One of the defiant problems many Western women face today is infertility. Shifting patterns of work and home life, longterm use of contraceptive pills, a high energy drain from combined career and family responsibilities have joined to produce a nightmare situation. Women in their thirties decide to have a family and find they cannot. Western infertility experts respond with medicines and high-tech fertilization techniques which can be enormously expensive with no guarantee regarding the type of result, either successful or deleterious; sometimes in the form of unwanted and heart-breaking side effects such as multiple births.
On the other side of the medical coin, classical Chinese medicine, often referred to simply as "traditional medicine," offers a less disruptive and often successful approach to combating infertility. Arising out of the Far East and including herbal prescriptions and acupuncture, this option is generally becoming more acceptable.
Ai Ja Lee, Ph.D. and practitioner of oriental medicine since 1965, now with the New York City Oriental Holistic Center, says, "It is natural for a woman to get pregnant. If she cannot, then it's safe to say something is out of balance. When you lose the balance by an external or internal reason--external can be the season or weather, or stress; internal can be an emotional or hormonal problem--then the yin and yang balance is disturbed and you cannot conceive."
Dr. Lee stresses that a woman's energy level must be high if she wants to have a baby. To build up this energy level, Dr. Lee prescribes a combination of herbs which she imports from mainland China. However, she suits the prescription to the individual patient, based on her perception of needs in that person's body. Herbs are individual. "You may have a headache and he has a headache," she says, "but the reason is different. So I have to diagnose. I can also handle infertility with herbs, if there's a blockage or an infection other than tuberculosis."
According to Wei-Ming Tsao, Ph.D., acupuncturist and Chinese herbologist in New York City, infertility can be better treated by Chinese than Western medicine. Dr. Tsao says, "The cause is likely to be a hormonal disorder and after a long term of using the supplementary hormones of Western medicine, the side effect is dangerous. But with Chinese medicine, there is no such worry."
The ways in which herbs encourage pregnancy are several. They might be used to establish and balance the normal functioning of the hormonal system, to stimulate circulation to the reproductive organs, to nourish and tonify the uterus as well as the rest of the body, or to relax the nervous system and balance sexual desires. Prescriptions always consist of a combination of herbs, never a single one.
At the age of 33, Marilyn Wells (not her real name) had started consulting some of the top infertility specialists. One told her: "Don't worry; it'll happen if you just keep trying." By the time she was 35, she was exhausted physically and emotionally, and almost ready to give up. Then a friend talked her into seeing a Dr. Richard Chung.
"He looked at me closely. He felt my pulse. He asked me some questions about my medical history and said that women who don't get pregnant have
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