Acupuncture for IVF support by Irina Szmelskyj, an award-winning fertility acupuncturist based in Cambridge with 20 years of clinical experience.
Are you looking for specialist IVF acupuncture support?
Research shows that combining acupuncture with IVF can increase implantation rates by up to 65%, reduce levels of stress hormones which can interfere with conception and improve blood flow to the ovaries and the uterus, which can help improve egg quality and optimise endometrial receptivity.
DipAc, MSc, MBAcC, MBMAS, MBAA, RBAF
Our fertility acupuncturist, Irina Szmelskyj, is a co-author of a leading textbook on acupuncture for fertility and IVF.
The book ‘Acupuncture for IVF and Assisted Reproduction‘ (ISBN 978-0702050107) reached No1 best-seller ranking in the UK, the USA, Canada, Australia, France, Germany, and India.
When you begin your IVF acupuncture treatment with us, our fertility acupuncturist will review major factors known to affect IVF success and will put together your comprehensive acupuncture for IVF treatment plan.
Ovarian follicles (and eggs inside them) take over a year to develop after coming out of their dormant state. Sperm takes around 3 months to be produced. So, what happens in the months before IVF can make a big difference to egg and sperm quality and, therefore, IVF outcome.
Adequate preparation is the key to successful IVF treatment, but it can get confusing what is proven to work. Before starting their IVF acupuncture treatment with us, many of our patients are doing “everything” in the hope it will help them. This is stressful, expensive and can actually reduce IVF success.
So, at the beginning of your IVF acupuncture treatment with us, we will review all the major factors found by research to reduce IVF success rates, including:
But, don’t worry, we will not give you a long list of expensive supplements to take or complicated diets to follow. We will only recommend small easy to implement changes that research shows will have the highest positive impact on your IVF treatment.
If, after taking your medical history, we suspect you might have an underlying medical condition that can impact on your IVF treatment, we will recommend what investigations you would benefit from and how to arrange them.
If you’ve already had infertility investigations, we will review your tests results. It is not unusual for us to pick up on something that’s been previously overlooked or recommend other tests.
Our fertility acupuncturist, Irina Szmelskyj, teachеs other acupuncturists, doctors and consultants nationally and internationally on advanced interpretation of infertility tests. So, she has detailed technical knowledge of all infertility tests and will talk you through them, something our patients find really helpful.
If you’ve already had IVF or similar treatments, we will review how your treatment(s) went to see if there are any aspects that can be improved upon in the future. The areas we usually look into include:
If we find anything that was not optimally managed, we will recommend what your IVF clinic can do to reduce changes of the same issue coming up in the future.
If you’ve never had any reproductive treatments, we will advise which reproductive treatments or techniques are likely to benefit you and which IVF clinics offer these treatments.
As part of this review, we are always thinking about how you can give yourself the highest chance of success while keeping the cost of assisted reproductive treatment down. So, it’s not unusual for us to recommend steps that will actually save you money, sometimes thousands! So, acupuncture treatment with us can pay for itself.
If you or your partner have been pregnant before, those pregnancies can give us a clue as to why you are having current fertility difficulties. We will review these as part of your detailed assessment. All information is treated with the highest level of confidentiality.
We will look into your reproductive and obstetric family history as some fertility related medical conditions can be passed on and can affect IVF success rates.
IVF acupuncture treatment is holistic, so we will look at every system in your body to see if everything is working as well as it should.
It’s not unusual for a patient to be “fit and healthy” from a conventional medical point of view, only to have several syndromes (as they are referred to in acupuncture) that need to be treated by acupuncture before you begin your IVF treatment.
We will then put together your IVF acupuncture treatment plan. In addition to acupuncture treatment, your plan may include:
IVF acupuncture treatment may need to be administered outside of normal clinic hours, for example, on the day of embryo transfer. We are as flexible as we can be to ensure that you get treated exactly when your chances of IVF success will be maximised, even if it’s on a bank holiday.
Undergoing IVF treatment is like being on a rollercoaster with many ups and downs. This is why as part of our IVF acupuncture treatment we provide unlimited email and emergency phone support.
Book your initial appointment. Our easy-to-use online appointment system is available 24/7.
