Reproductive Acupuncture: Calming the Nervous System to Support Fertility

Nicole Lange LicAc MAOM founded Life Healing Life in Minneapolis, MN with a revolutionary approach to healthcare that transcends the traditional "doctor fixes patient" model. As an acupuncturist and practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine and third generation entrepreneur, Nicole embraces a unique perspective that integrates Eastern practices with Western medicine and scientific innovation. Nicole has worked exclusively in the areas of Women’s health and trauma since 2006, her outcomes surpass studies and expectations, and it is her deep passion and a privilege to have worked with thousands of women on their reproductive journeys.

Transcript

Rebecca Gleed: 0:00

Record. Hello everyone. I am extra excited this evening. Welcome to perinatal and reproductive perspectives. Today. I am thrilled to introduce Nicole Lang. She is a licensed acupuncturist. Welcome Nicole. Thank

Unknown: 0:19

you so much for having me. I'm excited to be with you. Becky, yeah,

Rebecca Gleed: 0:22

and you're coming out of Minneapolis. Sure. Am great city, beautiful right now. Yes. Well, tell us a little bit about your practice, what you do, what brought you into the space of fertility, wherever you want to start,

Nicole Lange: 0:39

yeah. So that's a big question, but I think my practice is called Life healing life, and I named it that it's kind of a tricky one at first, but life healing life. I heard the idea it's life healing life, as opposed to a doctor fixing a patient, and that just spoke to what brought me to the medicine. Because in my own life, it was I had these life events and and I got kind of as far as I could get with mainstream medicine, which I am so enamored with and so grateful for. But then I was looking for something that just made my life feel even more full and balanced and all of me more seen. And so by the time I started my practice, I was like, I like the idea of life, healing life. And so I, because of my own history, I wanted to work exclusively with people that identified as femme, and I was very interested in sexual and reproductive health and trauma, because I have that sort of PTSD and trauma in my own lived experience. And so I I opened my doors, and I had done a lot of extra education in these areas on top of my master's degree. And very quickly, after starting my practice, the word of mouth for what I was doing in the reproductive wellness sphere just caught on. And for 18 years, I've been probably 90% of my practice is people who are trying to conceive and in subsequent pregnancies after fertility struggles. And so there's a lot of those reproductive, sexual and PTSD layers that go into a lot of fertility stories.

Rebecca Gleed: 2:17

What would be some examples of someone who would enter your door, and how would, how would they present? Like, what would be some of the reasons they would pick up the phone and call you?

Unknown: 2:30

Yeah, that's a great question. So a lot of times I'm getting referrals from fertility clinics and from OBGYN. And so a lot of people are are told that acupuncture is a good thing to support better outcomes in their cycles. And so a big chunk of people that come to see me are getting those direct referrals. But I say Chinese medicine is especially good at supplementing what Western medicine is not, and vice versa. So especially for people that have really complicated or subclinical, kind of nebulous things that Western medicine either doesn't know how to treat yet or doesn't even know how to diagnose yet, that's an especially good fit. So you'll see a lot of specific research for acupuncture and fertility. For example, for people that are having unexplained adverse IVF outcomes, unexplained infertility, and things that are just, you know, not as responsive to the Western options. So when we add on acupuncture, that can be a thing that can tip into where, then the Western treatment can work better.

Rebecca Gleed: 3:41

And then, my understanding, that's a third the unexplained representative. Yeah, they

Unknown: 3:47

chunk. And, I mean, we're getting more data on some of the such a cool time for a sciencey minded Yeah, I love it. You can see, you know, things that we never really thought about are starting to be like Silent endometriosis and inflammatory responses in the body and things like that. That where we used to look at, oh, your hormones are good, your anatomy is good. These are the fertility things, versus now we're looking autoimmune and nervous system and circulatory system and things like that. So it's it's getting bigger and it's getting easier to find things. But like I said, sometimes there's not a known treatment for it. So just because we can say, Oh, now we think it's maybe this, you know, there's some really great things for, say, regulating inflammation or regulating the nervous system, it's a huge thing, and then all the ripples that come from that,

Rebecca Gleed: 4:38

yeah, what would be some examples of you said more nebulous or unexplained, what would you might might see, or what would the referral sound like?

