Integrated Reproductive Health Care Medicine for Fertility
IVF complementary medicine is very broad and a sensitive and comprehensive practice. Categories of the offered therapies are acupuncture, yoga / meditation, hypnosis, massage therapy, aromatherapy and herbal preparations. Both deliver assistance in different ways and can be adopted as complementary to traditional/normative and empirically supported interventions; they afford numerous advantages in the overall health management strategy when used as part of it.
Those using complementary treatments alongside IVF indicate that they become less stressed, psychologically enduring and better placed to handle the IVF program – and not least, they feel more optimistic about the final result.
Yoga
It is believed that yoga helps to improve overall reproductive condition in women, who are planning to get pregnant due to the increased blood circulation in the pelvic region, the general strengthening and toning of the muscles, which support women’s reproductive organs, the correction of spinal position, providing better circulation and augmenting capacity and quality of respiration.
It can also be argued that the most significant changes in physical fitness, which regularly taking yoga classes can bring to a person’s fertility plan, is again the calming and beneficial action on the body and the mind.
An investigator based at the Harvard Medical School undertook a study which invited infertile women on a 10-week mind-body programme involving yoga based interventions such as meditation, nutrition and exercise aimed at modifying negative thought patterns. In the aggregate, 55% of the participants became pregnant in the first year, and 20% of the women in the control group.
Another one of the most popular mind-body problems among the couples, who decided to start a family through fertility treatment, is stress and a sense of helplessness.
Stress hormones manufacture compounds that reduce the body’s ability to fight diseases and also decrease fertility hormones that may hinder conception. Yoga, because of the employment of relaxation and breathing techniques in practice counters these effects of stress, anger/ or depression from infertility or fertility treatments.
Lacking positive evidence that putting into practice yoga will necessarily make one get pregnant, the positive impact of relaxation, and the overall bottom line of doing away with stress or tensions that may be emotional or physical will also be an added advantage when one is undergoing the process of fertility treatments.
Meditation
Meditation and relaxation exercise can serve as empowering processes that can be used while undergoing fertility treatment. The relationship between stress and infertility is complex. There is minimal evidence that anxiety contributes significantly to infertility, but increasing research that depression may.
Several studies have shown that infertile women who learn a variety of stress-reducing practices, including relaxation, have higher pregnancy rates than women who do not adopt such techniques.
Physiologically, hypnosis, meditation and/or relaxation exercises are known to lower blood pressure, heart rate and the production of stress hormones. The connection between stress and decreased fertility is thought to be directly related to our biological evolution. The mind-body connection knows that in situations of extreme tension our sex organs are our most expendable parts. The mind-body link knows that stressful times do not lend themselves to making a baby.
Meditation also stimulates the pineal gland. This gland produces several hormones, two of which are serotonin (necessary for libido and wellbeing) and melatonin (another hormone connected with feelings of relaxation and wellbeing), which in turn stimulate the pituitary gland. The pituitary is the gland that predominantly regulates female reproductive hormones such as FSH (follicle-stimulating hormone, which matures the eggs in the ovaries), estrogen, progesterone and oxytocin in labour.
It is possible for hypnosis, meditation and relaxation techniques to enhance and/or change the level of certain hormones in your body.