Combining Traditional Chinese Medicine With New Fertility Treatments Increases Pregnancy Rates

A recent study shows that using Chinese herbs and acupuncture with intrauterine insemination (IUI), a common fertility treatment, increases the number of pregnancies and births.
Lorne Brown Dr. TCM, clinical director of the Acubalance Wellness Centre, will discuss recent research on Chinese Medicine and fertility as well as a new study on how CoQ10 may improve egg quality, in a free public talk entitled “Age and Fertility: Can You Turn Back the Reproductive Clock?” on February 7, 2012, at the Pekoe Tea Lounge in Vancouver.
This study was conducted at Tel Aviv Medical Center’s Fertility Research Institute, where they treated one group of women with infertility using IUI alone and another group with a combination of IUI and Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), specifically acupuncture and Chinese herbs. Among the 29 women in the IUI plus TCM group, 65.5% conceived and 41.4% delivered healthy infants, while in the control group, only 39.4% conceived and 26.9% delivered healthy babies.
This research follows a recent study from Adelaide University where women using Chinese herbal medicine doubled their pregnancy rate, achieving “on average, a 60% pregnancy rate over 4 months compared with 30% achieved with standard western drug treatment or IVF over 12 months.” The study also found that the same improvement in pregnancy rates was true whether Chinese herbal medicine was used alone or in conjunction with either Western drugs or IVF.
“The surprising thing about the Tel Aviv study is that the TCM group, which had more pregnancies and live births, was made up of older women .This suggests that acupuncture and herbs may make a bigger difference for older women who are having difficulty conceiving,” says Brown.According to the authors, Dr. Shahar Lev-Ari and Keren Sela of TAU’s Sackler Faculty of Medicine, “the average age of the women in the study group was 39.4, while that of the control group was 37.1. Normally, the older the mother, the lower the pregnancy and delivery rates.”
“It is not clear exactly why women who received TCM had a higher pregnancy rate than the control IUI group, but acupuncture and herbal treatments are known to balance stress hormones, enhance blood flow to the reproductive organs, regulate fertility hormones and affect the uterine lining – all which may improve the chances of getting pregnant and having a full term birth,” says Brown.
Brown will discuss the science supporting how acupuncture and Chinese herbal treatments can have a significant positive effect on western fertility treatments such as IUI and IVF, as well as practical tips and strategies that women (and men) can take to improve egg and sperm quality and boost overall fertility.