Traditional Chinese Medicine after failed IVF – A Different Perspective

I don’t have enough information on the case to say that it would be a possibility. We need to know why you’re doing IVF in the first place, what’re the AMH levels like. There’s always a potential that we can improve things to a level where natural conception can occur, but we have to be smart about things and think well how old is a patient and what’s going to get them there first. If you can do some work before an IVF cycle potentially to build and support the body, then the results of the following IVF cycle could be better, but I would suggest speaking to a Chinese Medicine practitioner and maybe having a consultation so you can go through everything. They will be realistic and pragmatic about it as well, we can’t do everything, and time is a big issue for a lot of people and some of the work we do, particularly if there are deep-rooted deficiencies like with the yin. If the yin is very deficient, then sometimes the work would take a lot longer than most patients are willing to give it, but I’d say it’s an avenue worth exploring.

There’s no magic herb that cures all people. With Chinese medicine, we’re very bespoke about what we do, and this is where the syndrome differentiation comes in, and there’s kind of a saying in Chinese medicine that you can have the same symptoms, and you’ll get a different treatment. Then you could have completely different symptoms and get the same treatment, so for example, you could have poor egg quality because your yin is deficient and because you have kidney indeficiency and so what would happen is your practitioner would look at all the symptoms and signs, your full health history, your menstrual history, they’ll even look at blood test results and see what your hormones are up to and then they will formulate, well a Chinese herbal formula is how we would describe it for you, and they’ll put different ingredients in, depending on what’s specific to you. They would produce a completely different formula for somebody with different symptoms and signs.

It’s the same answer again. With the syndrome differentiation for most conditions, there’s going to be maybe three or four different potential syndrome differentiation that we see commonly in the clinic, and so a practitioner is going to ask the questions, see which kind of category you fall into, and then there’s no very hard or fast rule. If one of them is qi deficiency, one of them is blood deficiency, one of them is heat, that’s not to say that you can’t have a combination of different ones within your syndrome differentiation, they’re going to tailor it specifically to what’s going on in your body.

For the case that I saw recently with the spleen qi deficiency, we did a lot of work with the lifestyle stuff. Just looking at foods that are not nutritionally energetically good for the spleen, for example, having things like porridge for breakfast. The change in the way she cooked her foods and trying to eat just really warm, simple, easy to digest foods will help support the digestive system. In the heart yin deficiency in the spleen, I also use specific acupuncture points that fitted the diagnosis, and what I tend to do is just change it depending on how someone’s feeling on the day that I treat them and what I know from their case history. Then with herbs, we used herbs to support the spleen, to nourish the yin during the pregnancy, to help support the progesterone levels. So it’s just tailored, and that’s one of the beauties of Chinese medicine, everything is tailored to the individual, and what we see each time it’s not just one size fits all.

We would again look at how good is the lining, how good are your bleeds, do we need to give your endometrium a bit of a kick and give it a good clear out for a few cycles. Energetically what do you like, and that way a practitioner would plan how long maybe you’d need to have a bit of prep work. It may be that there’s a male factor involved more so, and a little bit of prep work is enough, and some treatment throughout your stimulation on the build-up to your transfer and then working with you through your transfer and beyond would be enough.

This would depend on the severity of the scar tissue, the position of it, and what your consultants are saying the options are with it. For some things the herbs again, there’s potential that they can help with scar tissue but in practice, if it is pronounced, have we got enough time to really work on that? There are possibilities there, but it also depends on what the actual situation is in your case.

What I would say is Chinese herbs can be safely used through IVF. I understand that doctors are often very concerned about their use because again, there’s not a lot of knowledge out there about the interactions. What a lot of practitioners tend to do is they try and do that preparation work first, so you don’t have to combine the herbs with your medication. What I find is sometimes patients will come to me at a point when it’s almost the last case, last chance, and using a small number of herbs is really the only hope we’ve got, and I’ve seen very good results doing that. I think in an ideal situation, we try and minimize the use of herbs just to really help keep the clinic happy and also just know that your body’s reactions are down to the medication, so it’s usually ideal that you’ve had some IVF cycles before and we know, how your body reacts to the medication when the medication is the same. That’s not to say that they can’t be used concurrently. If you wanted to do that and your clinic was very anti, I would suggest finding a practitioner who is confident in using the herbs through an IVF cycle and then seeing if your clinic is open to discussing with them.

