A Case Series on Acupuncture Treatment for Female Infertility with Some Cases Supplemented with Chinese Medicines Follow Up Study

¹Macau Institute for Applied Research in Medicine and Health, Macau University of Science and Technology, Macau SAR, China

²Modern TCM Ltd, Hong Kong SAR, China

³Department of Applied Science, Hong Kong Institute of Vocational Education (Shatin), Hong Kong SAR, China

⁴Centre for Complementary Medicine Research, University of Western Sydney, Sydney, Australia

⁵Faculty of Pharmacy, The University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia

*Corresponding Author:

Dr. Shiu Hon Chui
612 Melbourne Plaza, 33 Queen’s Road Central
Hong Kong SAR, China
Tel: (852)2116 0788
E-mail: shchui@diagnostix.com.hk

Received date: January 11, 2016 Accepted date: February 16, 2016, Published date: February 29, 2016

Citation:Chui SH, Chow FC, Szeto YT, Chan K, Lam CWK (2016) A Case Series on Acupuncture Treatment for Female Infertility with Some Cases Supplemented with Chinese Medicines – Follow Up Study. J Community Med Health 6:398. doi:10.4172/2161-0711.1000398

Copyright: © 2016 Chui SH, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

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Short Communication

Subsequent to the article titled “A Case Series on Acupuncture Treatment for Female Infertility with Some Cases Supplemented with Chinese Medicines” published in the European Journal of Integrative Medicine in June 2014, in which 7 out of 21 cases failed to get pregnant within the observational period of 2 years, 7 non-pregnant cases had since been followed up clinically by the study team.

The original case series study took place from October 2004 to June 2009. Totally 21 female patients who sought medical consultation for infertility problem were observed clinically. They were treated with acupuncture with or without taking prescriptions of Chinese medicines (CM) based on individual’s condition and/or pathogenesis of the disease. Over the period of two years there were 14 successful pregnant cases (66.7%) and 7 patients were not yet pregnant upon termination of treatment. The details of the observation were reported [1]. Nevertheless, it was speculated that some patients might need a much longer treatment period to achieve the effect. The 7 nonpregnant patients were advised to continue their treatment beyond the 2-year period.

However, among these 7 cases, 2 decided to cease the acupuncture treatment, while the remaining 5 cases sought for a secondary treatment during the prolonged treatment from June 2009 to January 2012. All 5 patients were diagnosed pregnant after completing their prolonged treatments. Among these 5 successful cases, 3 achieved pregnancy naturally and 2 with in vitro fertilization (IVF). Four out of these 5 cases were prescribed with Chinese medicines (CM) according to the pathogenesis of their respective infertility problems. One of these successful cases continued the treatment from 2009 by taking CM only, while previously, she received acupuncture treatment supplemented with CM during the study period. The demographic details of these 7 subjects are summarized in Table 1 and the treatment details of the 5 successful cases are summarized in Table 2.

Table 1: Patient demographic details.

Table 2: Number of acupuncture sessions and treatment for the successful cases.

References

1. Chui SH, Chow FC, Szeto YT, Chan K, Lam CWK (2014) A Case Series on Acupuncture Treatment for Female Infertility with some cases supplemented with Chinese Medicines. European Journal of Integrative Medicine 6: 337-341.