Trying to conceive: what a TCM consultation covers
Physician Poh Yu Min (Joy) · 傅瑜敏医师
Trying to conceive is the area where TCM and medical care most need to know about each other, and where people most often keep them apart — seeing a specialist and quietly not mentioning the herbs, or the other way round. This article is partly about why that is worth undoing.
Both of you, where both of you can come
Where both partners attend, the consultation covers both. It asks about the cycle in detail, and about sleep, digestion, work, stress and exercise for each of you. TCM does not treat fertility as one person's subject, and a consultation that only ever sees one half of a couple is working with half the picture.
The words a physician will use
Kidney essence, qi and blood, cold in the lower abdomen. Kidney essence is the one worth pinning down: it is a TCM concept about constitutional reserve, and it is not a hormone level, not an AMH result and not a measure of ovarian reserve. Those are numbers from a laboratory and nothing said in a TCM consultation substitutes for them.
Where a doctor's diagnosis fits
Fertility investigation — ovulation tracking, semen analysis, checks on the fallopian tubes, hormone panels — is medical work, and it is how a cause is actually found. TCM does not perform or interpret any of it and cannot tell you why conception has not happened.
If you are already under a specialist, or in an IVF or IUI cycle, say so at the first visit. It changes what is appropriate and when — some things are avoided around egg collection and transfer, and the physician needs your dates to work around them rather than through them.
Please see a doctor if you have been trying for a year, or six months if you are over 35, and sooner if your cycle is very irregular or absent. If you are already having fertility treatment, tell both sides about each other — the specialist about the herbs, and the physician about the cycle you are in. None of this is a reason to stop TCM treatment. It is a reason to have both, and to have them talking.
This article is general information, not medical advice, and not a promise about what any treatment will do. What is appropriate for you is decided at consultation.