Infertile couples turn to acupuncturists for help

The all-too-common question may seem simple enough to most, but for a couple who can't have kids, it may not be. Brian and Jamie Rees were such a couple.

"We had no answers," said Jamie Rees.

Two years after their marriage in 1997, the Kaysville couple decided they were ready to have a baby. But they never could get pregnant. They didn't know why.

Once her friends started having babies, Rees said she started to feel the pressure.

"Then it was hard," she said. People would say to the couple that they should have kids.

"I'm trying, thank you" was Rees' response. She said she was always honest about their situation.

The couple tried in vitro twice, artificial insemination and had signed up for adoption classes. Four years and $20,000 later, the couple was still just that — a couple.

Rees said in vitro was the most emotional part.

"I had to give myself a shot in the stomach," Rees said, "and had to have patches on me."

She said the second time in vitro didn't work was more difficult because of the physical pain, having to pay so much money and then waiting to find out it didn't work.

"I was so mad," Rees said.

The couple was running out of options.

"You get to the point where you think, I will do anything to have a baby, " she said.

In 2003, Rees heard about a woman taking herbal supplements for infertility. Rees mentioned it to her chiropractor, and he suggested that Rees try acupuncture.

"I was really at the end of my rope," Rees said. "I was willing to try pretty much anything."

Her husband, Brian, was skeptical.

"She wanted to try one last thing," Brian said. "I said it wouldn't hurt."

And it didn't.

At her first acupuncture appointment, Rees said she remembered thinking it was strange. She glanced at her body with pins sticking out of it as she lay on the table at the doctor's office. She quickly laid her head back down.

"Strange but very relaxing," she said.

According to Dr. Marshall Hai Ding, the only strange thing about acupuncture for infertility is that it has taken so long to catch on in the United States.

"About three years ago, acupuncture to assist in infertility became very popular," said Ding, who has two Chinese Health Clinics in Utah.

In 2005, a German study on acupuncture's effect on fertility was reported on TV. It showed that women who received acupuncture, in addition to Western medicine, were 50 percent more likely to become pregnant.

"Do you know where acupuncture comes from? ... Why do you listen to Germans?" Ding said. "It's from China. Acupuncture is about 4,000 years old."

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