23/01/2023
Treatment of female infertility with Traditional Chinese Medicine
By Karin Ried, Keren Stuart
A meta-analysis conducted at the University of Adelaide, funded by Primary Health Care Research Evaluation Development (PHCRED) Program and supported by the Australian Government, suggest Traditional Chinese Herbal Medicine to be more effective in the treatment of female infertility achieving on average a 60% pregnancy rate over 4 months compared with 30% achieved with standard Western Medical drug treatment, or IVF over 12 months.
The TCM approach to infertility treatment integrates the menstrual cycle as a simple, non-invasive, sensitive, motivational, diagnostic tool to understanding a women’s fertility status.
The findings suggest that the integration of TCM diagnostic tools and therapy in the current WM model of infertility treatment could improve pregnancy rates while reducing treatment time frames and emotional and financial burden.
In this review the focus was on the TCM approach and diagnosis of infertility, a review of herbal formulae used in TCM therapy, and comparison of therapies combining TCM and ART/IVF were outside the scope of this review.
Author’s contributions
KR conceptualised the study, and undertook data collection, extraction and quality assessment with KS. KR under- took data analysis and interpretation, and prepared the manuscript with contributions from KS. All authors approved the final version.
Acknowledgements
We gratefully acknowledge Thomas Sullivan, Data Management & Analysis Centre (DMAC) at the University of Adelaide, for statistical advice. The authors were supported by the Australian Government funded Primary Health Care Research Evaluation Development (PHCRED) Program.
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