The ancient art of infertility treatment

If headlines are any indication of what's hot and what's not, it's easy to believe that infertility treatment is strictly a modern-day science, made possible solely through the courtesy of high-tech medicine.

As good as modern science is, many couples trying to get pregnant find themselves turning to an age-old treatment for help -- one so steeped in tradition it's about as far from life in the 21^st century as one can get.

That treatment is acupuncture, and today some high-tech reproductive specialists are looking to the somewhat mysterious world of Chinese medicine to help patients for whom Western science alone is not quite enough.

"Most of our patients are referred to us by reproductive medicine specialists -- they are usually women who have failed one, or usually more than one, attempt at IVF [in vitro fertilisation], and their doctor is looking for something to help complement the success of their treatment, over and above what the protocols alone can accomplish," says Dr Raymond Chang, a classically trained acupuncturist as well as a Western-trained medical doctor.

Acupuncture is an ancient Chinese treatment that relies on the painless but strategic placement of tiny needles into a "grid-like" pattern that spans the body, from head to toe. The needles are used to stimulate certain key "energy points" believed to regulate spiritual, mental, emotional and physical balance.

"It can allow you to cross the line from infertile to fertile by helping your body function more efficiently, which in turn allows other, more modern reproductive treatments, like IVF, to also work more efficiently," says Dr James Dillard, a specialist in complementary and alternative medicine.

In a study of 160 women, published April 2002 in the reproductive journal Fertility and Sterility, a group of German researchers found that adding acupuncture to the traditional IVF treatment protocols substantially increased the chances of pregnancy.

In this study one group of 80 patients received two 25-minute acupuncture treatments -- one prior to having fertilised embryos transferred into their womb, and one directly afterwards. The second group of 80, who also underwent embryo transfer, received no acupuncture.

The result: while women in both groups became pregnant, the rate was significantly higher in the acupuncture group -- 34 pregnancies, compared with 21 in the women who received IVF alone. However other studies have given conflicting results.

Increasing the success of IVF is not the only way acupuncture may help some women. Chang says it can also work to stimulate egg production in women who can't -- or don't want to -- use fertility medication to help them get pregnant.

"When you compare the pregnancy rates for an egg-producing drug such as [clomiphene] to acupuncture alone, the rates are equal -- a 50% chance of pregnancy in three months for general patients -- to those not undergoing IVF," says Chang.

However, Chang explains that, because acupuncture generally stimulates the growth and release of just one egg, it can't be substituted for fertility drugs used in IVF, since they work to produce the multiple eggs necessary to achieve success with this treatment.