Last week I shared a story that depicts the classic pharmaceutical treatment spiral that is quite commonplace in women’s healthcare. Since writing that I have received numerous inquiries from women who have stories that are, truthfully, heartbreaking. Following the advice of their ob/gyn physicians and believing they were helping their symptoms by taking hormonal birth control, these women are now in a state of aggravated symptoms and struggling to conceive. The message I have reiterated in each of these posts—Menstrual Symptoms What’s Normal?, The Root of Infertility, Could this be your Daughter?, Painful Periods, Stop the Suppression—is that suppressing menstrual symptoms is not, and never will be, the right answer.
When explaining the crucial role menstruation plays in womens’ health in my office recently, I gave this example: we could not even imagine a health practice that would suppress bowel movements when they are irregular. Why then have we accepted that as a standard treatment for menstrual cycles?
While there is much more to be said on this topic of fertility, I will be closing out this series by making a case for detoxing the body rather than following the conventional treatment for infertility.
Making a Case for Detox vs. IVF for Infertility
If you or a close friend or family member have gone through IVF you know it’s a difficult, emotionally charged and expensive process. Because there are success stories, it has become the accepted “conventional” approach. What I’ve learned from the women who come to my office, however, is that IVF is just the last step along a long trail of pharmaceutical treatments that started for most of the women when they took their first hormonal birth control pill or had an IUD implanted.
I believe the actual approach to fertility should be to first re-balance the body until the menses occurs every 28-30 days and with little to no discomfort. This change alone signifies a healthy body with a high fertility rate. It’s important to know that fertility rates decline as the body’s elimination routes are compromised and wastes build up in the system. The uterus can’t serve its purpose as a womb when the body is using it to help clean accumulated wastes the bowels and kidneys did not eliminate. Adding hormonal birth control to lessen or stop monthly flow creates even more havoc.
What if you are ready for a baby but your body is not? The best thing you can do is to get your body ready by helping it to clean out the build up of wastes created by years of meds and a less than perfect diet. The state your body is in when you conceive affects not only your pregnancy but the long term health of the child you are carrying. So cleaning up the system not only impacts your health and your fertility, it has positive consequences for your children throughout their lifetime.
So now that we’re talking about a much greater and longer impact than just a 9 month pregnancy, let’s look at some of the details of a typical process.
Joan came into my office a few months back looking for answers to why she was struggling to get pregnant. Like many of my clients, she had followed the conventional medical treatment of hormonal birth control to suppress the pain, irregularity and additional symptoms of her menstrual cycle during her late teens and twenties. Now in her 30’s and thinking about starting a family, her body isn’t really up to the task. Those painful periods in her teens were the body’s way of saying “Pay attention. Something is wrong here.” What was wrong was inflammation caused by diet and difficulty eliminating wastes, but she was told to treat it by suppressing the pain.
The original problem was that her bowels and kidneys were not efficiently eliminating the wastes. Her uterus tried to take up the slack, but also got bogged down and inflamed, which then caused the secondary symptoms of cramping and heavy flow. This means that Joan’s reproductive organs have been mired in all that build up of stagnant lymphatic fluid, which, by the way, is acid. It seems fairly clear that doesn’t lead to healthy organ tissue by any means. Unhealthy organ tissue means that organs simply cannot perform their function. Think of it if like a dirty air filter in your air conditioner. Every smart AC technician will tell you a clean filter optimizes function and a dirty one makes the ac work twice as hard. To solve this problem you wouldn’t boost the power of your AC you would just clean the filter, right? Same is true for your reproductive organs.
If Joan had sought conventional help to get pregnant she would have been treated with medications to stimulate the function of the organs that are tired, dirty and sluggish. If the first level of treatment is unsuccessful there are stronger medications and more refined procedures all optimized to push unhealthy organs to perform in ways they have tried to make clear they are not up to. It’s a testament to the inherent strength of our organs that the IVF approach actually yields a success rate of over 50% nationally.
Beyond my concern for mothers is an interest in a healthy fetus and child. When the pharmaceutical treatment is successful, we then have a baby developing in a less than optimal environment. Conventional medicine rarely discusses that problem. The rate of premature deliveries of IVF babies doubles that of naturally conceived babies and for some very obvious reasons. On top of that, the increased health struggles faced over the lifetime of an infant who arrives prematurely are significant. While medical science has advanced in the area of neonatal care, much of this is completely avoidable if mom is in a healthy state at the beginning of the pregnancy.
Here’s what I propose:
- Get yourself familiar with how the body cleans and heals itself.
- Begin a clear plan supervised by your health practitioner that features a clean, plant-based diet, gemmotherapy and works on these four steps:
• Opening your elimination organs
• Cleaning and restore organ tissues
• Optimizing organ function
• Supporting your body’s ability to harmonize - When your bowel and kidney elimination and menstrual cycle is regulated, then consider getting pregnant.
Do I guarantee success? No I don’t because I do believe there is more at play in bringing forth life than just your physical state, but I do guarantee that you will have a clean, healthy, harmonized body if you see your way through the entire process. You will be in a better space to make decisions that will be wise and informed for all involved.
Please check back in next week. I will revisit and update a post from last summer that depicts what happens over the course of your life when your body does not clean and eliminate efficiently.