but if you, we say this all the time, if you feel like your doctor is not listening, there is another doctor that you can find.
Amy:The great thing is that the introduction of telehealth and platforms that are allowing women who live in medical deserts, right, who may be like 50 miles from the nearest gynecologist, 100 miles, right, there are now options virtually and so we would strongly encourage you to seek that out.
Melissa:I love that you brought that up because I did want to talk a little bit more about technology and the future. And I'm very excited about wearable devices and data in a sense of how they can enhance your relationship with your provider, but your ability to also manage things on your own, which OhmBody is an example of doing that, bringing that into the hands of women themselves. Anything else to mention around how the device works? Does it track any information? In the future, are there ways that you could see it being enhanced?
Amy:Yeah, that's a really great question. So no, our device does not track. Your data is your own, women have enough places to track their data and we're so thankful for that, and great companies who are really good at the security thing, making sure that stuff is locked down and that your data doesn't get in the hands of people that don't need it and shouldn't be using it. All the device itself does is tell you how intense you feel it and for how long. So we recommend wearing our device two days every day that you menstruate or need support.
Amy:So some women cramp really bad leading up to their period, so throw your own body on for two hours. I only wear mine the first three days of my period. I am really fortunate, I don't tend to cramp leading up to my period. I wear it on my first day, to deal with my brain fog and my very, very sudden onset of, lethargic tendencies on my first day since I hit perimenopause. And my second day is when I bleed the worst and I tend to flood out of my disc.
Amy:And so I wear it on the second day. And then I wear it on my third day probably 50% of the time just to help support through that. And then I'm usually spot four day four and five. So I'm really fortunate in that, but we have team members and users who use it any day they have a cramp. So they have a cramp flare up, maybe they have a condition that lends itself to days that cramp back pain and pelvic pain, and they use that to support and to balance their autonomic nervous system so their body can handle those symptoms a little easier.
Amy:And then we have people who wear it three or four hours because their body needs just on their most intense days because their body needs a little extra support. The nice thing about it is that there's no adverse response to wearing it longer than the two hours that we recommend. And, you know, in the use cases that we talked about earlier from the other divisions of our company, those individuals are wearing it 20 fourseven, all day long. And we have yet to note any significant systemic responses to that. Maybe some irritation at the point of adhesion, you know, you've got an adhesive allergy.
Melissa:And worth mentioning that it's totally mobile, easy to wear under your shirt, or if you are under a blanket with a heating pad, that's cool too. But if you are trying to clean up the kitchen or go on a walk or jump into a Zoom meeting, it's not a big device that you need to plug into the wall. It's battery powered?
Amy:Battery powered. Yeah. Three triple a batteries.
Amy:And you talk about the future of what it is. It's about innovating. How do we make it sleeker, smaller? How do we make it rechargeable?
Amy:Right, so those are things our engineers are continuously working through. But, you know, as a wellness device, so a we're prescription device, a wellness device, you can buy it directly from us, we knew that we could either wait and, you know, two to three years to create a sleeker form factor that was smaller, or we could go to market today with a device that's pretty sleek, still super easy to use, but it's a solution for women today.
Melissa:Well, thank you, Amy. I'm very proud of the work that you're doing, and it's really exciting to see. I can't wait to keep following you guys and everybody at OhmBody. Our closing ask is for you to give a shout out to another leader who's innovating for the betterment of women's health.
Amy:There's so many, but, one that's really top of mind currently is a company called Incora, I n c o r a. They are a wearable similar to an Oura or a Whoop, but it's an earring designed specifically for women. And they're beautiful. Their CEO, Keara Sauber, is phenomenal. I've had a pair on before, and they're stunning.
Amy:I mean, truly look like earrings I would wear. And what I love most about Incora is unlike other wearables where the database and the algorithms are all traditionally based on male input, right, male bodies, that is not in Quora. They're truly building this algorithm based on a female's body and a female's response to stressors, to exercise, to menstruation. They're designed for women.
Melissa:Baseline for women.
Amy:Baseline for women. Their baseline is based on women.
Melissa:So cool. Amazing to think about the technology at that. I know it's wild. Fit in your ear.
Amy:And they're tiny. It's just it's wild to me. I'm obsessed.
Melissa:So much to look into. Well, if people want to continue to follow OhmBody, what's the best way to do so or to get in touch with you?
Amy:Yeah, so ohmbody.com is a great resource. It's got all of our clinical research, where we show up in media, how the device works, and you can buy it directly from us today, which is great. And then follow us along on Instagram, I think it's Ohm.Body and then on TikTok across social media platforms. And then for me, I'm on LinkedIn, reach out and let's connect.
Amy:And I'd love to hear from your listeners what they're doing in women's health and the innovations that they're excited about.
Melissa:Sounds great, thanks Amy and that is a good reminder if you are dealing with something, feeling a story, hearing things from your friends, we'd love to hear from you to go out and find innovators that are solving these problems.
Amy:Yeah, Thanks Melissa for having me.
Melissa:Thanks for listening. And I hope you're able to share this podcast and what you learned with others who care about women's health. Whenever I get frustrated about health concern or struggle, I always remind myself that I have more information than my mother did and way more than my grandmother's. These innovations are so important and we can't stop talking about them because those conversations result in progress for generations to come. I'd also really love to hear your stories.
Melissa:The stories that end in hallelujah and the bombers. If you're comfortable, you can leave a voice message by going to her -house.com and clicking your stories. Again, that's her, the dash symbol, house.com and your stories. Everything is a 100% anonymous and always will be. I wanna hear about your period, your doctor's visits, your PCOS, pregnancy, giving birth, what happens after birth, being postpartum, raising your daughters, caring for your mothers.
Melissa:I want to hear about sexual health, mental health, weird symptoms, your immune system, and seriously, any differences that you recognize between women and men, because we are different down to the chromosomes that encode the entire maps of our bodies. People are researching these topics and we're going to find them.