Infertility

Infertility is more common than you might think. Roughly 12 percent of women have difficulty getting or staying pregnant—and that data does not include men who have fertility issues as well.

Mental health professionals who work with fertility will tell you that struggling with infertility can register as a trauma—and that not many people openly talk about how difficult it is. Therapists and fertility counselors see first-hand how infertility affects their clients, but beyond the therapy room, infertility isn’t something people like to discuss.

For the most part, though, once a person is in therapy for infertility, they’ve been going through treatments for some time, and are feeling the full emotional weight of that. What would infertility care look like if we could address it before it gets to this point?

How Acupuncture for Infertility Works

Dr. Jennifer Yen is an acupuncturist and fertility specialist in Maryland. She’s been practicing for decades , and works closely with many infertility doctors in Maryland. She’s become an expert on acupuncture for infertility because she’s seen so much success in her practice. The key? Educating women early on about fertility and taking a holistic approach to treatment.

“Acupuncture can do really well for infertility treatments from an integrative medicine point-of-view,” she says, “because it offers some tools that are missing from the Western medicine model.”

Studies have shown that acupuncture can successfully regulate sex hormones in women like estrogen and progesterone. “That’s the beauty of acupuncture,” “It does what your body needs.”

Many medical fertility treatment options include medications to help stimulate the body to produce more of the hormones needed for reproduction. But acupuncture, can offer a more gentle way. “By helping regulate all these systems in the body, acupuncture is really about supporting the system you already have,” she says.

Looking at a Patient’s Whole Health

One of the main tenets of acupuncture, regardless of what is being treated, is to remove physical blockages in the body to allow for increased blood flow. Blood flow and hormone production impact, and are impacted by, the entire body—not just the uterus and ovaries. This means that sometimes the treatment methods Dr. Jennifer Yen focus away from fertility on the first month of the treatment to make sure their patient’s entire body is healthy and ready for a healthy pregnancy to prevent miscarriage.

Sleep: “For instance, if your hormones are out of balance and you’re also not sleeping well, those hormone levels probably won’t get better until your sleep gets better,” she explains. “It sounds like such a simple thing, but sleep is so important for rejuvenation. People often forget that. Your body is healing and recovering overnight while you sleep. Your adrenal system and your liver (which is the source of sex hormones) rejuvenate overnight.”

Nutrition: Other simple lifestyle changes, like addressing sources of inflammation and regularly exercising, have a big impact on overall health. Dr. Jennifer Yen has a background in nutritional science, and she often suggests dietary adjustments for her patients that can impact their fertility, like drinking bone broth and taking other supplements that are nourishing for the body. Many acupuncturists will prescribe herbal medicine to their patients, but Dr. Jennifer Yen encourages her patients to get the same benefits from the food they eat.

Even though it may seem that issues like your sleep schedule or digestive problems are unrelated to infertility, all the systems of your body are interconnected. And because infertility treatments take time, it’s important to pay attention to things like your diet in the meantime.

Stress Levels: Stress has a physical impact on your body including hormone production, which is critical to reproduction. “Stress causes a hormonal imbalance in the body,” Dr. Yamamoto explains. “Acupuncture addresses all these systems that are really important for fertility, starting with the brain and the pituitary gland, which sits just underneath the brain.”

The pituitary gland is often referred to as the master gland, because it controls several other hormone glands in the body. Dr. Yamamoto calls it the manager of the entire system. “It tells your eggs when to grow, when to ovulate, and it connects your thyroid and adrenal systems to your ovaries and your uterus,” she says. “All these systems are constantly communicating, and acupuncture has been shown to help regulate this communication.

Dr. Jennifer Yen has had a lot of success using acupuncture for infertility treatment in her practice. One of the key reasons is to help the patient’s body to relax before they even try to get pregnant. Like with stress, relaxing has physical implications on your body that go beyond mental relief.

When your adrenal system and brain are overstimulated, like when your body is under stress, you have to signal to your body that it’s okay to relax on an evolutionary level—that it’s okay to let its guard down. “Acupuncture literally produces relaxation,” she says. “It lowers your cortisol and your adrenaline, so your body thinks, ‘Okay, I’m relaxed. I’m not running for my life. I can safely reproduce now.’”

Once that physical relaxation happens, the body is then able to redirect some blood flow where it’s needed most for reproduction—the ovaries and the uterus.

Start with Early Education: Part of the reason a lot of women don’t think about how the other parts of their body impact their fertility is because there’s little education about what pregnancy really entails.

“Until you’re in your thirties, the whole focus is on how not to get pregnant, and learn how to look for things like their ovulation cycle, or what that’s even supposed to look like, and what happens to your body.”

“One of my big focuses is letting women in our society know how to take care of themselves and their reproductive health, so we’re not dealing with fertility issues all of a sudden,” she explains. “If we can do the preparation much earlier, and teach women how to take care of their gardens all the time, pregnancy would be a lot easier for a lot of people.”

Proactive Fertility Care: Pregnancy and fertility treatments aren’t something most people spend a lot of time thinking about until they’re in that situation for themselves. Early education and proactive treatment could help a lot of people avoid a lot of heartache. Do a early fertility testing to make sure every organ is normal and healthy. As long all the reproductive organs is not missing, I am 100% sure to help my patients to get baby they want.

Give the Body Time: I recommend clean eating, gentle exercise, supplements, and stress reduction in addition to acupuncture twice a week.

“There were times when it felt like doing all of the right things to focus on my fertility was consuming my life,” she says. “But I think it’s so important to stick with it. You have to give yourself time, give your body time.”

After several weeks of acupuncture for infertility treatment and the other lifestyle adjustments, she’s seen her follicle count double. “Personally I attribute my follicle count directly to the acupuncture,” she says. “Because I had been doing everything else for six months, and nothing really changed—but then I did acupuncture for two months, and I was pregnant.”

Planting Seeds of Hope, Seeing the Miracles

Because infertility is such an emotional and traumatic experience for so many women, people shy away from talking about it. But there are also so many stories of people who do have children after struggling with infertility, and telling those stories can offer hope to people who desperately need it.

“Going through fertility treatments is extraordinarily emotional for women especially those women who have suffered a miscarriage before. All I can do is tell my patients the success stories I’ve seen, and try to safe keep their baby once I help them to secure their babies. Most patients are scared, but I always tell them to stay positive. Having a baby is a really amazing process and teach those mom how to breath to relax.”

Most of my fertility patients will bring in their ultrasounds, or bring their children in to meet with me and later on, all their kids become my patients as well. It is miraculous how things happen. My first fertility patient ended up getting pregnant on her first ovulation cycle with my treatment. I usually can tell from their pulse that my patient is pregnant by touching their pulse. Most of my patients are so happy, and many of them experience the miracle of keeping their baby safe until they deliver.”