The magic of trying for a baby feels like a distant memory. Everywhere you look there are pregnant women, pregnancy announcements, babies being born. You feel on a monthly roller-coaster of emotional up’s and down’s, and in the midst of a never-ending cycle of raised and then dashed hopes. Seeing a negative result on a pregnancy test is like a tiny, cold splinter in your heart, and it’s taking a lot of effort to pick yourself up and keep going. Take heart, you’re not alone! Many women can take a long time to conceive. Let’s take a fictional couple, they are both 23, in good health, have sex all the time and it takes them a year to get pregnant. In comparison with other animals, humans have quite low fertility and it can take many (sometimes many, many) months of trying before pregnancy is achieved. This is not abnormal but it is incredibly frustrating and often very emotionally draining. Of course, we’ve all heard stories about couples who get pregnant the very first time trying (this happens in about a third of people) but the reality is it can take up to a year and if you’re over 35, up to 2 years to get pregnant.
Lots of people come for to us for acupuncture when they have been trying to conceive without success. Often – but not always – they combine this with medical tests (and in fact if you have been trying to get pregnant for a year or more we actively encourage you to see your GP to get the ball rolling for fertility investigations). We have a really good look at your health, lifestyle, and fertility and try to understand, within the context of Chinese Medicine, what might be holding you back. Sometimes this is a physical problem, sometimes it’s an emotional block – sometimes both. It’s well-known that life stresses and pressures can create hormonal imbalances that when righted, can result in effortless conception. For this reason, and because in Chinese Medicine we recognise an intimate and real connection between the heart (which is our emotional centre) and womb, we always pay very close attention to the emotions as well as the physical self.
Acupuncture’s whole-person-whole-lifestyle approach, allows us to form a detailed and tailored treatment plan for acupuncture to help bring you – both physically and emotionally. This is almost always goes hand-in-hand with lifestyle advice and can often be outstandingly effective.
If you’re trying to conceive and finding that it’s all getting a bit too much, we’d love to hear from you.
