Preconception - Planning for a Health Baby

Chinese medicine offers you a natural way to optimize your fertility during the critical four to six months before conception. Our preconception program uses a blend of diet therapy, lifestyle counseling, mind-body techniques, herbal formulas and acupuncture to balance your hormones, improve your fertility, and boost your overall health and well being.

The preconception program is an option for women who simply want to boost their fertility naturally, for women that have been unsuccessful with IVF and want to try a natural alternative, or for women who want to ensure their body is in the best condition to conceive before trying IVF again.

If your fallopian tubes are intact and your partner's sperm is healthy then you might want to start with the preconception program and only use IVF if necessary.

One of our highly trained practitioners will do an in-depth evaluation of you and your partner’s condition and create a personalized treatment plan based on your individual diagnosis

Reproduction 101

The health of the parents before and at the time of conception, and the mother's health during the early stages of her pregnancy have an influence on the health of the baby.

• Professor David Barker, head of the Environment Epidemiology Unit of the Medical Research Council, has been conducting research into the effect of the mother's nutrition prior to conception and during pregnancy on the health of her children in later life. His early conclusions are as follows: "it looks as though getting it right at the beginning may be a key to good health throughout life." Ensuring optimum health in both parents in the period leading up to conception (as well as in the mother during pregnancy) can do a great deal to enhance fetal growth and to minimize the risk of fetal abnormalities.

Excerpted from "Acupuncture in Pregnancy and Childbirth" by Zita West

• It appears that the ideal time to do our best to prevent miscarriage and birth defects is the three months prior to and immediately following conception. Ideally, the three months before conception should include attention to diet, supplements and body weight; it should also include the elimination of unhealthy practices such as smoking, drinking and excessive sugar consumption.

Excerpted from "Fertility, Cycles & Nutrition, 3rd edition" by Marilyn M Shannon

• Although ovulation should occur monthly, the recruitment process begins about 100 days before the actual time of ovulation. So the quality of the egg to be fertilized is highly dependent upon the health of the body and hormonal system during those 100 days of recruitment. This is consistent with the TCM approach of treating a woman for at least 3 full menstrual cycles in order to regulate her cycle, as well as what Marilyn and Zita West say in their respective books about the pre-conception period being vital to fertility and the health of the baby. In essence, the health of the baby is dependent on the quality of the egg and sperm, which is actually determined during the 3 months prior to conception. It is consistent with the Chinese expression about "cultivating the soil before you plant the seed".

TCM stresses the importance of the parent's health in general, and specifically at the time of conception, in determining the health of the child. If the parents conceive when too old (biologically vs. chronologically), or in poor health, the constitution of their child may be weak. Getting it right during the preconception period can help "turn back your reproductive clock."

http://www.acubalance.ca/importance-preconception-care-especially-diminished-ovarian-reserve