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Acupuncture and Chinese Herbal Medicine in Pregnancy

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acupuncture fertilityPart 1 – Early pregnancy

Congratulations, you’re pregnant! While you might be thrilled to bits, you might not yet be experiencing that “glow” everyone talks about. In fact you might be feeling distinctly unglowing! Some women breeze through this stage of pregnancy but many find their energy is at rock bottom and they experience anything from “morning sickness” to all-day queasiness to outright nausea and vomiting. You may also feel anxious about the weeks and months to come, especially if you’ve previously had fertility struggles or a miscarriage.

The good news is that acupuncture and Chinese herbal medicine can help with many of these conditions.

You might be wondering if acupuncture and Chinese Herbal Medicine are safe in pregnancy. The answer is a resounding “Yes”, as long as given by a qualified practitioner who has been trained in the points and herbs to use during pregnancy and those to avoid.

 

Quell nausea naturally

Some researchers think that the heightened sense of smell and aversion to anything but the blandest of food could be part of an evolutionary mechanism to protect the embryo from food poisoning. Perhaps pregnancy hormones boost our sense of smell to protect us from consuming food that has gone off or would be harmful in another way. This certainly seems to make sense given that we did not have fridges for most of our evolutionary history!

Some women experience disabling nausea to the point where they can barely get out of bed and their diet becomes very restricted. If you are finding it hard to cope with morning sickness, acupuncture can be very useful. Unfortunately this has not yet been well proven by medical research. However, one study looked at 88 women with morning sickness who received either acupuncture plus acupressure or medication plus vitamin B12. The women who had acupuncture/acupressure had similar relief to those who took medication. Although it took longer to gain this improvement, the acupuncture group were actually better able to function in everyday life than those who took the drugs.

 

Boost your energy levels

Feeling extremely tired in early pregnancy may be another evolutionary adaptation, as it encourages us to rest during this time. That being said, if you are completely wiped out and unable to get out of bed, then treatment is a good idea.

I find acupuncture very helpful in gently boosting energy levels in early pregnancy. Treatments concentrate on boosting energy production by working on specific meridians (energy pathways) and organs, depending on your symptoms, pulse and tongue pattern. In this way, treatments are tailored to suit your individual circumstances. As well as very gentle needling, we warm key points on the body by applying a herb (moxibustion).

 

Calm your mind

Acupuncture is fantastic for calming the mind and harmonizing the emotions. Many women find themselves feeling anxious at the change in their circumstances and wondering how they will cope with pregnancy, birth or being a mum. Acupuncture treatments, as well as talking it over with a trusted friend, or if necessary, a counsellor, can really help. It can also help you sleep better at a time when hormonal changes may be interfering with your night’s rest.

 

Protecting the pregnancy

One of the things you may be concerned about is miscarriage, which is something no-one wants to experience. Most miscarriages are caused by chromosomal abnormalities in the embryo, and cannot be avoided. However, other causes do occur, where something seems to go wrong in the implantation process. So, particularly if you have had more than one miscarriage, acupuncture and Chinese herbal medicine may be of benefit. We theorize that these therapies counteract an over-active immune system or aid implantation in another way. This is certainly borne out by studies on animals. There has not been much research done on this in humans, but one study of 250 women who had become pregnant after IVF showed that those who took a Chinese herbal formula as well as a standard medication (progesterone) to support the pregnancy had a significantly lower miscarriage rate (13% miscarried) than those who just took the progesterone (23% miscarried).

Several acupuncture points are also used to reduce the chance of miscarriage. I recommend that women who’ve had previous miscarriages, especially if a chromosomal cause has been ruled out, have acupuncture weekly from conception (preferably before, as part of a pre-conception program) until about 12 weeks. Herbs would also be useful in this situation.

If you do experience bleeding in pregnancy, as alarming as it seems, remember that reasons other than miscarriage are often found, such as bleeding from the implantation site and hormonal changes affecting the cervix. Get checked out medically (see your obstetrician or ask your GP for a referral to your hospital’s Early Pregnancy Unit) and also see your acupuncturist as soon as you can, and hopefully your mind can be put at rest.

 

Moving past the first trimester

Once they get past the first 13 weeks, many women find they start to feel much better, with energy levels picking up and nausea subsiding. This is when the glow starts! See next month’s newsletter for more about how acupuncture can help later in pregnancy.

 

More information?

For more information or to make an appointment to see Toby or Louise, our Acupuncturists, call 9904-1333 or contact us here: Contact.

