Infertility Treatments

Nowadays there are many infertility treatment options available and the potential for successful treatment is very high. In the text below you can read about the most common infertility treatments, starting with Hormonal Treatments, including three approaches to balance hormones, and followed by Advanced Reproductive Technologies.

Infertility Treatment Options

Treatments for Infertility

Hormones like estrogen, testosterone, and progesterone play a very important role in women. If hormone levels fluctuate, effects on the whole body are evident. Fluctuation may affect your moods, sexual desire, as well as fertility and pregnancy. In fact, the imbalance of estrogen and progesterone hormones can cause infertility. These are just some of the reasons why it is very important to keep hormonal levels in balance.

Though the pharmaceutical companies would have you believe that for the treatment of hormone imbalance, drugs are the best solution, that isn't the case. Before you make the choice of taking synthetic hormones, you might want to consider less risky approaches, like alternative medicine or lifestyle changes. The medical establishment is becoming increasingly interested in alternative medicine since breast and ovarian cancer as well as heart diseases, blood clots and other side effects are associated with conventional HRT treatment.

Three approaches for treating Infertility:
Three approaches can be considered for infertility treatment. These are categorized as: (1) Lifestyle Changes, (2) Alternative Medicine and (3) Drugs and Surgery. You should always start with the least risky approach (lifestyle changes) and go on to riskier approaches (surgery/drugs) only if necessary.

(1) LIFESTYLE CHANGES
Lifestyle changes involve no risk but may be the hardest way to go. You'll have to restrict yourself from many things. So if you are considering this approach, you will need a strong mind and a positive thinking for managing these changes.

Surprisingly, there has been less research on how lifestyle changes may affect hormonal imbalance. Nonetheless, techniques for stress reduction (e.g. yoga), a diet rich in estrogenic food (soy, apples, alfalfa, cherries, potatoes, rice, wheat and yams) or even becoming more fit by doing regular exercises will have positive effects on your infertility.

It's not easy to maintain this approach, and you might wish to consider alternative medicinal treatments that have been proven to be excellent for treating infertility naturally and safely.

(2) ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE
Alternative approaches involve little or no risk and can be considered as the best and safest way for treating hormonal imbalance. Herbal remedies and Acupuncture have established themselves as the best of these treatments. Acupuncture is a Chinese medical treatment involving the insertion of very fine sterile needles into the body at specific points according to a mapping of "energy pathways". It's an excellent treatment, but complicated to follow. A successful acupuncture treatment involves considerable time, money, and finding the right practitioner. Most women are looking for less complicated ways of alternative treatment and think herbal remedies are a safe and effective solution.

There are basically two types of herbs for treating unbalanced hormonal levels: phytoestrogenic and non-estrogenic herbs. The phytoestrogenic herbs (e.g. Black Cohosh, Dong Quai) contain estrogenic components produced by plants. These herbs are good for treating low hormone levels, because they replace some of the missing estrogen hormones, but they aren't the best solution for treating hormonal imbalance. As a result of adding hormones from outside, your body will become less responsive to produce estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone on its own, causing a further decrease of your own hormone levels.

Unlike phytoestrogenic herbs, non-estrogenic herbs, as its name suggests, don't contain any estrogen. These herbs nourish your hormonal glands into producing more efficiently your own natural hormones. This ultimately ends up in balancing not only estrogen, but also progesterone and testosterone. In other words, non-estrogenic herbs stimulate your own hormone production, by inducing the optimal functioning of the pituitary and endocrine glands. Due to this, non-estrogenic herbs, such as Macafem, can be considered as the safest way to treat infertility naturally.

A combination of approaches is a good route to take. Lifestyle changes combined with alternative medicine will probably take care of the infertility problem in a more efficient way. Nonetheless, there will always be some women who need or want to take the riskiest approach. Side effects are inevitable, but sometimes these are worth the risk, if relief can only be provided with this method.

(3) DRUGS AND SURGERY
Surgery is a treatment option for both male and female infertility. Generally it is used to correct structural problems, such as Endometriosis or Fibroids (non-cancerous growths that often occur in uterine walls).

There are a variety of drugs used to treat infertility. It is important to understand the most common fertility drugs and their purposes and to speak with your physician about the medications that will be used in your specific treatment plan.

Surgical interventions and drug therapies involve the highest risk and often the highest costs. The most common drug therapy for treating hormonal imbalance in the US is hormone replacement therapy (HRT). There's no doubt that this is the quickest and strongest way to combat hormonal imbalance; but, unfortunately, it entails serious side effects and increases the risk of different cancer types among women, as the following study has proven.

If you still want to consider this approach, take a visit to your physician, and become more informed about what this treatment option involves.

These three approaches are not mutually exclusive. You can use different approaches at different times or combine several at the same time. Nowadays more and more women think dealing with infertility is best accomplished via a combination of healthy lifestyle and alternative treatments.

Advanced Reproductive Technologies

Intrauterine insemination (IUI)

Intrauterine insemination is most commonly referred to as artificial insemination. It is a relatively quick procedure and is performed in the doctor's office without any anesthesia. IUI should not be painful, although some women report mild discomfort. In this infertility treatment the woman is injected with carefully prepared sperm from the husband or a donor. IUI is often performed in conjunction with ovulation stimulating medications. It is used to treat unexplained infertility or for women with cervical mucus problems.

Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART)

Assisted Reproductive Technology is a procedure in which a woman's ovaries are stimulated, her eggs surgically removed, combined with sperm and returned to a woman's body. ART involves several types of medical treatment, including in vitro fertilization (IVF), gamete intrafallopian transfer (GIFT), zygote intrafallopian transfer (ZIFT), embryo cryopreservation, egg or embryo donation, and gestational carriers, designed to result in pregnancy. IVF is the most widely used of the ART procedures.

In Vitro Fertilization (IVF)

IVF is a highly sophisticated, meticulously timed procedure, which involves removing a ripened egg or eggs from the female's ovary, fertilizing it with semen, incubating the dividing cells in a laboratory dish, and then replacing the developing embryo in the uterus at the appropriate time.

Inform yourself at Female Infertility about all you should know: the causes of infertility, what you can do to prevent it and the answers on frequently asked questions.