The Globe and Mail - Health - Ancient medicine for a modern problem.

Today, one in six couples can't conceive. In vitro is expensive and doesn't always work. So some are turing to traditional Chinese treatments such as acupuncture. And as Leslie Grant Timmins reports, finding themselves on fertile ground.

Our GP couldn't tell us why we weren't getting pregnant." says Shannon Kush, a 31 year old student of sign language and deaf studies in Vancouver.

Ms. Kush and her husband, Garrett, a chiropractor, have a four-year-old daughter, but after two years of trying to conceive another child and failing, they were considered to have "unexplained infertility."

A friend recommended traditional Chinese medicine and Ms. Kush reluctantly decided to try it. After three month of acupuncture and herb treatments, she was pregnant.

Today, one in six couples in North America is infertile and 15 to 20 percent of them will never know why. Add to this the fact that women are delaying childbearing to per-sue careers and that Western medical treatments offer women aged 35 to 39 only a 30% chance of conceiving, and it's not surprising that there's a boom in other kinds of medicine. Some fertility clinic in Canada are now recommending acupuncture to their patients.

Published April 15, 2006

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