Acupuncture and Infertility and Results

Numerous articles have been written on acupuncture and infertility and results obtained in various research studies since 2002. The main reason for this coverage is because of the landmark German study that combined acupuncture with IVF, that was published in 2002 in the medical journal, Fertility and Sterility. This study garnered the attention of both acupuncturists and allopathic doctors.

Wanting to examine the effect of acupuncture on IVF, the German study included 160 women, who were undergoing IVF. Within this group, 80 women had acupuncture treatments before and after their embryo transfers. The other 80 women did not have any acupuncture treatments.

The results of the study are as follows:

IVF without Acupuncture 21 women pregnant 26.3% success rate IVF with Acupuncture 34 women pregnant 42.5% success rate

If you'd like to read more about the acupuncture protocol and the results obtained with the 160 patients, you can view the published study by Wolfgang E. Paulus, M. D., Mingmin Zhang, M. D., Erwin Strehler, M. D., Imam El-Danasouri, Ph. D., and Karl Sterzik, M. D. at PubMed.

Since 2002, there have been a number of studies on the effect of acupuncture on IVF success rates in both Western medical journals and Chinese Medicine journals. In June 2007, the Journal of Chinese Medicine published an article by Lara Rosenthal and Belinda Anderson on Acupuncture and In Vitro Fertilization: Recent Research and Clinical Guidelines.

Rosenthal and Anderson found that three out of four randomized controlled trials showed that acupuncture significantly increases pregnancy rates. While summarizing the research that has come out since 2002, the writers explain the process of combining acupuncture with an IVF protocol. You can read more about this study at The Journal of Chinese Medicine.