Unknown: 4:49

Well, so it can be like a diagnosis, but something that is hard for Western medicine. So from a fertility perspective, it's the. Wild West, like it's brand new medicine. Okay, we didn't start doing reproductive medicine. The oldest IVF baby is the same age as me, so yeah, and, and even then, if you look at what was being done, like the the protocols and the medicine, and what they were able to do in a lab is totally different, even in the absolutely so maybe it's somebody with premature ovarian decline, and they're like, Well, we think this is most often genetic, but we don't really have a dialed in thing from a Western perspective, like one clinic might do something that's more fringy and cutting edge. It's not necessarily evidence based at this point, but we don't really have anything that's evidence based yet, and besides the standard IVF protocol and hope that we can get the numbers right. So, so that would be an example where then looking at the whole person and saying, Okay, this is what I see in your constitution. This is what I see as things that could be doing better, having more robust function, feeling more supported, feeling more abundant, that can go into the ripples, that can maybe help support you, not only having the best IVF outcomes in this really hard circumstance for Western medicine, doesn't have a lot of really direct things to do, but also as a person, as a whole person, that the whole, the whole trajectory of Your life is in limbo. So there's research that fertility is as anxiety and depression inducing as cancer. Yeah. So, so just to have somebody say, Hey, I'm looking at all of you, not just how many eggs you have on deck and how many you're going to retrieve in this IVF, we're going to hopefully make your outcomes better there, and you're going to feel more balanced and supported throughout this really hard, unfair medical condition.

Rebecca Gleed: 6:47

Yeah, I'm I want to pause to expand on that and to underscore because you're right. The research shows us that infertility as a diagnosis is so psychologically distressing. I also heard you talk about that the field that we are both in is is new, and we're learning and absorbing new research and data and information, whether it be, you know, peer reviewed or anecdotal, or, like you said, The Wild Wild West. Do you have an approach for how you just continue learning? What does that

Unknown: 7:31

multi dimensional? I want to clone so I can just study all day long. I me too. I mean, there's so many versions of me that could exist in, you know, the Marvel universe of fertility, I I just love learning. So a lot of what I learn is when I see something that I haven't seen before, or I am exploring. I want to see what's new in something that I feel like I know pretty well. But like I said, things are changing so much so I, I am a member of the ASRM. I look at the research, I look at the data. I want to I honestly, I use some AI to be like, give me the latest and give me the citations. And I want it to be peer reviewed. And meta analysis are good. And so there's just so many places that you can go and read up on things. And obviously I I required to do continuing education as an acupuncturist, and so I'm doing studies in holistic medicine and traditional Chinese medicine, but then adding all of the science to it, because it is so specific. And I, I talk to my patients about their reproductive specific parts are, like their nursery, and the rest of their bodies like the house, and then the rest of their life is like the neighborhood. And as an acupuncturist, I can just look at their house and make a traditional Chinese medicine diagnosis and say, Oh, your pattern in Chinese medicine is, you know, wood imbalance or kidney deficiency or whatever. But it's so much better. If I can, I can understand what's happening in their nursery as well, and understand the ripples that are happening. So, you know, if you have a kitchen issue with your gut, what does that mean for your microbiome and your nursery and your, you know, vaginal dysbiosis, or health and implantation and IVF, which there's research crossing these things. So it's, it's really cool to do research in all the things, and even going bigger to what you're talking about a lot in this show that I love is the relational and the the neuroception of the felt safety and the support that works and all of that. That's neighborhood stuff, but it absolutely has legitimate physiological kind of ripples for things like hormone levels and pelvic circulation and things like so, yes, just cool to learn about it all as much as I can.

Rebecca Gleed: 9:53

Yes, I'm a member of ASRM, too. For those who don't know, it's the American Society for Reproductive Medicine. It's an incredible. Resource. I'll add it to the show notes, but they're doing really good work and stay on top of the latest research and provide education advocacy, which is, like I said, I'll add it to the show notes, but maybe that's a segue into, if someone has never studied or Googled or Wikipedia, acupuncture, yup. What is it

