Infertility Treatment:
What Are the Various Solutions?

What makes up infertility treatment?

Leaving aside incurable chronic diseases and age, most of these infertility problems can be cured through scheduled drugs and treatments but (a) they are fairly expensive and (b) they come with side effects which can be harmful and thus further medication might be needed to get rid of these side effects. Of course there is another solution to infertility through IVF or In vitro Fertilization and even ICSI or Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection in which the egg cells are fertilized by sperm outside the womb and then transferred inside. It comprises a major treatment in infertility when everything else has failed. The process entails hormonally controlled ovulation progression, removal of the ova from the female’s ovaries and allowing the sperm to fertilize it in a fluid medium. In order to establish a successful pregnancy, the fertilized egg is transferred back to the female’s uterus thereafter.

However, IVF or ICSI is an inherently unnatural process. It is not normal to excavate the eggs from the ovary, have them fertilized in an alien laboratory and then put them back into the uterus. In the normal process, the human body decides which the healthiest sperm to reproduce the egg is. But in artificial reproduction techniques, this decision is taken by the embryologist at the laboratory and so, very often the artificial process fails to pick the healthiest sperm and the egg. Because of this there is always the scare that the child will either not be born healthy or might have some serious problems later on in life.

Alternative ways of treating infertility

However, there are some alternative ways of treating infertility that includes a holistic approach that are becoming more and more popular these days since there are no side effects involved, and there is no stress too.

While acupuncture, especially Auricular (ear) acupuncture proves effective in females where the infertility has been caused due to ovarian malfunction, it was found that the beneficial results were achieved due mostly to the hormonal message transferred from the brain to the ovary. In an investigative trial, females who failed to ovulate and were treated with acupuncture 30 times over a period of three months responded well. Interestingly, side effects were reported only with those that had also undergone hormone therapy.

Alternative treatment technique for infertility stresses heavily on diet and lifestyle changes. Caffeine that is found in regular coffee, black tea, green tea, chocolate, cocoa and some colored soft drinks has detrimental effect on conception. A study especially dedicated on the topic found that consumption of one and a half cup of coffee per day has delayed conception in women trying to get pregnant. Hence the beverage has been carefully withdrawn from patients suffering from certain types of infertility.

Diets rich in fish contaminated with PCBs or polychlorinated biphenyls are also reported to substantially reduce the ability to conceive. In a study it was recorded that women who had more than one fish meal in a month comprising fish procured fromLake Ontario (believed to be contaminated with PCBs) developed reduced fecundity.