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If under 35, and unable to conceive after regular, unprotected intercourse for at least one year, talk to your doctor. |
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If between 35 and 40, try for 6 months before talking to your doctor or seeing a specialist. |
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If over 40, talk to your doctor/see a specialist after 3 months of trying. |
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Fertility treatments include: Medications taken orally or injected, surgeries, ART (assisted reproductive technology - such as IVF or IUI), and acupuncture. |
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For the full article, read more...
f you are having trouble conceiving and you are considering treatment, there are numerous resources to help you with your decision making process. Of course, the wide range of fertility treatments available today can be overwhelming. Infertility affects millions of couples each year and the drugs and treatments for it represent a $3 billion business.
The following is a general overview to help you navigate the different steps you can take, as well as the available options.
How are things supposed to work?
When I was in high school, our sex-ed instructor was so determined to scare away teen pregnancy that she made it sound like spontaneous combustion. You would have thought a boy could get a girl pregnant just by staring at her long enough. Of course it didn’t work that way back then and it certainly doesn’t work like that when a couple decides they actually want to get pregnant. In fact, the process is so complicated it’s a miracle anyone gets pregnant at all.
When things happen the way they’re supposed to, it goes something like this:
1. Each month the pituitary gland in a woman’s brain sends a signal to her ovaries to get an egg ready for ovulation. One single egg. A woman will have over a million eggs (or follicles) in her ovaries when she’s born, most of which will be eliminated through a process called atresia, leaving her with approximately 400,000 by the time she reaches puberty. If only one egg is promoted to ovum once a month between the ages of thirteen and sixty, only 564 eggs are needed. So generally speaking, there are plenty of eggs to go around.
2. The pituitary hormones FSH (follicle stimulating hormone) and LH (luteinizing hormone) stimulate the ovaries to release an egg. Another word for all this is ovulation and it is “primetime” in the getting pregnant schedule (usually around day 14 of the menstrual cycle).
3. The egg travels through the fallopian tube and can be fertilized for up to 24 hours after release. Sperm can live for 5 days, but the egg is only alive for 1 day - so timing is everything. Conception is most likely when whoopee takes place 1-2 days before ovulation.
4. To go to the big dance, a sperm must connect with the egg in the fallopian tube during this time. Sperm are mighty. They can live for up to 5 days, but they have to be inside the fallopian tube at the same time as the egg for conception to occur. And as mighty as they are, sperm must be the right shape and moving in the right direction (they can’t steer) for all of this to work out. It just takes one, but there needs to be plenty to choose from since most of them will try valiantly, but fail to get the job done. For this reason, they work as a “team” in order to break down the egg’s defenses and send one lucky candidate across the finish line. The vaginal and uterine environment needs to be healthy in order to give these guys a fighting chance, too.
5. If fertilized, the egg moves into the uterus where it cozies up to the uterine lining and begins a nine month process known as Wow!-we’re-actually-having-a-baby.