Unknown: 10:24

that? Yeah, where to begin. So I'll give you the spiel that I give my new patients. I like turning things into analogies that are kind of Western minded, because it's a leap to get to chi and Yin and Yang from the get go. We can get there, but it's a little bit of a leap. So So I say, first of all, Chinese medicine, a lot of these classic holistic medicines are observation and experiential. So that means that we didn't necessarily understand the anatomy and physiology. It was just observation experience. More observation, more experience. So I say it's like if you would never been in a modern building and somebody locked you in a building, you would very quickly figure out that a light switch turns on, the light on and off, right? But you would have no idea about electricity and current and all the different things that are going on there. And sometimes acupuncture can be that dramatic, but more often, it's like a thermostat. And so a thermostat is like, that doesn't do anything, it doesn't seem like. But then, if you're watching closely or experiential and observation based, you're going to see, oh, there's a whoosh over there, and it's warm. It was a little bit delayed. Gonna notice. Oh, sometimes it's cold, sometimes it's hot. It might take more observation, but eventually you'd be like, Okay, again. No idea that duct work or pilot lights or blower motors or any of that stuff. Thank you to my brother who works, but they you know, you would just know that that's how it's working. And so then, over the course of 1000s of years, we have these 400 thermostats that are the acupuncture coins that acupuncturist get their master's degree in, are taught to memorize how to find them and what they're the thermostats for. And some of them are really straightforward, like this is a headache point, but they can also be in the language of patterns of imbalance and things that we see that are kind of interconnected. So somebody might have a thermostat tweaked for something called stagnation, cheese, stay nation energy stagnation and that might treat anything from headaches to irritability to Vivid crazy dreams to menstrual cramps and PMS to stomach aches to bloating, all of those things would be just some of many things that are linked to that same pattern. So we pick the thermostats, we put the needles in, and that gives the message to the body to respond as the thermostat does. And now we're living in a time where we can start to actually see like on an fMRI when we do the points for calming, wow. The brain turns black in all sorts of places that were lit up, like we can watch on a fMRI, it's just shuts it down. So I say it's like, it's like closing all the tabs and restarting your browser for your brain, incredible. And another thing that we can see that's really cool is the brain wave pattern that in the places where the brain stays active. It actually shifts the brain waves from GABA and beta, brain waves into alpha and theta. So these are from, like, adult thinking, logical planning into kind of where kids hang out easily, and people that meditate a lot, so time doesn't matter as much. You're not asleep, but you're kind of spacey, and so I always say this is a great thing for people to watch when they're getting kind of trauma informed nervous system related acupuncture treatments, if it's effective, one thing that I always tell people heads up when I come back, you're going to feel like, I'm going to tell you, I'm going to leave you for half an hour and you're going to be like, a half An hour just laying here with needles in my body and no screen or anything, and I come back and it'll feel like there's no way that was a half an hour, and that's those brain changes happening. Wow,

Rebecca Gleed: 14:14

would you be able to map out what this might look like, specifically for a fertility case, from when you're first meeting the patient to, I don't know if treatment is the right word, but you get what I'm saying, and then maybe a few sessions down the road, how that might evolve,

Unknown: 14:34

yeah. So I'm a big fan of patient education, right? So I think I can pick the thermostats and do the things to the person's body based on their nursery and their house and their neighborhood. But it's even better if I can do that, and then they walk out the door and they have ideas of like understanding those those parts of their body and choices to make and tools to use in that right? So, so when I start with a new patient, whatever, wherever. Entering in, I always take the time. I do have very extensive forms, because we're connecting all the dots. And I'll give them a report of findings that explains their their imbalances, from a Chinese medicine perspective, how they probably came to be, what sorts of things would influence them, and a treatment kind of strategy, plan, my plan is pretty much always the same, and you'll see different studies saying, if you're doing IVF, you should do eight treatments before this point, or you should do them and during this part of the cycle. And I think it's nice to know those studies. I have a video on my website that goes over the research on acupuncture during IVF. But I think what trumps all of those studies, and it's another study, so it is actually evidence based is getting even more customized. So if you're like, I need eight treatments by the time I do my my embryo transfer, and you only have a month, that's pretty crazy making for most people, and it's going to actually heighten their sense of threat and maybe end up fighting with their partner about the finances of it all, and they're running around to appointments and hating traffic, and that is just going to cancel out what we're trying to do. So I would much rather a person start with the research and then find what fits their actual life. And so I like to do a few treatments closer together, whatever that looks like for that person. And then that's where we're doing a little bit more education. We're really consistently resetting the nervous system, teaching ways for them to work with their nervous system and interrupt those stress cycles and things like that that will be most helpful for them. And then we start spacing out from there. And that could be different durations, if, this, if a person's getting ready to do an embryo transfer, a lot of times we're working to have the day of embryo transfer acupuncture and well studied. So I just did two this morning, people at the same clinic. So I go on site for those. And then I really love seeing people close to the end of their the nine day wait with an embryo transfer, because the embryo is already five days old. So that gets us to the 14 days out. Yes. And so I like to see them like the three days ish before their test, because they get, of course, threatened and in their head,