If you’re using them to help control symptoms. Is your practitioner may be stopping them just before you start your medication? If you are concerned about using them during your IVF cycle and you are, I think you need to weigh up the benefits of how they’re supporting your digestive system as well. Because good digestive health is really important for fertility and we know a lot now about the Gut biome and the different biomes within the body and how they impact fertility. I think just to have a real deep, discussion and it’s really easy to find information on Chinese herbs now. There are huge amounts of data online. I would say, if you trust your practitioner, then you’ve put your trust in him, go with it. I really wouldn’t be worried, but you can read about all of your herbs online. You should have all the ingredients of your prescription on your herb bottle or whatever they’ve been prescribed in, and it’s very, very easy to just put them online and read a little bit of information about those herbs and how they work. You can try and find some information out about how they interact with hormones, but just have a really good conversation with your practitioner, and if it is creating high levels of anxiety, then maybe it’s a little bit counterproductive as well.

Yes, they can but there has to be a little bit of caution here because there can be issues that arise from doing too much work, and so if patients are on high levels of antioxidants and then the herbs are having a similar antioxidant effect, it can have a negative effect. Again, your practitioner should have the knowledge and experience to know what you need to take with herbs and not.

That depends on you. If you are a cold person and you feel cold a lot, it goes back to this idea of the energetics of food, and you don’t want to be putting cold into a cold body because that’s just going to affect circulation more, and we have this idea in Chinese medicine that we want the body to be warm for conception. That old kind of wives description of a bun in the oven, your body is the oven, and we want those like yang levels to be high, yang is like the fire in the body, the progesterone. If you’re a cold person and you’re drinking icy cold drinks particularly, now when it’s getting really cold then, I would try and stick to warm drinks. Environment plays a role in this, so if you live in a very warm country then you can probably get away with a little bit cooler drinks and things but try and drink them more at room temperature rather than icy cold.

They have completely different effects on the body. We generally use cupping to increase circulation, it’s fantastic for releasing tension in the muscles and drawing toxins out of the body. Moxibustion is about nourishing the body and putting heat into the body, so because you’ve got low energy, your practitioner was probably using some moxibustion on points that are going to help support and nourish the spleen. One of the things the spleen likes is warmth. What we often see is patients have what we would describe as spleen Yang deficiency, so the fiery part of the spleen is deficient, and we need to give it a bit of a boost, and using the moxibustion can really help that. With that low energy treatments, like moxibustion will help boost the energy when they’re used on those points that nourish and build the qi in the body. To boost your energy going back to things like eating foods that are going to support the spleen, warm, simple, easy to digest foods. If you think about convalescence foods, chicken soup, the Chinese make congee and it’s like a rice soup where they keep adding water to the rice, and then, they’ll crack an egg in it, or they’ll put bits of chicken in it, so it’s nourishing, but it’s really easy to digest, so your body isn’t having to expand lots of energy digesting your food to extrapolate that energy, as well. Make sure you get plenty of rest as well and think about everything in moderation the things that wear us down and deplete our bodies are things in excess, staying up too late, overwork, overthinking, overheating, try and find balance.

I would say, have faith. I don’t know what part of Asia you’re talking about, but there’s lots of research that goes on that. Even western practitioners like me, I don’t have access to because they’re not produced in a language that I can read, and all practitioners who train, at least in the way I did, are taught the whole of internal and external medicine. Similar to the way a GP would be taught to learn a little bit about everything and so they should have some fertility grounding, it may be that they don’t necessarily know the lingo in terms of IVF cycles, but they will have some basis there and if their training is good and they’ve got a good level of experience. If they’ve been practicing for a long time and they’ve seen a good number of fertility patients, then they should have sufficient experience in that area and if they’re trained in Chinese medicine, then they will know how to put a formula together. That’s the beauty of Chinese medicine, to some degree, you don’t always need to be a specialist because if you have a good diagnosis and if they’ve diagnosed you correctly, then they know what herbs to put together to treat you. Where the kind of more specialization stuff comes in is what I really see around the kind of the immunology side and the really complex cases, so patients who’ve had things like recurrent miscarriage, recurrent implantation failure, or they’ve just been trying for a very long time with no obvious reasons as to why they are not conceiving, patients like myself who’ve done things like the fertility support training and the advanced diploma, we’ve spent time training with reproductive immunologists and embryologists, so we have a deeper level of knowledge, and we can translate that into our treatment, but not every patient needs that level.