Truth Fertility

Fertility care should feel joined up

Verity has a simple principle that she shares with every Truth Fertility practitioner: a patient should be able to walk out of a consultation at their fertility clinic and into ours, and the transition should feel seamless.

That means understanding the language of reproductive medicine, the investigations patients are undergoing and the treatments they may be receiving - while also understanding where acupuncture may appropriately fit alongside them.

Patients shouldn't have to navigate two completely separate worlds, or translate their medical care into the language of Chinese medicine before an acupuncturist can understand it.

Acupuncture treatment can still be informed by Chinese medicine. But the patient's fertility problem needs to be understood in the context of their reproductive health.

That principle has shaped both Verity's own practice and the way she trains and supports practitioners across Truth Fertility.

Looking beyond a Chinese medicine diagnosis

Traditional Chinese Medicine provides its own framework for understanding health and choosing acupuncture treatment. But early in her fertility career, Verity became increasingly uncomfortable with using concepts such as damp heat or cold in the uterus as the primary explanation for a fertility problem.

Those concepts may have a place within an acupuncture treatment framework. They don't tell us whether someone has thyroid dysfunction, iron deficiency, endometriosis, impaired sperm parameters, tubal disease, an infection or another issue that may require investigation or medical treatment.

And they don't provide a common language with the doctors and fertility specialists involved in that person's care.

Verity believes good fertility acupuncture therefore requires an understanding of reproductive medicine as well as Chinese medicine.

Sometimes acupuncture may have a useful role.

Sometimes further investigation is more important.

And sometimes the appropriate treatment isn't acupuncture at all.

That distinction has become fundamental to the way Truth Fertility works.

What does “unexplained infertility” actually mean?

One of Verity's greatest frustrations with fertility care is how inconsistent the investigative pathway can be.

Patients may move between their GP, NHS services and private IVF clinics, seeing different clinicians along the way. Tests performed for one person aren't necessarily performed for another, and assumptions can be made about investigations that may never actually have happened.

Eventually, the solution offered may simply become IVF.

IVF is an extraordinary treatment and, for many people, exactly the right one. But helping somebody achieve a pregnancy isn't necessarily the same thing as understanding why they struggled to conceive.

For Verity, “unexplained” should never automatically be interpreted as “there is nothing to find.”

This is why consultations at Truth Fertility often involve going back to the beginning: looking through previous results and treatment, understanding what has already been investigated and identifying potentially important gaps.

The aim isn't to test everybody for everything.

It's to make sure the right questions have actually been asked.

Acupuncture within modern reproductive medicine

Since qualifying, Verity's further education has increasingly focused on reproductive and functional medicine.

She has completed additional training across female and male fertility, including postgraduate education with US obstetrician Dr Bethany Hayes, alongside specialist fertility and functional-medicine training.

She has also been accepted onto an MSc in Reproductive Medicine as part of her continuing development in reproductive science and assisted conception.

The intention isn't to turn acupuncture into Western medicine.

It's to make sure acupuncture is practised with an understanding of it.

That also means recognising the limits of treatment. Acupuncture cannot correct every cause of infertility, and Verity is wary of claims suggesting that needles can somehow overcome every reproductive problem.

Where medical investigation or treatment is appropriate, patients should be able to access it.

Where acupuncture may have a role, it can be used alongside that care.

Measuring what we do

Verity believes that if acupuncture is to become more integrated into modern fertility care, practitioners need to be willing to examine their own outcomes.

Truth Fertility therefore undertakes clinical audit, rather than relying solely on anecdotal success stories, and publishes its pregnancy outcomes openly.

Verity is also interested in finding ways to measure the effects of treatment using outcomes that are meaningful within modern healthcare. This has led to a current pilot study exploring stress physiology and fertility acupuncture, using physiological testing alongside validated patient-reported measures before and after a structured course of treatment.

Not every result will necessarily support what practitioners expect to see.

For Verity, that's part of the point.

Good clinical practice should be willing to ask the question — and interested in the answer.

Writing, evidence and fertility education

Before training in acupuncture, Verity studied journalism. Although her career ultimately took a different direction, many of the instincts behind that training remain central to her work: questioning assumptions, going back to the evidence and translating complicated information into something people can actually understand.

Today, writing and patient education form an important part of her work. Alongside writing extensively for the Truth Fertility blog, Verity is a guest contributor to IVF Matters and has contributed fertility evidence resources for the British Acupuncture Council.

Much of this work is driven by a frustration with the myths and misinformation surrounding fertility. Patients shouldn't have to become reproductive medicine experts simply to understand their own care - but they should be given enough accurate, accessible information to ask good questions and make informed decisions.