Rebecca Gleed: 17:16

yeah, Nicole, let's tell folks what that's we call that the two week wait, it's not really two weeks, but the research shows us, again, it's such a psychologically distressing process. So anyone who's going through this, you can connect with someone like Nicole, who can provide that extra layer of support to you. You don't have to do it alone. I hear so many stories of it's like nobody understands true. None of my friends have gone through IVF. It's hard for my partner to understand. So to have an ally, to have someone, my understanding is you've witnessed like over 1000 transfer Okay, so someone like Nicole can be your ally and support,

Unknown: 18:05

yeah, and support in different ways, right? I'm, I'm an ally that has a ton of experience, and then there's other people that are going through IVF. So places like resolve is a great organization that has both pure led and professional led support groups, therapy. You know, all the different ways to work on those angles, to feel safer and to feel more regulated, and the ripples that come from that for outcomes and for quality of life and mental health are all just beautiful.

Rebecca Gleed: 18:35

Yeah, I can't tell you how many women I work with that go back and forth like by the minute of, should I take a pregnancy test, or should I wait for my blood test? What should I do? So to think about other ways to calm your nervous system. So that pesky thought of, should I take a test? Should I take a test, can be allayed a little bit, yeah, could be

Unknown: 18:59

accurate. That reset for the brain, right? Like, I see people all the time that they're like, there is no way I could relax right now, and then I put the needles, and then they're like, like, and it's, it almost feels like I'm a wizard, but with like, stress reset, and it's very important to me to then, like, I have, I have an entire YouTube video about like, pros and cons of taking a test at home, you know, things that people don't think about, of what, what the risk and benefit could be and and, you know, understanding if you can't see an acupuncturist, or the only acupuncturist in your area doesn't feel like a fit, or does it doesn't fit your budget. There's DIY acupressure things. There's lots of more, more and more information about Vegas stimulation and resetting your nervous system. So there's so many ways to do this, and what I'm mostly doing is cultivating like I have this one very specific tool that's really good at it, yeah. But more than that, I want people to just understand that there's so many ways so. In so many different places that you can inject this into an IVF or into a fertility journey, versus just, I have to pay and go to the appointment and get the thing done once a week, or whatever it is, so all of it together.

Rebecca Gleed: 20:13

Yeah, I appreciate you saying that, because I do think there's a preconception by many that this is, this is an extra, extra, as opposed to what I'm hearing. This is accessible. You can get on Nicole's website. Look at some of these YouTube videos. Learn the the vagal nerve, the pressure points, and do some of this if, if economics is an issue, or perhaps you don't have access because you're in a rural environment, but there are ways to access some of these tools outside of such a clinical setting.

Unknown: 20:50

Absolutely, I have a whole acupressure freebie guide on my website. There's a glossary. It's like, if you're getting ready for an IUI, do this combination before, and there's videos on the YouTube channel that that show how you might stimulate it, and where you find, how you find the points and things like that. So I never want anyone to feel like they need me, right? They they can. I just want them to have the tools. A lot of people in the world of fertility, acupuncture, fertility, it's like the Nicole Lang method or the and I specifically like, I don't want Nicole Lang. It's not in my online programs. It's not in my practice. It's not in the way that I market because it really is this beautiful medicine with this increasing amount of science and trauma informed care and education based health care and all these things that I hope will be everywhere more and more, and I want it to be accessible at any price point in any place.

Rebecca Gleed: 21:49

Yeah, fertility, I think I saw a quote on your website that said, no mud, no Lotus. Does. Does that resonate here?

