More and more women are turning to acupuncture to increase their chances of conceiving a longed for baby.

Modern life seems to put so many demands on women in their twenties that making a decision to have a child is postponed. Career progression, affording a home, not meeting ‘the one’ until later in life, seem to be the main reasons why many women decide to have their first child over the age of 35, a time when our fertility, supposedly declines.

Of course, there is the inaccurate media message that as soon as we hit 35, all of our eggs are defunct! Interestingly, this message has had such an effect that some women over 35  stop using contraception because they think they are no longer fertile.

So how can acupuncture and diet help boost your fertility? A healthy, regular menstrual cycle is optimum to helping you conceive, being no less than 19 days and no more than 35 days in length.  Acupuncture seems to regulate the menstrual cycle and is particularly beneficial for women who may have been diagnosed with PCOS (polycystic ovarian syndrome). This is a condition of the endocrine system where cysts develop in the ovaries and cause the body to miss ovulation. PCOS also raises high levels of the male hormone called androgens into the body which reduce the size of the follicles. Follicles produce the hormones oestrogen and progesterone and release an egg when you ovulate.

Having acupuncture around pertinent times of the menstrual cycle such as at ovulation and then at the highest point of progesterone, usually day 21, can encourage the body to work more effectively and contribute to a natural pregnancy without the need to resort to hormone therapy. A diagnosis from a Chinese medicine perspective would identify the best time in your cycle for you to have acupuncture.

For many women, undertaking a course of acupuncture to help conception could simply be because it is going to help de-stress the mind and body. Trying to conceive can be extremely stressful, particularly once all the tests have been undertaken and there are no identifiable issues for not falling pregnant.

Stress causes cortisol, a steroid hormone to rise, which in turn can stop our bodies ovulating, so using acupuncture can keep the body receptive and open. Cortisol also affects the part of the immune system responsible for preventing miscarriage in early pregnancy, so having a course of acupuncture once you are pregnant can also be beneficial.

For women who choose medically assisted fertility cycles, acupuncture is often used to maximise the health of the developing follicles and to encourage the blood supply to the uterine lining, to aid with implantation of the egg. Acupuncture is also used to help minimise the side-effects of the drugs.

Acupuncturists who are also naturopaths are additionally equipped to give nutrition and lifestyle advice. Eating nutrient-boosting foods which suit you, and omitting foods and products from your life which can disrupt the functioning of the endocrine and digestive systems helps to address both toxicity and any vitamin or mineral deficiencies. These powerful natural tools used together can support the body in returning to hormonal balance, and can greatly enhance your chances of a having a naturally conceived healthy pregnancy and a healthy baby.

Author

Acupuncturist Amanda Hair-Bedding is a Course Consultant for CNM (College of Naturopathic Medicine), the UK’s largest training provider in natural therapies. She practices in Bristol, UK.

Acupuncture has been practised for more than 2,000 years in China, and it is becoming ever more popular in the West. It is estimated that more than one million treatments are given per year in the UK.

There is increasingly good evidence that acupuncture can successfully treat a wide range of conditions. The World Health Organisation website lists 28 conditions for which acupuncture has been “proved through controlled trials to be an effective treatment”, including rhinitis, headache, high blood pressure, lowered immunity, rheumatoid arthritis, sciatica, back pain, and knee pain. It lists another 60 conditions for which some “therapeutic effect has been shown”, including asthma, infertility, insomnia, and pre-menstrual syndrome.

Thousands of western doctors and physiotherapists have undergone some training in acupuncture. Despite this, many people are still sceptical about acupuncture because it seems to make no sense that the insertion of tiny needles can treat disease. So how does acupuncture actually work?

Part of the answer is that the insertion of acupuncture needles causes the release of chemicals called “endorphins”. (This word is short for “endogenous morphine”. Endogenous means it is produced inside the body, and the word morphine comes from the Greek God of sleep, Morpheus.) There are many kinds of endorphins in the human body, each with a different function. Some reduce pain, some promote the healing of damaged tissue, some promote good sleep, some calm anxiety, and some play a role in hormone production. So, we can see how acupuncture can be used to treat many conditions.

Recent scientific investigations have given us more clues. Using an MRI scanner, it has been shown that the shallow insertion of needles at specific points causes increased activity in the pain control centres of the brain. However, what the neuroscientists found really interesting and surprising, was that if the needles are inserted deeper into the skin, and manipulated until the patient feels a tingling around the needle, the pain control areas become less active (you can see this remarkable experiment on You Tube). This would explain why experienced practitioners get better results than novices, as getting the tingling sensation is an acquired skill.

One study showed that acupuncture caused changes in the brain which promoted stroke recovery. In this experiment, normal acupuncture was compared to “sham” acupuncture, where needles are deliberately inserted in the wrong points. Only the correct acupuncture had the desired effect.

According to Chinese medicine, energy, or “qi”, gathers in certain points near the surface of the body and flows along channels called “meridians.” It has been speculated that this “qi” is a very low level of electrical impulse, and indeed acupuncture points and channels have been found to be areas of low electrical resistance. When a person is ill, the electrical activity at the acupuncture points changes. The insertion of needles helps to return the electrical activity of the acupuncture point to its normal level. Experiments have been done where substances have been injected into acupuncture points and have been observed to move along the acupuncture channels.

So, there is mounting evidence that acupuncture has real health benefits, and that it has a scientific basis of action.

Author

Henry McGrath is an Acupuncturist and the author of a number of books on traditional Chinese medicine, including Harmony in the Face of the Tiger, about TCM approaches to cancer. He is Academic Director at CNM (College of Naturopathic Medicine) the UK’s largest training provider in natural therapies.