Clinic Blog

The attached article, written by Emilie Salomons, was featured in Urban Baby and Toddler Magazine in Winter 2009. We are so pleased to have Emile join our team at Acubalance (August 2010). She has been a positive influence for years in Vancouver and I personally want to welcome Emile and her patients from her previous private practice to Acubalance.

I love getting emails like the following one, as they remind me, on the tougher days, why I come to work.  It is not always pregnancy or a child that is a measure of success, it can also be the difference one makes in anothers life, regardless of outcome...

There are many positive changes that can be implemented in one’s life to improve the ovarian environment in which the developing follicles grow.  Our aim is to help couples to optimize their fertility and reach their maximum fertility potential to enable them to conceive naturally and go onto have a healthy live birth.  This is good news and hope for those who have decided to not use donor eggs or have already responded poorly to one or more IVF cycles and looking for a natural approach.

OK, I just posted a research abstract that showed men that do not experience herpes symptoms may still have it in their semen, and that it negatively affects motility and morphology, thus causing infertility and poor IVF results.  The herpes was interestingly more present in the semen in the winter months (study was done in Russia).  With this information, it makes sense that all mens sperm that has lowered parameters should get their semen checked for herpes simplex virus,...and really give it the boy scout try to conceive in summer months!

Please feel free to listen to a 15 minute radio interview with my New York Colleague, Mike Berkely, about how he integrates East West in the treatment of Infertility.  He spends a few minutes discussing male factor infertility and how acupuncture and antioxidant therapy may be beneficial.  This is refreshing as we spend so much time discussing female infertility in comparison to male factor which is also 50% responsible for couples having difficulty conceiving.

It is interesting, the more we understand about reproduction, the more we see that men and women are very similar creatures (biologically speaking of course).  Here, in particular, I use FSH (follicle stimulating hormone) as an example.