Unknown: 22:00

That's, a, that's a Han, as far as I know, I think it's a Tiktok Han, who's a monk and a prolific author that my my logo is a lotus flower. And that comes from that idea of the the no mud, no lotus, like these dark, dark places. I don't think they're meant to be. I don't think we need to learn things to be able to be worthy of a pregnancy. I think that's all magical thinking and really harmful. But what I do think is we have a choice in those dark places to like cultivate and to grow towards the light and to and to see that there's this possibility there, and when we can't see the possibility. I know you talk about a lot of, you know, deep struggles, that that can feel very, very dark. It's like, well, then, if you can't see that, then the resources and knowing that there are people and treatments and things that can help get you there, but eventually coming out of it and saying, Oh, this really dark time, this, this really hard, uncontrollable thing where I didn't know how it ends became this catalyst where I learned all these things about myself, I learned all these tools, and then I'm going to take that into a pregnancy, and I'm going to take that into postpartum, and I'm going to take that into parenting. And so it's just the most beautiful, empowering thing in something that feels very powerless.

Rebecca Gleed: 23:24

So eloquently said, and I love the idea of using different frameworks modalities to build the different supports and resources and tools so we can be healthy and stay healthy. And so one of the frameworks that I'm less familiar with that you specialize in is Chinese medicine. And you talked about Chinese the idea of an imbalance, or imbalances. Can you help listeners understand that better?

Unknown: 23:56

So I'll do another analogy, because I love my thank you. This one came to me. My mom was asking me, like, what are you what are you treating when I was still in school? And I was like, Okay, it's like, it's like, your body is a bank account. Okay? So everyone can relate to finances and like, there's, there's always in Chinese medicine. Do you have enough and is it in circulation, right? So that's a very like budgety thing, right? Do I have enough resources? To me, it might be chi and blood and Yin and Yang and these Chinese medicine things, but you could also say hormones or just vitality or wellness or resources, right? So do you have enough? And is it in circulation, and so that's like, or is it stuck in a Ponzi scheme of never ending stress cycles or hyper vigilance or control issues that are really wired into your brain that you don't know how to get out of, that you can, you can work with, with different therapies and different things. So, so and then, you know, I will say in a report of findings, I'm seeing some deficiency patterns and a lot of your stuff. In a bad investment pattern. But let's break it down even further so there's not just you don't have enough money and it's stuck in a bad investment. It's well, why don't you have enough money right now? Is it because you had this really traumatic thing that's the equivalent of a big unfair bill, like a tree fell on your house, and you had to pay for that, and so now you're kind of trying to get back on your feet? Or is it because maybe you started in a bit of a deficit, because there were some complications with the your mom's pregnancy with you, or your premature or things like that, that can get us kind of a less a robust start? Is it because we're trying to go to a job every day, but we can't deposit in our account because we have a crooked accountant? That's like having a gut or a respiratory system that's inflamed and it's not processing and putting those resources into our system as we would like it to. So there's all different ways that we can have not quite enough showing up in our accounts, or what we have getting stuck in bad investments, or some of both. And so for me, then it's like, well, I want to have more in your account, and I want to get what you have freed up. So we're going to work on that fight or flight, and we're going to work on getting you out of that mode so that it comes back into circulation. And then we're going to boost you up and conserve what you have, which is equally important, right? We don't just need to add, add, add. We need to be like, maybe we prune, maybe we do less, maybe we can rest, maybe we have some joy and some downtime, boundaries, and so we're doing all these things. And the hope is that in that moment, the quality of life feels better. It protects the mental health, it protects the relationships. It makes, oh, I'm I'm less anxious. I'm having better bowel movements. I'm sleeping a little bit better, even though I'm going through fertility struggles. And that feels great in the moment, and it helps the outcomes. A lot of times, I'll see people that when they're doing this kind of in the in with the wrong like, I just like, I had somebody who was like, you just need to fix my pelvic circulation. I was her third acupuncturist, and she had a terrible Doppler study, terrible bedside manner. Whoever told her she had terrible pelvic blood flow. And so she fired her acupuncturist, and came to me and and I was like, How have you been doing this? And she was doing all the right thermostats. I'm like, How do you feel about this? And she's like, I It stresses me out. I don't like it. I and I'm like, well, you're doing the treatment for being in threat mode in a way that's right, so that we're again, start with the research, start with the things, but actually see how it feels and find so I found a much more gentle, much less less rigid way to work on her, kind of getting neurologically familiar with kind of doing less. And it was very uncomfortable at first, but I explained it in like, where your where your nerves are, like super highways versus like little dirt paths. And her super highway was like, I can conquer this. I'm going to do it harder, and it's like, and that's shunting blood away from you. So we're like, let's just, I know it's not, it's just a little dirt pad, but we have to, like, start doing this a different path to get here. And we're going to do less acupuncture, and not the herbs that you don't like, and cut things out and try to even if it's cognitively very unfamiliar and very uncomfortable, at first, start to try to, like, challenge some of those beliefs that I can just like white knuckle and force fertility, because that's not how life and death stuff works. And she, she ended up having two kiddos in in one of her like, I thought you needed to fix my blood flow, but you really, like helped me with all this generational trauma, and have to pass that on to how I parent. And I was like, whoa,

