Acupuncture & Yoga

A Brief History Lesson

With how successful fertility treatments like IVF can be, many people are often shocked to find out that the practice has only been around since 1978. Astonishingly, acupuncture is postulated to have originated around 100 BC in China. Even older is Yoga, with certain scholars dating some of the practices as predating civilization in the Indus River Valley.

Dr. Luk, one of the founders of Generation Next Fertility, states “many patients will be surprised to learn that Eastern medical practices like yoga and acupuncture neatly go hand-in-hand with Western fertility medicine.”

Stress and Fertility

Fertility techniques and treatments often bring a lot of stress: it’s a lot of monitoring, timing, repeated visits, using available PTO, uncomfortable procedures, and the stress of holding on to hope. We understand that when patients come to our clinic, they are dealing with a lot of negative and often overwhelming emotions. Parenthood should be accessible to everyone.

The Impact of Yoga and Acupuncture

The ancient practice of yoga focuses on the connection between mind and body through mindfulness and a focused awareness of your body. Fertility, Pregnancy, and Wellness, a scientific textbook published earlier this year, discusses the vastly positive effects that mindfulness and yoga have on people undergoing fertility treatments, including physical effects like improving semen quality.

Another tested method for decreasing stress has been the use of acupuncture. When testing the stress levels of hypertensive patients via heart rate, patients that received acupuncture treatments expressed a decrease in their physiologic stress levels (Sparrow & Golianu, 2014).

Compared to no treatment, acupuncture was more likely to show a benefit yield in fertility treatments, as described by the Acupuncture Course on fertilityiq.com/acupuncture. In fact, this course was helped created by none other than our own GNF doctor, Doctor Janelle Luk.

Consider This!

If you are a novice to Yoga, consider researching the following poses: Downward Facing Dog, Mountain Pose, Warrior 1, Warrior 2, Extended Side Angle, and Standing Forward Bend. As you are doing these poses, focus on where you are feeling a stretch, how you are breathing, and what sort of thoughts you are experiencing. Acupuncture, on the other hand, can only be performed by a licensed professional. It takes three dedicated years of education and typically over 500 hours of clinical training to become an acupuncturist. They learn how to strategically insert needles at the precise locations of your body that may stimulate endorphin release (Abali et al., 2022) to relieve stress.

In Manhattan alone there are over 300 Yoga Studios and over 150 Acupuncture-licensed sites in NYC. Consider visiting and joining a session at your local studio next time you come in for a visit!

https://www.fertilityiq.com/acupuncture

Abali, A. E., Cabioglu, T., Bayraktar, N., Ozdemir, B. H., Moray, G., & Haberal, M. (2022). Efficacy of Acupuncture on Pain Mechanisms, Inflammatory Responses, and Wound Healing in the Acute Phase of Major Burns: An Experimental Study on Rats. Journal of Burn Care & Research, 43(2), 389-398.

Rooney, K. L., & Domar, A. D. (2022). The relationship between stress and infertility. Dialogues in clinical neuroscience.

Sparrow, K., & Golianu, B. (2014). Does acupuncture reduce stress over time? A clinical heart rate variability study in hypertensive patients. Medical acupuncture, 26(5), 286-294.

Tardin, R. M., Martínez, P. A., Bonow, M. P., & Schuffner, A. (2022). Mindfulness and yoga approach for fertility: the benefits of mindfulness in human reproduction treatments. In Fertility, Pregnancy, and Wellness (pp. 183-191). Elsevier.