Female Infertility

A new friend on internet asked me something about treating female infertility with acupuncture. Here's my reply.

Lots of Taiwanese couples who suffer from infertility turn to TCM for help, especially those who have already done all the examination and find no organic problem or those who have difficulty keeping the fetus after IVF (In vitro fertilisation). BTW, It's a huge market because patients are willing to pay out of pocket. Ask any of your Taiwanese friends about infertilty "不孕", most of them would think of TCM "中醫". Usually, the problem in men is easy to identify, so here we mainly focus on the problem in women. 

Remember, there is no difference between TCM and modern medicine when it comes to gathering information from patient, because the patient is right there and there can be only one truth. However, the language TCM use to describe and explain the symptom and sign is different, as well as the tool we have to diagnosis and to treat. We need to focus on what really happen in women's body. The sonography, CT might tells you because there's a teratoma in ovary, endometriosis or adenomyosis, blood test might shows hormone imbalance, etc. If the cause of infertility is organic, it's not too hard to prescribe herbal medicine to treat. It might take some time to treat if it's not indicated for surgery. The main thing we could do with TCM is to make the qi and blood flow fluently in the dysfunction organ. If it's lack of qi and blood, we supply. If it's stagnated, we dredge. If the cause is not organic, we'll have to adjust the body constitution to make the environment comfortable for fetus, such as "warm" the uterus. Usually we will prescribe some herbal medicine (decoction is more effective), some doctors will use both herbal medicine and acupuncture. 

Ancient Chinese develop a meridian theory for the guide of using acupuncture. Imagine that the acupoints are like small lakes and the meridians are like rivers that connecting these lakes. Our body organs are way more bigger lakes. The main function of acupoints are to adjust the water (qi & blood) level of organs. There are 12 main streams that connecting the 12 important organs. The main function of acupuncture is "引此注彼", which means "guide the water here to pour over there." So what acupuncture really does is to guide the qi (& blood) from where qi is sufficient to the place where qi is insufficient. For example, we will do acupuncture on the acupoints that can bring more qi and blood to uterus, if the diagnosis is qi and blood deficiency in uterus. There's other function of other acupoints that can "dispell heat", "dissolve sputum and stagnation",etc. It really depends on the diagnosis to select acupoints. Usually, with a couple of months herbal medicine treatment, some patients will conceive naturally. However, it depends on the cause of infertility, it needs expertise to do proper treatment.