At the time my article on acupuncture, Sticking points [read it in the August edition of Women's Health] went to press, I had just begun seeking medical help to get pregnant. I was 40 years old. My experience at a high-powered clinic began badly, as I scored poorly on a key blood test. Before I'd even seen a doctor for the initial consultation, an assistant called to tell me that I was infertile. The bad kind of infertile. I wasn't someone who could spend lots of money and take lots of hormones and with luck, have a baby. I was out of the running – what in olden days people referred to as "barren". All the doctor could do for me, his assistant said, was help me get pregnant with an egg donated by another, younger woman.

Thus began a saga that ended, 14 months later, in my giving birth to healthy twin boys, from my own eggs (sperm from my husband also contributed, as he likes to remind me). How did I go from being told by a top fertility clinic that I would never have my own biological children to giving birth to two beautifully normal babies, in just over a year? In large part through an in vitro fertilisation procedure (my doctor took a more optimistic view than did his assistant, and agreed to treat me). But I am convinced that a key aspect of my double success was acupuncture. I recommend it to anyone trying to conceive. Here's why.

I hadn't even heard about acupuncture being used to enhance fertility until I interviewed Eliana Jacobs for my Women's Health story. Jacobs had been through four in vitro treatments, all of which failed for reasons the doctors did not understand. And then, after six months of acupuncture, she got pregnant the natural way.

A striking story, and an inspiring one. Immediately after that dismal blood test branded me as "high FSH" – the medical problem that put me in the pariah group of the truly infertile – I began acupuncture treatments with the Chinese doctor Jacobs swore by. I had one-hour acupuncture sessions, twice a week, for six months. (Yes, it was expensive: I paid $90 per session.) The doctor applied needles to many different parts of my body – hands, head, back, legs – depending on where I was in my menstrual cycle.

Before I go any further, a quick biology primer: FSH, or follicle-stimulating hormone, is made by the pituitary gland at the beginning of each menstrual cycle. It tells the ovaries that it's time to start preparing an egg for release during ovulation a couple of weeks later. When your FSH is high, it means your ovaries didn't respond to the regular nudge, so your pituitary has to whip up an extra batch to get them going. Think of visiting your grandma, and having to ring her doorbell seven times because she's going deaf. Basically, your ovaries are aging, and they're less alert than they should be.
High FSH is no joke. Many women who have this problem struggle for years to get pregnant, and they often fail. At many large clinics, doctors inject patients with hormones so they'll produce 10, 14, even 20 mature eggs in a single menstrual cycle. But women with high FSH don't tend to make lots of eggs when they're doped up with hormones, and mainstream doctors assume that as a result, such women won't get pregnant.

I fit the high-FSH mould. When I did my in vitro fertilisation, I formed only three mature eggs. This is, admittedly, not a lot. I'd watched friends with high FSH go through in vitro procedures, so I knew what to expect. Often out of four eggs, just a couple fertilise, and perhaps only one of those will become an embryo. And embryos are not always robust; some are lopsided or otherwise of poor quality.

But when my three eggs were placed with my husband's sperm, all of them fertilised. A couple of days later, all of them had grown into embryos. And on the day when I showed up to have them put back in my body, the doctor told me and my husband that our three embryos were perfect. They were lovely, symmetrical globes of eight clearly differentiated cells. "The reason we normally want to start with 15 eggs is so that we can end up with three embryos that look just like this," he said.

A few weeks later I learnt that I was pregnant with twins. I went on to have a relatively easy pregnancy – I worked up until five days before giving birth. I carried the babies to term – 37 weeks – and neither of them needed any medical assistance when they arrived.

Western doctors – including ones to whom my friends told this story – were stunned. My acupuncturist, on the other hand, was not all that surprised by my success. "You don't need 15 eggs," she'd always said. "It only takes one good egg to make a baby." A woman's body is naturally primed to make one egg each month, and the purpose of fertility-oriented acupuncture is to help that egg be the best it can be. It takes a woman's body three months to bring an egg to full maturation. That's why my acupuncturist tells patients they should undergo at least three months of acupuncture before expecting results.

If only one of my embryos had been perfect, and I had given birth to one healthy child, that would have been miracle enough to me (and to the western doctors in charge of my care). But the fact that I had a double pregnancy, when my ovaries were clearly showing signs of ageing, tells me something changed my odds. Not being a religious person, I tend to attribute that something to acupuncture. Of course, there's no way to know for sure – this was a test sample of only one – but acupuncture has been shown to help with pain and many other medical conditions (as my article reports), so there's no reason to believe it couldn't help increase a woman's fertility.

If you want to get pregnant and decide to try acupuncture, I would definitely suggest finding a practitioner who specialises in fertility. It's a particular kind of treatment and not every acupuncturist has the appropriate training.

by Emily Laber-Warren