Fertility

What Your Doctor May Not Tell You About Getting Pregnant: Boost Your Fertility with the Best of Traditional and Alternative Therapies
by Raymond Chang, M.D., Elena Oumano, Ph.D.

(Page 5 of 5)

Over the course of human history, nature has fine-tuned us to reproduce in the most efficient way possible. We know this from observing reproductive patterns. We've reproduced more when food is plentiful enough to nourish expectant mothers and their infants, and reproduced less when nourishment is too scarce to support pregnancy and new life. Likewise, during times of danger, war, or famine, when the human race or individual lives - especially new ones - were in jeopardy, fertility rates dropped - our bodies adapted by protecting the few precious eggs we had through shutting down ovulation. This selfprotective system in which innate wisdom guides the ebb and flow of our reproduction patterns as a species has kept us going for hundreds of thousands of years. We know too that when other animal species- our relatives - are under duress, they also experience lower fertility. For example, it is well known that animals in captivity have difficulty reproducing. In fact, they seldom reproduce unless they do so after artificial insemination? which is what we humans are doing with IVF treatments. Yet we fail to recognize that overcrowding in cities, for example, works the same way for humans. The evolutionary force within you senses overcrowding and a need to control population growth. What more effective and natural way to adapt in order to accomplish that survival tactic than by lowering fertility? There's too many of us, so the collective unconscious that lives within us all may decide "We won't make more."

Even on the purely physiological level, reproduction is an exquisitely fine-tuned process that can be thrown off easily. As you will learn in the next chapter, reproduction involves not only the harmonious interplay of the entire endocrine system? a hormonal chain of command that sets off a complex chain of molecular signals on cue - but also the cooperation of two other body systems, the nervous system and the immune system. These three systems - endocrine (or hormone), nervous, and immune - are key to the reproductive process as well as to creating the prompts that allow your body to make the continual shifts it needs in order to survive in a changing world.

The Grand Plan

Most endocrinologists and other conventional medical reproductive specialists fail to appreciate the grand plan of human reproduction and survival because their focus is narrowed on a biological model of the human, on the reproductive glands and hormones. Even medical experts who take into account the relationship between mind and body rarely explore how infertility rates and your fertility issues could fit into this broader evolutionary picture. They do not consider how the deepest part of the human mind that we refer to as innate wisdom or the collective unconscious may impact not only on our physical beings, but also on our individual abilities to reproduce. Yet even modern-day science knows that we are all connected through a deep level of human consciousness. We know, for example, that the forebrain and cortex - the parts of the brain associated with conscious thought - function independently of the deepest level of consciousness that ties all human beings together.

Traditional Chinese medicine, however, considers many possible factors - from the obvious and mechanical to the subtle and hidden - as influences on your ability to reproduce. It understands that the challenge of infertility requires not only restoring balance within yourself and between you and your partner, but also recognizing how your deep evolutionary programming, which has been in place ever since the first humans walked the earth, may not be in synchrony with your conscious, personal wishes.

Daily Stress and Your "Fertilistat"

If there were such a thing as a thermostat controlling reproduction? a "fertilistat," if you will - then stressful or threatening environments would cue your "fertilistat" downward in order to help you adjust to your environment and optimize survival of the race. So let's take a look at how the stresses of your daily life can interact with the primeval and collective evolutionary drive that dictates how, when, and if you reproduce. War may not be at your doorstep, but you can witness its sounds and sights every night on your television screen. Your refrigerator may be full of food, but you may be monitoring your diet to make sure you stay fashionably slim. Or you may live in a city that signals to your reproductive "fertilistat" that your environment is overcrowded.

Your deepest consciousness is literal - whether the war is conducted right before your eyes or you take in its images from a TV screen, your deepest consciousness interprets this information to mean you are living in a time of unprecedented perceived danger, stress, and anxiety. This perception of danger, stress, and anxiety can override even your deepest desire to conceive and bear a child.

So you, the individual, may think this is a great time for you to reproduce, but your deepest level of consciousness is taking in information about war, terrorism, danger, starvation, and overcrowding and sensing that, as a race, we should not reproduce more. There won't be enough food, water, security, or enough of anything else we need to survive. Even the stress of exercise - running or jogging, for example - can cue your "fertilistat" to lower, because running evokes a deep and old instinct of how we escape imminent danger.

What can you, the individual, do? I assure my patients that they don't need to relocate to a deserted island. Instead, I advise them on how to outsmart these powerful and intelligent forces that are telling your body this is not a good time for you to reproduce. You will learn these simple tips in chapter 11, so you will be able to assure your mind-body system that the right time for you to have a baby is now.

Copyright © 2007 by Raymond Chang, M.D. and Elena Oumano, Ph.D.

About the Author

Raymond Chang, M.D., is an internist, master herbalist, and licensed acupuncturist who attends at New York Presbyterian and Beth Israel hospitals, and specializes in complementary and alternative treatments for infertility. He has been featured in national magazines and interviewed on the Today show.