Rebecca Gleed: 28:53

whoa, what a trickle effect. Oh, that's beautiful. That's

Unknown: 28:57

and it wasn't even on her radar, right? Uh, a parent with addiction disease, and another parent who had gone, yeah, treatments during her childhood, and all the ways that that had served her, but also wasn't in in this particular way of, you know, working with fertility.

Rebecca Gleed: 29:16

Yeah, I'm tempted to hit pause and go get some popcorn and just listen to their stories all night, because they're they are fabulous. Maybe you can share one more that's on more than nuance, complicated, I know I'm putting you on the spot.

Unknown: 29:31

Nuance, complicated. I don't want to just do like Greatest Hits that I talk about more often, but let me think you said, you can pause this. Do you need?

Rebecca Gleed: 29:43

We can add, I'm thinking, Omar, this is a point to pause and cut out. Okay, take your time.

Unknown: 29:51

I mean, there's so many. Do you have something and like, what kind of thing comes to mind when you're thinking about

Rebecca Gleed: 29:56

it? I mean, something in the realm of infertility, whether it's. Diagnosed, or we've kind of covered unexplained. Maybe we do something that is maybe more known, but this particular case was more complicated or nuanced. Okay,

Unknown: 30:14

yeah, okay, so I'm thinking of a person who, when she first came to see me, she had a suspicion that she had polycystic ovarian syndrome, but because her BMI was high, a lot of fertility clinics were like, you just need to lose weight before we can start to see you. And so she again, she had all these sort of childhood reasons and reasons in her life that she had a lot of threat in her nervous system and a lot of interconnected pieces with her house and her nursery. And so she started seeing me, and I'm like, I can't change the rules and the biases and the unfortunate layers that are in these fertility clinics at this moment, but let's just work on all of you being seen and supported and abundant and feeling good right here. And then you can see, you know, if you want to go on a weight loss journey or try to focus more on that or not, but I don't even want to focus on that. I just want to focus on you being seen as a person, yes, like you're not your BMI. You want to have a baby, you have a partner, you have all this love, you have all of these lived experiences that are also making you feel pretty high alert and and a medical system that honestly is making you feel more so yes in this way. And so we started working together, and she started ovulating more regularly, and she's like, but I'm, you know, all these messages that she had gotten throughout her her life, and I'm like, if you're ovulating, you have a chance to get pregnant. So now we have to, you know, do some nursery education where we start to say, Okay, if you're if you're not ovulating, like the textbook says, How can you tell I have whole another freebie on really reading your body, especially with OPKS. With polycystic ovarian syndrome, you can get very inaccurate readings, because the way that the the insulin affects the hypothalamus is it makes it pulse differently and it makes it release different hormones. So it's going to throw off your ovulation predictor kits and a lot of the other things that you can try to externalize what, how to tell what your body's doing. And so I explained like, we're not going to externalize it, because it's not necessarily going to be correct for all these scientific reasons. And what I want to do is teach you how to, like, think about when you feel this, it's probably this hormonal state. When you notice this in your body, it's probably this thing happening in your ovaries when you feel this. And so she started following along. And just was like, okay, it might be day 48 but based on what we talked about, I'm feeling better. I'm ovulating sometimes now I wasn't before, and so I'm just going to have intercourse around those times. And this person now has three kiddos. Oh, never did IVF or the fertility treatment that she came thinking that she would need and and again, it's kind of like the person who, you know, said, with the generational trauma, she's just like, I just all the ways that we can gain back agency and empowerment and empowerment and joy and acceptance and love for our body doing what's right. You know, and I have polycystic ovarian syndrome and endo I thought it was going to take me forever to get pregnant because I still didn't have a perfect textbook cycle. And I went from not having a period for two years to irregular. But I got pregnant easily because I think, you know, some of it's luck, but also it certainly helped that I had been doing years of holistic things, yes, my whole body. So that's the kind of thing where you could fixate on this reductionistic microscope slide that is, you know, these are your hormonal issues, and the profile of polycystic ovarian syndrome, which is very legit and important to understand. But you can also say, how can we serve this person and and, yeah, knew what happens well,

