PCOS test is based on the Rotterdam criteria for diagnosing PCOS.
Fertility
Getting Pregnant: Your Foundational Health is Most Important
Feb 15, 2022Getting pregnant always begins with ovaries, uterus, sperm and semen health, right? And yet, when all this is ok, why are so many couples still struggling to conceive? As someone who has helped countless women get pregnant naturally, I will present a very different view.
I’m going to begin with a short story.
No Fruit: Look to Flowers and Branches?
Let’s say you have a tree in your garden that’s simply not bearing fruit. You get an expert gardener to take a look. He feels that the problem could be with pollination of the flowers. You don’t have bees in your garden. So he suggests that we take pollen from the male flower and put it carefully into the female flower and then see if it leads to fertilization of the flowers and formation of fruits. You try it. It doesn’t work.
He then suggests that maybe the problem is with the flowers themselves. Maybe they are not strong enough to bear fruit. He suggests that we should use a flower-growing spray. You do this too. But – no success.
Puzzled, he finally suggests that maybe it would be best to graft a branch from another tree, on to this one. The branch we graft will already have baby fruits on it, and when we attach it to this tree, the fruit will grow and reach full size here. Desperate, you try this as well. But sadly, the new branch is not able to join the old tree properly and the baby fruit simply withers away.
In this story till now, does something strike you as strange?
If this was happening in the real world, would you not expect the gardener to take a look at the soil first? Is the tree actually growing well in this soil? Is it getting enough water and sunlight? Does it have the nutrients and fertilizers needed for it to be healthy? All this is common sense, right?
And yet, this common sense is extremely uncommon when it comes to human infertility.
Infertility Causes: Getting to the Root
No conventional fertility expert looks at your foundations – your digestion, your sleep, your vitamin and mineral status, your stress levels, etc. Their work begins and ends at the flower and the fruit – the reproductive system. No one looks at the soil.
From follicular stimulation using Clomiphene and Letrozole, to doing follicular study and IUI, to ovarian drilling, all the way up to IVF, diagnosis and treatment is all about only the reproductive system.
But if your core health has shaky foundations, trying to fix the flower and fruit alone is unlikely to succeed. It is hardly surprising that less than 33% of IVF cycles succeed! That means 2 out of every 3 cycles fail!
Getting Pregnant: Start With Your Foundational Health
The foundations of the body – the right diet, proper digestion, assimilation of nutrients, minerals, providing the right raw materials to build hormones naturally in the body, stress management and weight management – these aspects are all ignored in conventional infertility treatment, because they require time, they need expertise in nutritional and lifestyle medicine and you need the patience to stage things right.
To correctly identify which of these foundational aspects of health may be hampering you chances of having a baby, you need experts who are trained in nutritional sciences and in something called Functional Blood Chemistry Analysis (FBCA).
By looking at your regular blood test results differently and examining your current diet and lifestyle, these experts are able to give you insights into your health and infertility that you may not even heard of till now.
For example: We’ve had many women at Sepalika who were told that they have normal thyroid function, just because their lab reports showed quote-unquote Normal Values. But we could tell from their symptoms, that the thyroid needed support. We fixed it and the result was often natural pregnancy. We’ve also had men who had again quote-unquote normal sperm parameters, but when we improved these further, with diet and supplementation, the couple who were infertile till then conceived naturally.
Whether it is your inability to digest protein or a waking blood cortisol level that is high or hidden insulin resistance in a thin person – we’ve seen so many cases where people who were labelled infertile and subject to multiple rounds of IUI and IVF were able to conceive naturally, once their core, foundational issues were fixed.
It’s common sense: the soil matters. I have a friend who runs an amazingly fertile organic farm and she tells people that she does not cultivate crops. She cultivates soil. The crop is a natural result of the fertile soil.
No doubt, follicular stimulation, IUI, IVF – all these have their place, for folks who really need them. There is absolutely no shame whatsoever in using Assisted Reproductive Techniques or ART, which are valid medical procedures.
We even partner with gynecologists’ to assist couples who already know that they can’t conceive naturally, because they have structural issues – like blocked fallopian tubes. We work with them to improve their chances of conception using IUI, IVF etc. Our role there too is to improve ovulation, sperm quality, etc.
But it makes sense, to first start with soil, doesn’t it? I often tell patients that Nature has only two goals – Preservation and Procreation. If Nature is happy with your Foundational Health, Conception of a Baby happens naturally. And conversely, in many cases where conception is not happening naturally, it is the foundation that needs to be fixed.
We’ve worked with hundreds of clients to restore them to natural health, using this root-cause, foundational method.
Mahesh is a hormone health counsellor & holistic health expert. He has a Mastery Certification in Functional Blood Chemistry Analysis from the US, is certified in Functional Nutrition from Washington State University and uses a wide array of healing modalities to guide his clients to vibrant health and well-being.
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