Study: Chinese herbal medicine is twice as effective for infertility as conventional Western drug therapy

In December issue of the journal Complementary Therapies in Medicine, women receiving Chinese herbal medicine treatments were twice as likely to get pregnant within a four-month period than those receiving conventional Western medical fertility drug treatment or IVF. There are eight RCTs, 13 cohort studies, three case series and six case studies involving a total of 1851 women with infertility were included in the systematic review.

With this being said, the Chinese herbs treatment methodology is dramatically different from conventional Western medical fertility drug treatment or IVF. C is mostly based on certain procedure protocol or fixed treatment. It is based on disease analysis out of HSG, Biopsy, Blood work, etc. It does not need to do the constitutional analysis, disease analysis plus menstrual cycle analysis like Chinese medicine. Chinese medicine has to evaluate patient condition every time certain herbs are added or dropped from the list. Certainly Chinese medicine refers also the test result from conventional medicine.

Therefore, in additional to its “Organic” treatment, Chinese medicine has more check points when a treatment is finalized.

There are hundreds to thousands of herbs formulas to-date. However, their benefit has to be closed associated with the patient’s constitutional analysis of that moment. Other time, patient’s condition are likely changed. For a quick fix and patient’s constitution is stable and obvious, a fixed formula or reuse of thousands year old formula  might be easy and cost-effective. This is doing well for young female. However, age sensitive ladies shall not try that approach. They need to have customized herbs every time to deal with the change of body and condition in order to optimize their chance. For practitioner of Chinese medicine, experience is that there is no fixed formula. Even there is a fixed formula, it must be modified every time the situation changes.

In today’s market, stores are selling traditional herb formula tablets or menstrual phased herbs formula. These herbs has to be evaluated by herbalist. For serious fertility patient, they needs more customized herbs which is tailored to their constitutions and reference to their stages of menstrual cycle. The customized herbs can be assembled by herbalist in clinic office every time patient comes. This includes dried raw herbs and extract powder form.