Full Transcript Introduction to fertility testing 0:00 So for the sperm testing, I usually have them ask their MD for their test. 0:04 They're set up to do it. 0:05 However, what's really cool is there is now at home sperm-testing and it's very cool. 0:13 So this male fertility kit. 0:16 You place some sperm on a slide, it goes under a viewing unit, and it will actually share the screen with your TV. 0:23 So you can see the sperm in real time for yourself and really get a great idea about how healthy the sperms is. 0:33 Less than $100 and, really, a lot easier than going into the lab. 0:38 Hi and welcome to The Balancing Point. 0:40 I'm Dr. 0:41 John Needers and I am here to make traditional Chinese medicine. 0:45 functional medicine and integrative health simple, practical and fun so you can restore balance, boost vitality and enjoy a healthier life every single day. 0:59 Hi there, this is Dr. 1:00 John again. 1:00 I want to thank you for joining us for another episode of The Balancing Point. 1:05 And today's one of my favorite topics. 1:08 Again, my doctoral work is in gynecological endocrinology. 1:12 So I've done a lot of fertility work and a lotta gynaecology work, which I really enjoy. 1:18 Today I'm gonna talk about Western testing. 1:22 Now in Chinese medicine, we have all kinds of things that we look at around fertility and have different ways to kind of figure things out. 1:31 But today I'm going to talk about the functional medicine aspect of this. 1:36 So we're going take a quick run through some tests that you want to consider or should be considered if you're looking at fertility. 1:43 And these don't have to be run by a fertility physician. 1:46 Most of these are fairly inexpensive, some are really inexpensive.
Male hormone and inflammation testing 1:51 And you can kind of take charge of your fertility whenever you're ready. 1:54 Okay. 1:55 So let's go ahead and take a run through these. 1:57 First, we're going to talk about male testing and then female. 2:01 And we'll talk About male first, because it's a lot simpler. 2:03 okay. 2:05 so male Testing, We look for hormones. 2:08 We're looking for sex hormones, so that's testosterone, free testosterone estrogen. 2:15 That's A surprise for a Lot of people, but it It's really important thing. 2:20 And then I have sex hormone binding globulin with an extra X in sex. 2:25 So there you go. 2:27 These are all very important. 2:28 I'm going to show a lab result looking at testosterone and free testosterone. 2:35 Now a lot of Doctors will only look at total testosterone and that's a real mistake because it's free testosterone that really gives you the bang for your buck. 2:47 And I've seen people with perfect testosterone levels have really low free-testosterone levels. 2:53 So they had, you know, all the symptoms of low T. 2:57 Estrogen, because if you're not producing enough free testosterone, sometimes you are converting the testosterone to estrogen, 3:06 which can then be a problem. 3:07 And you see this in men that do testosterone supplementation or steroid supplementations will often get what we colloquially call man boobs, 3:17 right, from all of the estrogen activating their breast tissue. 3:21 Sex hormone binding globulin is really, really important, very important. 3:25 And it's not run nearly often enough. 3:28 So you can have perfect testosterone for a female. 3:31 You could have a perfect progesterone, perfect estrogen. 3:35 But if your sex hormone, binding, globilin, is too high, and that's a hormone that is just what it says, it binds your, your. 3:44 Sex hormones. 3:45 so you, can't utilize them. 3:46 and I've seen, had many women come in. 3:49 progesterone was fine, testosterone was find, everything was fun. 3:55 And then we'd run sex hormone binding globulin, and it was too high, so they weren't utilizing those hormones. 4:02 Sex hormone-binding globilin is one of those hormone that goes up with stress. 4:08 So this is typical, I'd guess that 90% of my patients, female patients that come to me, with unexplained infertility, 90% of the time that is explainable 4:21 by stress. 4:23 And if they take some time off, if go on vacation, often they get pregnant because their sex hormone binding globulin goes down. 4:30 Then we test for inflammation and immunity, C-reactive protein, CRP, which is a systemic quantitative measure of inflammation. 4:41 C reactive protein is something that is produced if there's inflammation, but then we go a step further and then, we do HS-CRP which has high sensitivity, 4:51 sometimes called cardiac CRB to see if, there is inflammation in the heart and or the arteries because if it is, it's very hard to get pregnant. 5:00 You really want to know the blood flow is getting where you want it to go without inflammation. 5:04 Homocysteine, it'll give you a lot of information about B vitamin levels. 5:10 It's very inflammatory, so we want check that. 5:13 Then we do just a simple metabolic panel. 5:16 We want see how the kidneys, liver, gallbladder, everything are working. 5:21 A CBC, which is a complete blood count, Unfortunately, when most medical doctors read that, they're taking out about 10% of the available information. 5:32 They're just looking at levels. 5:33 Is it too high? 5:34 Is that too low? 5:36 For one thing, their levels are not accurate. 5:39 If you're trying to get pregnant, there were far too wide. 5:43 You can be have a six times greater chance of dying than if you were at the sweet spot and still be in a so-called normal level. 5:51 So we really want to really fine tune it.
