Acupuncture and Male Infertility – How This Alternative Treatment May Help An Increasing Problem
Acupuncture has only been used on a noticeable scale in western countries since the 1970s, and male infertility is one of the conditions it has been shown to be capable of treating. This is a welcome development as in the same time period male infertility, along with many other conditions that acupuncture is used to treat, has increased steadily.
Between 7 and 10 per cent of all males who ought to be fertile are not. In many cases the cause can be traced to alcoholic, tobacco or drug abuse, physical injury, or to physical illnesses such as mumps or varicoceles (a kind of varicose veins affecting the sperm cords). Whether hot baths and the wearing of tight underpants can cause infertility is doubtful, though it has been shown that the sperm count tends to increase when these activities are ceased.
There have been several studies in recent years of the connection between acupuncture and male infertility, and while no definite conclusions have been reached it does seem that when groups of infertile men have been treated by using acupuncture there are generally substantial improvements in the quality and often the quantity of their sperm.
The difficulty in establishing exactly how acupuncture can affect any given physical condition, including male infertility, lies in the nature of how acupuncture works. In contrast to western medicine, where specific medicines are developed to treat specific complaints, acupuncture is used to treat the whole body, not just a part of it.
It is based on the concept that, left to it own devices, the body tends towards healing itself of any defect. Acupuncture is a way of channeling that healing energy into a specific weakness. Ancient Chinese wisdom holds that natural energy flows through the human body and that when that energy is blocked at any point then disease and ill health are liable to occur.
This is rather alien to our way of thinking in the West. We are used to thinking in terms of bringing a specific solution to a specific problem, and that especially includes health problems. If we have a cough we take cough medicines. If we have a headache we take an aspirin.
But Chinese traditional medicine holds that this is treating the symptoms rather than the cause of the complaint. A headache, for example, may be a sign that something is wrong elsewhere in the body, in which case suppressing the headache means the condition causing it may get worse and manifest itself in other, more serious, ways.
And so with male infertility, the infertility itself could be a sign of something amiss elsewhere that ought to be attended to. So our Western way of treating the symptoms could actually be counter productive in some cases.
This may explain why Western medicine has failed to produce a treatment for many cases of male infertility where the specific cause remains unknown. And also why increasing numbers of people affected by male infertility are turning to alternative medical treatments such as acupuncture.
Optimum fertility must depend on optimum health. If you find a way of getting your body to heal itself through the use of totally natural and non-intrusive means then that in itself ought to encourage it to become more fertile, to be ready to pro-create life. It’s a message of hope to everyone coping with infertility.
Visit Fertility Secrets and download your free copy of “How The Female Body Really Works” to start your quest to have your own baby – naturally.
Philip Gegan