Rebecca Gleed: 34:19

and it, it seems like you are so Person Centered that each case is going to look different, each approach, each you know, the conceptualization is going to be looking at the individual, which is so refreshing. So thank you. Yeah, your patients are lucky.

Unknown: 34:38

It's a total joy. And it's and I say, like, if you hear, well, this person did this, it's like, think, put it on your menu. I say another analogy, you have a fertility menu, and it's like, my sister's said this, and my re said this, and my acupuncturist before you said this, and my therapist said this. And it's like, these are all menu options that you would get sick if you try to order them all. And also like, think about what you actually crave and what you like, and understand that you're ordering from your unique nursery house and neighborhood. And what are the odds that the person who got pregnant who swears by the supplement has exactly your same nursery house and neighborhood? So we can get so much more nuanced and so much more person centered, and sometimes it's the thing that is just like, totally seems unrelated, but it's a huge way to unlock what you have out of that bad investment mode. I just was talking to a teacher who's having a really aggressive parent coming at her all the time about their kiddo, and she's just in this high, high alert and and she's like, Oh, I shouldn't be talking about work. I'm here to get ready for IVF. And I'm like, This is how we get ready for IVF. How do you not let this stay in your nervous system every time you get an email from this parent? Or how do you set memories or ask your principal to get involved in stuff? And she's like, really? And I'm like, This is not in the fertility books, but so much bigger and so much more truly holistic, right? There's like, this Fauci that's like, natural, but not super customized, and there's truly holistic, which is like, hey, yeah, what makes you actually feel good right? Now? Let's start there,

Rebecca Gleed: 36:18

yeah, well, and this will hopefully be captured on video. But for anyone just listening through audio, just your lighting up, you've been smiling this entire episode, so you clearly find joy in this work, which, again, is just lovely and refreshing. And then just quickly, for our audience, you mentioned an R E, can you tell folks what that is, a

Unknown: 36:43

reproductive endocrinologist? So these are the folks that work at the IVF clinics. So they're usually OB GYN, or they are OB GYN who have done additional training and certification to become a reproductive endocrinologist, and they're going to be the folks that are prescribing like IVF medicine and doing egg retrievals and embryo transfers. There are some OB GYN that do things like IUI and oral medications and even some stimulant IUI, which are intrauterine insemination. And those can be done at not IVF clinics, but IVF clinics are the ones with the art.

Rebecca Gleed: 37:23

Yeah, thank you. And I want to take maybe as the last portion of our episode to highlight one of your online courses which stood out to me is called banish fertility burnout, and oh my goodness, I cannot wait to blast this and share this with so many. I mean this sometimes, this is years, Mm, hmm, a quarter million dollars of financial, emotional, relational exhaustion. And so when I saw burnout, that somebody has a course for this. Go Nicole. What? What could we expect to get from this? And