Sperm analysis and at-home testing 5:55 And then thyroid hormones. 5:57 Thyroid hormones, if you're hypothyroid, very very difficult to get pregnant unless you are taking something for the hypathyroidism. 6:05 Want to check your neurotransmitters. 6:07 We'll check metabolites of your serotonin, of you dopamine, your melatonin. 6:13 And then we're going to look at stress hormones, cortisol, epinephrine, norepinephrin. 6:18 Now, Cortisol gets a lot of airtime these days, and cortisol is the hormone that activates your blood sugar, affects blood-sugar levels quite a bit. 6:28 Epinephrine, you know, makes your heart beat fast, And nerepinepherine is often overlooked. 6:35 Uh, its job is to pull the blood out of your center and get it to your extremities and your brain so you can run away from the tiger. 6:45 Well, as you can probably imagine, that's a real problem if you're trying to get pregnant, because it's going to pull the blood away from the ovaries and 6:53 the uterus, where you need a very high blood supply in order to nurture everything. 6:59 And then reverse T3, T 3 is a thyroid hormone. 7:03 If you are under stress, you'll produce reverse-T3 which tricks the body by blocking the T-3 receptors so that you get very little bioactivity. 7:15 So that's the kind of the basic hormones. 7:17 And again, these are not particularly expensive. 7:20 Sperm testing. 7:22 This I just wanted to show you. 7:24 This is someone that had been on testosterone. 7:28 You can see up here, the total testosterone was 1595. That's very high. 7:36 And now it's a more normal 750.9, but the Energizer Bunny is this 10. Now that's kind of a medium range. 7:46 I'd rather have it a little higher, But you can say 750, units of that is really bioavailable to use. 7:55 Hemoglobin A1C to measure blood sugars over a three to four month time. 8:01 And then sperm testing. 8:03 So they're going to test for motility. 8:05 Can it swim? 8:06 And they actually have put them, they used to, I'm not sure if they still do this, but they put it on a little grid system and see how long it takes the 8:14 sperm to swim from point A to point B, because it's a long, long trip up those fallopian tubes. 8:21 My son once was watching a Nova video and he said, daddy, watch this. 8:26 And it was the first time they'd ever actually photographed a sperm inside a fallopian tube. 8:32 It looked like a little tiny fishy trying to swim up the Amazon. 8:36 it's a lot of hard work. 8:38 And so we want to know that sperm are healthy enough to get to where they need to go. 8:42 Morphology to show if we have viable, healthy sperm, if the shape's okay. 8:47 And then we're going to look at the sperm level per unit of volume.
Female hormone testing methods 8:51 Then the semen volume, because there needs to be enough seman also to carry out the load. 8:59 And so here's a picture of some, here is a normal oval form here just looking beautiful, beautiful head, the neck and the tail. 9:09 So the genetic materials carried in the head. 9:12 The neck is where the nutrients are and that's one of the reasons men are easier to treat because there are a couple of basic supplements that can really 9:23 energize the sperm and really get that neck full of proper nutrients. 9:27 And then we can see the other morphological problems. 9:30 You don't want a two-headed sperm, you don' want to tail sperm. 9:34 So they look at the motility. 9:36 Now here's the problem. 9:38 Getting to the lab can be quite inconvenient. 9:41 At one time the major lab testing company in this area had only one place that was doing sperm testing and you only had a 20-minute window from the time 9:54 you ejaculated until you got the sperm delivered. 9:57 Well, what if you live 30 minutes away? 9:59 I'll let you figure out how inconvenient that would be. 10:03 For the sperm testing, I usually have them ask their MD for the test. 10:07 They're set up to do it. 10:08 However, what's really cool is there is now at home sperm-testing, and it's very cool. 10:16 So this male fertility kit, you place some sperm on a slide, it goes under a viewing unit, And it will actually share the screen with your TV. 10:25 so you can see the Sperm in real time for yourself, and really get a great idea about how healthy the sperm is. 10:34 It's less than $100 and, really, a lot easier than going into the lab. 10:40 Then, female hormones. 10:42 And so, blood testing, just as it sounds, you're going to get blood draw, saliva testing. 10:48 The two most common places that people go for that are doctors' data and ZRT labs. 10:53 I do almost no saliva test anymore. 10:57 because there are much simpler methods that don't require you to sit around all day and spit in a tube, which doesn't sound that hard, 11:05 but trust me, my patients have gotten very, very frustrated by that. 11:10 Now my favorite test for female hormones is dried urine testing. 11:16 Couldn't be easier. 11:17 Several times a day you pee in cup, you put a piece of cloth in it, that they provide, and then you let it dry. 11:25 So it's dried urine testing. 11:27 Very, very accurate. 11:29 And so Dutch testing is the company I most use, but Andolisite at US Biotech also does a good test. 11:37 Then at-home testing, we've moved into a whole new world here over the last decade or so. 11:43 We've got Mira and Inito. 11:45 There are others. 11:46 Those are the ones that we have used. 11:49 And so here's a ZRT report. 11:52 Here's the first page of a Dutch test. 11:56 Dutch has changed the appearance a little bit and I like the new appearance better. 12:01 But as you can see, if we look up here, we see the estradiol is at the end of the green stage. 12:07 It's really maxed out and there's no progesterone. 12:11 So this is someone that is completely estrogen dominant. 12:16 Their testosterone is fine. 12:17 Its mid-range. 12:18 We've got estrogen dominance. 12:21 And down here, this is a circadian cortisol.
