A portrait of British doctor Xiao-Ping Zhai, who has has great success treating women for infertility using tradition Chinese medicine:
Watching a Zhai consultation is bizarre. She will check the tongue, the pulse, sleep patterns, whether a patient is thirsty, peeing a lot and their bowel movements. Often changes are made to the diet – no sugar, coffee, alcohol, dairy, wheat, spicy foods – and every month a woman is asked to keep a temperature chart.
Slowly, through the use of herbs and acupuncture, Zhai begins to regulate the vital energy, or Qi, that flows through the body. According to this ancient practice, good health and metabolism depend on Qi. As it flows, it provides warmth and distributes body fluids.
Each organ has its own pattern of Qi and each organ is represented on the tongue, which presents Zhai with a kind of map of the body’s health. If one organ is not functioning properly, it affects the rest of the body: “It only takes one thing to be wrong to throw the whole system out,” she explains.
Common diagnoses seem to be too much liver heat and blood stagnation, damp-heat obstruction in the abdomen, slow blood circulation to the ovaries – you get the picture.
Zhai says she can start seeing changes within three months but will not put a time frame on treatment: “Every woman is different.”
The herbs she uses are mostly shipped in from China and made up to her prescriptions, although she is currently looking at manufacturing them in the UK. They include carthamus flower (huang hua) for regulating the flow of Qi to alleviate pain, glossy privet fruit (nu zhen zi) for nourishing the kidney and liver, as well as peach kernel, angelica root and codonopsis root.
It is easy to see why many western clinicians distrust TCM. To them it seems so random, so weird, although acupuncture is slowly gaining more credibility for fertility. (Last year a Dutch and US research project published in the British Medical Journal revealed that for every 10 cycles of IVF with acupuncture there would be one extra pregnancy compared with cycles performed without acupuncture.)
Zhai is aware of the scepticism: “I wish TCM could be regulated,” she says, “I really do.”
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