What Is Acupuncture and How Does It Work?
Acupuncture is one of several branches of traditional Chinese medicine. In diagnosing and balancing the way your different systems perform, acupuncture sparks your natural self-healing mechanism and improves the way your body functions. By stimulating specific anatomic sites with very thin needles (most of my patients report not even feeling the insertion), your acupuncturist restores your body to a state of homeostasis. That’s a term we learned in high school biology that simply means your different systems are each operating at the right levels and at the right time.
A woman's ability to conceive relies on a well-functioning endocrine system that naturally regulates a delicate balance of hormones within her body. With today’s plethora of industrial toxins and endocrine-disrupting chemicals warring against her natural chemistry, a woman’s hormone levels can be disrupted, suppressed, or artificially increased, sending conflicting messages and changing how the glands function altogether. The glands exclusive to a woman’s gender, the ovaries, rely on a natural balance of progesterone and three estrogens: estradiol, estrone, and estriol. The right balance of these hormones is necessary for healthy development during puberty and to ensure healthy fertility. By selecting the right combination of acupoints, your acupuncturist triggers a neurochemical response in your body that regulates pituitary and thyroid function - and by extension your hormone levels. Acupuncture and herbs can also thicken the uterine lining to ensure the uterus is an optimal environment for the implantation of a fertilized egg.
The relaxing benefits that many patients report with acupuncture is due in large part to the lowering of cortisol and adrenaline, hormones associated with stress and an acidic body, both of which are fertility disruptors.
Why Should You Get Acupuncture?
Acupuncture is safer and twice as effective for restoring fertility than current drugs and can also double your chances of getting pregnant. Over 46 per cent of women using acupuncture as a method of fertility conceived.
Scientific data demonstrates that acupuncture produces significant improvements in menstrual regularity, restores ovulation pattern regularity, increases pregnancy rates, regulates hormonal secretions, normalizes basal body temperature patterns, and increases embryo survival rates.
Fertility enhancements provided by acupuncture apply to both natural conception and IVF (in vitro fertilization) patients. Acupuncture also increases the production of endorphins, the body’s natural “feel good” brain chemical that also plays a role in regulating the menstrual cycle.
Fertility acupuncture is for men, too!! Acupuncture improves sperm count, motility, morphology, and liquefaction (the time it takes for semen to liquefy post-ejaculation).
Acupuncture infertility treatment statistically produces better results than pharmaceutical IVF treatment with little to no side effects - and none of the side effects reported with IVF.
Acupuncture is a natural way of increasing your fertility. Your acupuncturist will design a protocol of treatment specific to your body’s needs to help you bring your dreams of having a family - to life.
Mel Baker-Thompson is a New York State licensed Doctor of Acupuncture and Chinese Medicine with over 3,000 hours of clinical and didactic training in Eastern and Western medical modalities. She has developed the Whole LIfe Integration Method to take natural functional medicine to the next level - incorporating the role of the mind in the optimization of authentic health. Over the last 20 years she has treated physicians, therapists, Rockettes, even an Olympic-qualifying athlete. From infants to grandparents, she has crafted an approach to health cultivation that combines the wisdom, skill, and acumen of Chinese Medicine with nutrition therapy, manual therapy, essential oils, and insight meditation to remove health disruptors in the body and mind.
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