Unknown: 38:08

yeah, it's so my main, my 90 day program is it's all, all the modules. So there's a foundation, a nursery, a neighborhood, a house. And I was like, that's a lot. And a lot of times people are feeling so overwhelmed, or they they want to, I don't want to commit to something for that long, because I hope I'm pregnant soon, or I don't even know that I can think about fertility, right? And so I just need something that doesn't feel like I'm trying to get pregnant. So I made the Spanish fertility burnout, and it's seven days, but you could do it in whatever speed you want, but there's seven lessons, and they're they're short, they're under 10 minutes, and they're videos that are like, Okay, today we're going to talk about pruning today. We're going to talk about joy today. We're going to talk about and, like, processing lack of control. And so there's a little video, and then there's some exercises to think about or do sometime throughout the day, and then there's a nightly reflection. And you could do it, you know, every three days, you do one and you stretch it out, or you could bang through it in seven days. But it really is just the idea of like things that are universally going to do those two things. How do we build you up, conserve what you have, and get what you have more into circulation? And then, if you're like, I don't know if I can keep doing this, you have that bigger bandwidth to make a clearer choice, to sit with that, to explore options that you didn't think you wanted to explore. But might be like opening up a window for some breathing room to look at things like third party reproductive like, Don't eggs and adoption might be to give yourself permission to be like, You know what? I really like this. I'm going to take the summer off, yeah, and just do some more, just getting my buffers bigger. And I say all the time, it's like, we we try to have a baby at first. For most people, it's like, I'm going to skip on. Cute outfit and pack a blanket and, like, have sex on a picnic flowers. And then you get to this point where it's like, oh, there's this dark and scary woods in front of you, and you have to march in. And what banish burnout does is it's like, it's like, if you're dressed, your outfit is torn and you have nothing left in your picnic basket and you got like, thorns stuck in you, and people are like, keep going, yeah. Maybe I just need, like, seven days to put some food in my picnic basket and to, like, do my laundry and put and take a shower and and then I'll decide if, if, if the path with keep going, with what I'm doing, is the right path, or change things up is the right path, and there's different ways to think about that too. But it's just like you're never going to regret taking a moment to recenter and build your buffers.

Rebecca Gleed: 40:52

Yeah, so much burnout in this space,

Unknown: 40:56

almost 50% of people. You probably know this statistic, but I think it's so important to say almost 50% of people who go through fertility treatments have PTSD, whether they have a baby or

Rebecca Gleed: 41:08

not. Whoa, I have not heard that stat. Can you see it one more time? Almost 50%

Unknown: 41:13

so I think it's 46 or 47% of people who do fertility treatments, and regardless of outcomes, have meet the criteria for PTSD,

Rebecca Gleed: 41:21

whoa, that's compelling to me is

Unknown: 41:26

it's just unacceptable. It's, it's absolutely sure that says, You know what, your your clothes are ripped off, you're barely surviving and like, keep on going. And it's, we have to come back to human beings who, yes, be resourced and regulated enough to have healthy pregnancies, not to mention not really damaged mental health and relationships and all these other things that we're doing, and it's entirely, I think, preventable. I see in my practice all the time. I don't see nearly the trauma, nearly the anxiety, nearly the depression coming out of fertility, when you do it in a more holistic way. And it's not to say there never is, because certainly there are certain neurochemical things that happen that can lead to mental health and mood disorders and things like that. But the part that's about lack of power, lack of education, unrealistic expectations, just constantly feeling like you're in the unknown on your own. All of those pieces are totally avoidable, and it's just a culture that hasn't built in the things that would rectify those things. And so that's my mission. My mission acupuncture. So rad for the reset, but we can do all the things around it, with or without. Yeah, sure. Honestly, that get rid of all that, then we're dealing with an, you know, such a different situation when it comes to prenatal mental health.

Rebecca Gleed: 42:55

Yes, yes. Well, I think that's a nice kind of ending point, if that's okay. Where can folks find you? So

Unknown: 43:08

my website is life healing life.com. As opposed to Doctor fixing patient.com. For online education, it'll take you to extensive blog, YouTube, online programs, lots of freebies, the acupressure, one, the figuring out what your hormones and your signs are actually telling you for your timing. All of that's on the website, and most of it is free, so I hope people go check it out, and thank you for this opportunity. Yes, you're doing Becky, this is great.

Rebecca Gleed: 43:40

Yeah, I am certain that this is going to help so many. And for anyone in the Minneapolis area, Nicole is there, but I'm guessing that you have a lot of out of state folks to seeking out your services.

Unknown: 43:56

I online. I work with a lot of in different countries too, but in person, I work at three different IVF clinics, and there's a whole form, if people want to see if I have them, or ways to support them during

Rebecca Gleed: 44:12

incredible Yeah. Well, thank you for being in this space, reproductive mental health and overall health is we're in this together. So thank you.

Unknown: 44:23

I'm so glad to be in it with folks like you. So onwards. Yes, I.