Neuro Emotional Technique can be effective with early life upsets and traumas?

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baby

As much as there has been a prolific amount of neuroscientific research into how the brain influences and controls memory, there has been a growing amount of research that supports the likelihood that memory is actually stored at a cellular level within the body. This finding has some exciting implications for how we think about changing, growing and healing as people, especially with respect to early or childhood trauma or abuse.

Memory Making

Research shows that, on average, a child can start to make real and accessible memories from around the age of 2 years old. This is because at this time the infant can start to think and communicate with the world, and think with themselves using basic language and thinking, a sense of meaning or story can start to be encoded within their experiences and therefore their memories.

It was previously believed that prior to this time in an infant’s life, memories were not actually formed due to the infant not yet possessing these basic cognitive assets. Research now shows that prior to 2, infants still hold memories but they are encoded differently. Rather than having images, or sounds or stories attached to their memories, they seem to be simply stored at a cellular level of the body as emotions. Simply put, the first 2 years of an infant’s memories are not memories in the sense that we understand typical memories to be, they are more like emotional memories.

Memory recall

We all know that certain stimuli can trigger specific memories. The smell of freshly baked bread can remind us of an earlier time where Mum used to make bread, or the smell of petrol can remind us of Dad’s work shed. Typically these memories are encoded in the form of pictures, sounds and often feelings. But our pre-cognitive memories are also triggered by events in our every day life too. The challenge here is that when these memories are accessed and recalled they do not come back as memories from the past, they can be experienced as emotions that seem to be from the present moment. In other words, because there is no story, picture or cognitive concept of the memory that links to their triggered feelings, often a person will not realise they are in fact recalling a memory, and will in fact think that the feeling Is emerging from something that’s happening right now In their environment. This point becomes increasingly important if there was early trauma in a person’s life, as these memories can come back as very powerful and unwanted experiences.

An example could be when a baby girl was given out for adoption at 6 weeks old. The baby intuitively stores their sense of grief and abandonment at a cellular level but with no cognitive story or meaning attached to the feelings of abandonment, it then becomes difficult for her to understand where these feelings come from when they are triggered later in adult life.
As an adult, if she’s faced with a situation where she has to say goodbye to a work colleague who is moving on to another company, she can suddenly become overcome with a disproportionately large amount of grief and sense of abandonment. In this moment she thinks that the current circumstance is the cause of their grief and abandonment, yet in reality the current circumstance is just a trigger for the very young and powerful cellular memory of being abandoned by her biological mother. For this person, there is no link in their mind between the emotion of abandonment and the original event of being abandoned.

Understanding, resolving and releasing these very early emotions can be difficult due to the fact that there is no cognitive memory involved. The person cannot think back and link their emotions to very early events and understand how and why they are overcome with powerful feelings.

Cellular memory transmission

Over the last 30 years, many researchers have shown that our early memories go back even further than birth!!!
As far back as the 1970’s, there has been research into the fact that a fetus can pick up on, and respond to, the emotions and the intentions of the mother carrying the baby, and those close to her, such as the father and extended family. Research suggests that both babies and fetuses are porous to other people’s emotions and actually take these on as their own. For example, if a mother, while pregnant, is angry and resentful at the fact that she feels too young to be a mother, the fetus actually stores the memory of feeling unwanted at a cellular level. Later in life the person has no possible way of connecting up the reason why they continue feel so unwanted and disconnected from others. Once again, the person thinks that what they experience as an adult now is a feeling caused from something occurring now, without seeing what they experience is actually an early stuck cellular memory being recalled.

In such instances, NET (Neuro Emotional Technique) gets powerful results in not only accessing these emotions, but in allowing the body to process them and let them go. NET works with the body’s natural intelligence and energy flows to pin point the times when the emotional memory was stored in the body’s cells, as well as where in the body the emotion primarily resides, and then quickly and painlessly helps the client to process and let it go with through the use of acupuncture and meridian points. The process is often so powerful that unwanted and life long patterns of behavior suddenly stop without the client having to try to change. The cycle in the mind body connection is broken and the person just moves on.

What types of early trauma can NET assist with?

  • Alcoholic or addicted parents when a child was young
  • Early violence or parental neglect
  • Dysfunctional or destructive parental relationships
  • Divorce while the child was young
  • Early childhood sexual abuse
  • Early adoption
  • Death of a parent or sibling while very young