If you have been trying to conceive and were told to keep trying and come back in a year, there’s a better way. Here’s why you need a root cause medicine approach to infertility.

Why Root Cause Medicine is Key for Infertility

a woman holding a green smoothie glass on a counter top, stirring a straw with a bowl of strawberries nearby

Today I’m going to kick us off by telling you a story, and I want you to reflect on whether or not it rings a bell.

Social media and cultural norms tell us that we are to fear motherhood. It’s challenging beyond belief. You’ll lose your sense of self. You’ll have to give up everything that makes you YOU. So you start birth control to avoid pregnancy. Or perhaps you’ve been struggling with hormonal issues and irregular periods, so your doctor writes you a script for the pill and sends you on your way.

Over time, you get tired. Like really tired. You lose your spark. You’re bloated all the time and your libido is nearly nonexistent. But these symptoms come on so slowly over time that you write them off as “just getting older”.

A few years go by, and you realize you’re ready to try to conceive. You stop your birth control, but the positive pregnancy test never comes after months and months of trying. And now, old symptoms start to reemerge after being masked by birth control for years. You schedule an appointment with your PCP and they tell you to keep trying for a year and come back if you’re still struggling.

Now you’re Googling for answers. You’re scrolling endlessly on IG looking for a glimmer of hope. You’ve read all the books, tried all the diets and bought every supplement. You’re losing hope and starting to look towards the savings account and whether or not fertility treatments are feasible. The light at the end of the tunnel is starting to get really hard to see.

a scattering of supplement pills surrounded by sprigs of greenery on a yellow background

The Problem With Fertility Work Today

Friends – I am tired of seeing this story play out. We’ve all heard it before. Maybe it was a sister’s story. A friend’s. Yours. We all know someone who has lived and breathed this experience. It’s painful and it’s isolating. And if this story is yours, please know that I hold so much space for your hurt.

The fact of the matter is, we are not getting the full story when it comes to the decisions we are guided to make when it comes to our health. The birth control to fertility treatment pipeline is not the only way.

I want to be clear – fertility treatments can be incredible, life-changing tools for so many families. But this approach does not have a 100% success rate. It can be a heart wrenching journey that asks so much of your mind, body and financial health.

I am here to tell you that there are more tools in your tool kit than you have been led to believe.

My goal is to equip you with an entire toolbox, not just a single hammer. These are tools that you have deserved to know since you were young and they are certainly tools that you need access to now if you’re on a healing journey.

a green frond with its roots in tact on a white background

A Root Cause Approach

In a more traditional approach to infertility, the biggest question is “how can we alleviate these symptoms?” How can we lessen a heavy period? How can we stimulate ovulation?

But in root cause medicine, we ask why. Why are our periods irregular? Why aren’t we ovulating?

Both approaches seek the same outcome. The difference is in the roadmap that gets you from point A to point B. With a functional, root cause approach, we seek to understand where symptoms are coming from instead of trying to dull them. We want to pull the weed from the root instead of simply clipping the leaves.

Your symptoms are information – we can either mask that information with medication and invasive procedures, or we can empower ourselves to dive into these symptoms and get clear on what it’s going to take to make your pregnancy dreams come true.

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Identify the True Root of Infertility

What comes to mind when you think of reasons why someone might struggle to get pregnant? Take a moment.

Did any of these come to mind?

PCOS
Hypothyroidism
Unexplained Infertility
Endometriosis
Fibroids
Poor egg/sperm quality
Missing or irregular periods
Low progesterone

But what if I told you that these are NOT fertility root causes. These are all related to the environment in which we are trying to conceive, but none of these conditions are a root cause themself.

A true root cause contributes to these example environments. They are predominately nested in diet, lifestyle, mindset, and behavior based practices that start to create dysfunction in the body. When I am assessing root cause approaches, we are evaluating the deeper habits at play. From there, we assess the terrain of the “damage” or imbalances that have manifested from that. It could be elevated stress hormones, insulin resistance, infections in the gut, low functioning immune system due to lack of important nutrients or massive imbalances of longstanding challenges not addressed.

Root cause medicine seeks to empower you to take your power back in your fertility story. You have the opportunity to turn this around – to support your mind and body from the inside out and create the availability for pregnancy.

a woman meditating on the floor

What Can Happen with a Root Cause Approach

Countless women have come to me deep in the weeds of infertility, desperate for a new solution. And oftentimes that solution simply involves someone taking the time to look a little deeper and ask the question “why”.

For example, one of my clients who came to me after struggling with infertility for 2 years. After 5 failed IVF treatments she was exhausted and heartbroken. This client had been previously diagnosed with PCOS and had been told this was the reason she couldn’t get pregnant. But when she came to me, we ran specific testing to get clear on the true root and found H Pylori, low mineral status and undiagnosed thyroid autoimmunity. The PCOS diagnosis was not stopping her from conceiving. Instead, her metabolic and gut health were suffering and creating an environment that made it challenging for a pregnancy to thrive.

Another client began working with me after being told she had low progesterone and as a result she had been struggling with spotting, short cycles and insomnia and was starting to consider fertility treatments. But after a deeper look through advanced lab testing, we found mineral depletion and bacterial overgrowth in the gut. To get to the root cause of her fertility issues, we worked on modifying meal timing and composition, increasing her intake at meals, adjusting exercise routines, addressing poor sleep hygiene, treating GI imbalances and maldigestion with targeting supplements based on her labs. She started seeing a healthier cycle, clear ovulation markers, better sleep, more energy and FINALLY a positive pregnancy test.

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These are just a handful of stories from real women who tackled their fertility struggles head on with a root cause approach. I believe that a positive pregnancy test is in your future, and you don’t have to trudge through a year of heartbreak to get there before throwing wads of money at invasive treatments that can’t promise the result your heart desires. If you’re ready to take a root cause approach, schedule your free discovery call with me here.