Dutch test results and hormone balance 12:24 So they did it four times this day and the cortisol level is bottomed out. 12:30 This person is totally and completely burned out, so one of the things we're going to have to do with them is get them to relax. 12:38 And we have lots of methods to that, but we really, really got to get that up because When cortisol is at such a high demand, 12:48 it will lower DHEA levels, dehydroepiandosterone levels which are the precursor for the sex hormones. 12:54 So we really need to work with the cortisol and the stress even though we're really looking for pregnancy here. 13:01 This is another page on it. 13:04 And you can see how, and it's got all the pathways. 13:07 There's pregnant alone, off the scale low. 13:11 And it the major precursor for progesterone. 13:16 So this person is going to have, they won't be able to maintain a pregnancy, right? 13:21 Progesteron is named for protestation, for maintaining a pregnant. 13:28 This person would need very significant amounts of progesterone supplementation in order to maintain a pregnancy. 13:38 And then there's tons of other stuff down here that is relevant for likelihood of developing breast cancer, your ability to methylate. 13:46 This person can't methylated at all. 13:49 The ratios here between the 2 and 16 hydroxyprogesteron are not so good. 13:55 And here's just another way to look at this. 13:58 Again, you can see that the cortisol is low. 14:02 The melatonin is very, very low, progesterone helps you sleep, melotonin helps, this person doesn't sleep. 14:12 It's one of the reasons they're so burned out. 14:15 Now, getting to the fun stuff, here's a mirror. 14:18 We've used mirror quite a bit with our patients. 14:22 Again, you take first morning urine. 14:25 You have a little dipstick or wand that you put in the urine, and then you'll put the urine in this little round device, 14:33 right here, little around device. 14:35 And in about 20 minutes, it will show your hormone profile. 14:41 So these, it's tracking your estrogen, your progesterone, you're follicle stimulating hormone and your luteinizing hormone. 14:50 So you can see exactly what day you are the most fertile and if you even ovulating. 14:56 It's just an amazing technology. 14:59 Down here is the INITO fertility tracker, which we are now switching to. 15:04 We find it's a little easier to use for us and easier for patients to track it. 15:11 So we're using the Inito primarily. 15:14 Same idea.
At-home fertility trackers and wrap-up 15:17 Here, the annito tracks all four of the primary fertility hormones. 15:22 It says the four, there are actually more, but these are the biggies. 15:26 And you can see here, right? 15:28 You'd go along here. 15:30 The purple's luteinizing hormone. 15:32 You get a big surge of lutenizing hormones, and then you're going to get big surges of progesterone. 15:39 Then you could see, here's peak fertility, And here is a confirmation that there was ovulation. 15:45 So it's kind of foolproof. 15:49 Now, If you want more information about fertility hormones or fertility or traditional Chinese medicine, actually about any subject, 16:00 I do free 15-minute discovery calls. 16:02 I find, and I just started doing this in the last year, but I found that people often didn't know where to start. 16:08 Do I start with my chiropractor? 16:10 Do start my medical doctor? 16:12 Uh, do I with an acupuncturist, an herbalist? 16:15 So I free fifteen minute discovery call several times during the week. 16:19 uh, to help people, you know, kind of guide them in a certain direction. 16:23 Uh, and so all you have to do is go to alamedaacupuncture.com and there'll be a box there for you to schedule your free discovery call. 16:32 Available California residents only, but feel free, just give me a 15 minute call and we'll just talk about stuff. 16:38 So I want to thank you for joining me today. 16:41 I love talking about this stuff and I'll. 16:44 Be back with you next week. 16:46 Thank you. 16:47 Thank you for joining me on The Balancing Point. 16:50 If you enjoyed today's episode, please follow the show, share it with a friend, and leave a review. 16:58 Feeling out of balance? 17:00 Most approaches just manage symptoms. 17:03 Here we get to the root. 17:05 So real healing, real clarity and balance can begin. 17:11 Visit alamedaacupuncture.com. 17:14 That's alamedaacupuncture dot com to learn more, explore our supplements or book a call. 17:21 We'd love to hear from you.
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