Are you considering acupuncture treatment in Miami for your fertility problems? But your problem is that you don’t know anyone who has tried it for the kind of problem you have or your doctor does not have any referrals to give you. What then do you do? Will you try to go online and look at acupuncture clinics near your area or do you use a phone book directory and call a few or several clinics near your location? How do you search for an acupuncturist who is qualified and one you can trust to resolve your concerns?
It’s not an easy thing to locate the right acupuncturist who can properly address your needs. There are practitioners who have lousy skills but have quite pleasant personalities and there are some who have really terrible bedside manners but outstanding medical knowledge. As with any type of profession you will have acupuncturists who are diligent and will put a lot of time and effort to constantly hone their skills and there will be acupuncturists who are contented with what they already know and will not strive to increase their knowledge.
In the treatment of infertility, acupuncture therapy during the last two years has been given a lot of positive exposure by the media and because of that the number of acupuncturists advertising infertility treatment as part of their practice has increased. Truth be told however, a great majority of Chinese medicine practitioners have been minimally trained in the treatment of infertility. There are no specialties being offered by Chinese medicine schools and if a practitioner calls himself /herself a specialist in a specific area of treatment, it won’t necessarily mean that he/she had extra years of training in that specific field. An acupuncture “specialist” is nowhere near equal to a Western medical doctor “specialist” who has actually undergone some years of extra medical training.
Chinese medicine practitioners and acupuncturists who want to get extra training in a specific field of interest can now avail of clinical doctorates in Chinese medicine. There are now acupuncture colleges that offer focused study on cancer therapies, geriatric medicine, women’s health, and others. These are programs that offer a more in depth study in certain areas and there’s a of interest in getting a doctorate in the field of Chinese medicine. Since these developments just began recently, it may take a while for it to become effective since almost all acupuncture schools run on a non-profit basis and are small.
If you want to find a Chinese medicine practitioner or an acupuncturist who can address your fertility problems, you need to ask the ones that you find some important questions. Below is a list of questions that can help you decide whether the practitioner is right for you or not:
1. How much time has your practice devoted in the treatment of infertility? If the majority of cases the practitioner has treated were about infertility, then the practitioner most likely has a lot of knowledge in the treatment of that problem. Practitioners who treat patients with infertility from time to time may not have the expertise or sufficient experience to give you the best treatment possible. But this does not mean that the practitioner will not be able to help you at all.
2. Have you had extra training in the treatment of infertility? If so, where, by whom, and how much training? Extra training is really needed in infertility treatment so these are very important questions to ask.
3. Did you receive training in herbal medicine? There are schools that only offer acupuncture training programs, no herbal medicine training. For thousands of years, herbal medicine has been the primary treatment for infertility in China. In the treatment of infertility it is actually acupuncture that’s used as a complement to herbal medicine. Infertile Chinese women commonly use various types of herbal formulas at different stages of their menstrual cycle based on their unique condition. It is normal to take four different herbal remedies for a month.
One should not be afraid to ask questions, learn what other treatment options are available, and the plan of treatment of the practitioner. Chinese medicine sees the human body very differently compared to Western medicine. It can be difficult to understand the theories underlying Chinese medicine. Your practitioner should explain to you the procedures that need to be done to treat your condition and what the prognosis is.
In order to understand your condition better your practitioner would recommend that you get evaluated by a reproductive endocrinologist. If, for example, your fallopian tubes are obstructed, the only way to treat it is by Western medicine procedures. In this instance, Chinese medicine can be used as a complementary treatment in order to prepare you for IVF and other assisted reproductive therapies. You could be wasting precious time having natural treatment if your practitioner does not know that you have that diagnosis.
What you need to avoid
1. Practitioners who boast of unbelievably high success rates (three fourths or more of all the patients got pregnant). This may be true if the practitioner has only treated three, four, or five infertile patients and three got pregnant. Also, does the rate of success of the practitioner just include pregnancies or live births? Does the practitioner include patients who underwent IVF and had acupuncture in its list of success? These are all important questions and they will determine whether the rate of success of the practitioner is useful or not.
2. Practitioners who give false expectations. This may include a promise of guaranteed results or setting a timetable for achieving pregnancy. (i.e., “You can get pregnant in a month”). No practitioner can predict if the treatment will bring about good results. However, it is known that natural treatments take a long time for results to appear. Infertility problems may take at least three months of treatment to produce results. It may even take a year of treatment for some patients. It’s time to seek a new treatment if after more than a year your condition has still not changed.