Boosting Fertility and IVF Success With Acupuncture
I absolutely love helping women on their journey to motherhood. I am a mom myself, so I know exactly what it feels like to desire a baby more than anything. After giving birth to an amazing, healthy little boy, I am a firm believer that there is nothing more magical than the love for a child. I get very excited when I get to help women through this process!
When a couple is planning at extending their family, it is really beneficial to spend 3 months to a year strengthening our body in preparation for pregnancy. When we build our resources and improve our resiliency before we start trying, it often results in a healthier baby, with less complications during pregnancy.
What I Did To Prepare For Pregnancy
I prepared my body + mind for pregnancy for about 6 months before we started trying.
I did so by minimizing inflammatory foods such as gluten and sugar. I ate an incredibly nutrient dense diet for those 6 months, which included organic liver (I know, I was hardcore!), whole foods, grassfed butter, healthy carbs, bone broths and tons of veggies.
I worked really hard at managing my stress load. I downloaded a meditation app and spent 10-20 minutes meditating every day. During my mediations, I focused on building trust with my body. I trusted that it instinctually knew how to grow a healthy, tiny human.
Everyone told me to “sleep now because when baby comes, you wont.” Well, I took that damn good advice and slept like a champ.
I also focused on building strength in my relationship with my partner. Introducing a baby is such a huge x-factor for a relationship, and practicing open and clear communication beforehand helped us make the first incredibly busy years of our son’s life much more enjoyable and fun. We also went on lots of fun dates while I was pregnant, and thank goodness we did! Date night didn’t happen again for quite a while after our son came along.
I also saw an acupuncturist to boost my fertility, a massage therapist to help me manage stress, and a chiropractor to help my hips and back prepare for a bulging belly.
And I started on a really good quality prenatal vitamin. Not all supplements are created equal, and investing in a professional brand is money well spent on mom and baby’s health.
Acupuncture For Fertility
This Pregnancy Preparation Time I just described is an excellent time to start fertility acupuncture treatments. Not only can acupuncture directly improve fertility, but it can help improve aspects of our health that will further improve fertility.
Acupuncture directly boosts fertility by:
improving blood flow to our child bearing organs
helping to build a healthy and cozy endometrium for our little fertilized egg to implant into
promoting ovulation
regulating our menstrual and ovulation cycles
balancing and regulating our natural hormonal fluctuations
improving egg quality and increasing egg production
increasing chance of a successful IVF treatment
improving sperm quality, motility, and count in Daddy
Acupuncture also indirectly boosts fertility by improving our overall resiliency, and physical + mental health and wellbeing. Acupuncture can help us sleep better, it can help us manage our stress load, it can lower inflammation in our body, it can also help open our hearts to our partner and future baby, all which will further increase our baby creating super powers.
Acupuncture + Cycle Regulation
It is much more challenging to become pregnant when our cycles are irregular. When our cycles flow regularly, we can easily predict our date of ovulation. Knowing this is the most crucial piece of the fertility puzzle. If we don’t know when we ovulate, we don’t know when to try. Acupuncture helps regulate our cycle so we ovulate on a similar or same day each month. With this knowledge, we will know when to plan date night with our partner.
During the beginning half of our cycle (the ovulatory phase), acupuncture regulates and stimulates egg production, while in the second half (luteal phase) of our cycle, acupuncture provides hormonal balance.
Acupuncture + IVF
Sometimes, no matter how much self-care, healthy food we eat, or stress management and hormonal balancing we do, we are still unable to conceive. This is okay! Everyone’s journey to motherhood is different.
Thankfully, we live during an incredibly exciting time. Modern medicine has perfected In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) to a tea. And research has shown over and over again that using acupuncture, alongside IVF increases our chances of success compared to using IVF alone. How does acupuncture do this?
Acupuncture improves our response to medications used during IVF. The medications increase growth and maturation of many follicles into eggs. The more eggs they are able to collect, the more they can fertilize, resulting in a higher number of embryos. More embryos means more chance of pregnancy.
Acupuncture increases the quality and thickness of the uterine lining, which increases the chance of the embryo implanting.
IVF can be stressful, and we all know that stress is a hindrance to fertility. Acupuncture excels at helping us move away from stress and into a calm state of being, which only helps with everything.
I recommend six to twelve acupuncture sessions during the 2 to 3 months before, and one treatment the day of, or the day before the embryo transfer.
Overall, acupuncture fits with fertility like peaches and cream. Book in today and let me help you on your journey to motherhood.
I Would Like To Hear From You!
Have you used acupuncture to boost fertility, or help with IVF?