Allow me to clarify something. I am a big believer in Western medicine. After all, I work in the field. I have seen some amazing things. But I am an even bigger believer in integrative medicine. I think that there is a time and a place for the use of drugs and other interventions to treat and hopefully cure diseases and conditions. But I also think it is important to do more than treat just the symptoms or effects of a disease or condition. I think that sometimes, Western medicine can be too focused on this. While a diagnosis is important, it is equally important (in my opinion) to acknowledge that there can be many contributing factors, all of which should be addressed to achieve the best possible outcome.
The best example I can give of this is stress. I truly believe that stress is a major contributing factor to disease. I've seen this in my own life (and not just with IF). And while some stress can be healthy, most people probably have too much of it. Everyone needs an outlet, a way of managing and relieving stress. Unfortunately, when no healthy outlet exists, stress may be expressed in the form of disease. Stress may not always be the single root cause of a disease or condition, but it can certainly exacerbate the situation and allow other things to develop. In my own life experience, stress with no outlet has led to chronic tension headaches, frequent infections, poor quality sleep (which also contributes to other conditions), and even depression. Fortunately, I had come to the realization that I needed to find better ways to manage stress long before beginning my IF journey. I had learned to recognize my own body's signs that stress was building and in need of an outlet.
And so it was that in the midst of the Clomid drama, I decided to give acupuncture a try. I could feel my stress levels rising and I knew it wasn't healthy. While stress probably wasn't the cause of my IF, I knew it wasn't helping matters either. The headaches were coming back, the sleepless nights were increasing. And don't even get me started on the feelings of depression. I had done some reading about alternative and complementary treatments for IF, and even knew a couple of people who had had success with acupuncture. I was willing to trying just about anything. Even if acupuncture couldn't directly fix my ovulation problems (and who knows, maybe it could?), there was a lot of research demonstrating the positive effects of acupuncture on stress. So I asked my chiropractor for a referral. He didn't have any personal experience or recommendations, but another patient of his was seeing a Chinese medicine practitioner down the street and had spoken highly of her experience. I tooled around on their website for a bit and was pleased to find an entire section devoted to acupuncture and IF. I made an appointment for the following Monday.
My first visit with the acupuncturist, Kurt, was interesting. He spent a good 45 minutes or more discussing my entire medical and family history with me before we ever set foot inside a treatment room. I had gone into the appointment intending to focus on IF and stress, but ended up talking about everything from my occasional bouts of insomnia to the foot cramps I'd recently starting having to my family history of diabetes. Kurt explained that while it was fine to have goals for my acupuncture treatment, his approach was to look at all of the things that I was experiencing, or had experienced, and then connect the dots to determine what energy imbalances were impacting my overall state of health; his goal would then be to correct those imbalances. A lot of what he said went right over my head, since I wasn't really up on my Chinese medicine theory and terminology. But it was clear to me that his approach was in line with my desire to eliminate or at least minimize the impact that stress was having on both my IF journey and my life as a whole.
I began going for acupuncture once a week. It was nice - I actually started looking forward to my visits. If nothing else, it was a break from my routine and an opportunity for some "me" time. I've never been much of a meditator, but I learned to focus on my breathing and feel my body relaxing. Although the Western medicine side of me still struggles to understand how those tiny needles, stuck in seemingly random places, can a have a physiologic effect on my body, I've learned to let go of that and simply enjoy the outcome. For me, acupuncture has become a useful tool for managing the stress of IF. I still have some tension headaches, but not as frequently. I still have trouble sleeping sometimes, but in general I am sleeping better. I still have moments, and even days, of feeling depressed and hopeless, but I bounce back from those much better and faster. Overall, I would have to say that acupuncture has helped me tremendously in terms of coping with the roller coaster ups and downs of IF. I even had someone at work tell me recently that I seem very "zen" about the whole situation. I don't know that I would call myself "zen", but I do think that deciding to pursue complementary therapy for IF has been one of the best decisions I've made in this process so far.
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