I have seen a number of videos and websites promoting something called fertility massage can
massage increase your fertility hi I'm Dr Randy Morris I am a us-based board certified fertility
expert I sift through hundreds of boring medical studies to extract the important information and
present it to you in an easy straightforward way so you can get the facts about fertility
and fertility treatments and make informed choices people who promote fertility massage
are of two types the first is regular massage let's talk about massage and its effect on
stress There are some studies that suggest that deep massage may have some benefit in helping
to reduce stress and even stress hormones like cortisol. However, there are other studies which
have not shown a benefit in reducing stress or cortisol. You should interpret any claims
like this to be scientifically unproven. Practitioners of fertility massage offer
massages of the inner thigh, groin and abdomen. There are claims that this somehow increases
the blood flow to your reproductive organs and that this would improve your fertility. Because
your reproductive organs are located deep in your pelvis which is surrounded on all sides by bones,
ligaments and muscles, None of these types of massages would be able to reach anywhere near any
of your reproductive organs or the blood vessels that supply them. So the theory as to why massage
might help fertility is fatally flawed right from the start. But is there any scientific data?
I first looked for any scientific data that fertility massage increases your chances of
becoming pregnant naturally. There is none. There is one study that looked at something
called undulating massage which uses a vibrating instrument. They were looking at patients who were
attempting pregnancy using frozen embryo transfer. This wasn’t a study in which patients were
recruited and then randomly assigned to a massage group or a control group. Instead, they looked
back at the outcomes of patients who had chosen to do this therapy on their own in the past. They
then tried to match them with people who hadn’t used the therapy. I couldn't find a copy of the
complete study, only an abstract so I couldn’t evaluate whether their study design and analysis
was done correctly or not. The authors did claim that the pregnancy rates were higher in those
people who got the vibrating massage, however. That’s it, there is no other scientific evidence
regarding massage and fertility. Should people be charging you for fertility massage? Well,
this editorial in the leading massage therapy journal states that even advertising yourself
as a fertility massage therapist is unethical because it implies there is
some difference between fertility massage and other massages or that there is some pregnancy
benefit to performing fertility massage. Here is the conclusion from that editorial:
Couples suffering from infertility are a vulnerable group and, as such,
must be protected from unethical, misleading, and deceptive advertising and promotion of
the benefits of fertility massage. To date, there is no evidence that fertility massage
is beneficial and, therefore, any promotion of objective fertility outcomes that would be
gained from receiving a fertility massage would be deemed unethical. Remember, this is not from
a journal for fertility and IVF doctors. It is a journal by and for massage therapists.
Some practitioners of fertility massage make the claim that the benefit comes from
performing acupressure. Acupressure involves stimulation of acupuncture points and meridians
without the use of acupuncture needles. It is claimed that stimulating a particular acupoint
with acupressure can activate small nerve fibers that send impulses into the spinal
cord, brain and even the pituitary gland. There has been one study that looked at whether
acupressure can improve the chances for having a baby when using IVF. They specifically studied
auricular acupressure which focuses on the ear. Unlike the massage study I talked about earlier,
this study actually did recruit couples to enroll in this study before they went through their IVF
treatment. They split them into three group: One group got no treatment at all. One group
received fake acupressure and the third group got real acupressure. This was a small study but it
was well designed. They found that although there was no difference in the number of eggs retrieved,
the fertilization rate, the rate of developing embryos or the number of embryos transferred. The
ear acupressure group did get more pregnancies than the fake group or the control group.
Another study looked at IVF patients who had previously failed to become pregnant
on previous IVF attempts. Although this study also claimed a benefit to using ear acupressure,
there were a number of problems. This study was even smaller than the previous study and
did not include critical information such as how they defined recurrent IVF implantation
failure and whether the treatment group was similar to the group that was not treated.
These two studies make up the total scientific literature about acupressure.
The claims that other types of massage therapy have some acupressure benefit
beyond the ear have no evidence whatsoever. Like many of the alternative therapies that
I talk about on Infertility TV, you may ask well what is the harm? Other than wasting
your money or getting your hopes up that these techniques may help you, there appears to be
little harm to something like ear acupressure. However, pressing on your groin and inner thigh
carries a real risk of causing blood clots on those blood vessels and should be avoided.