Fertility education provides a natural form of birth control that uses the design and knowledge of your body to know where you are in your cycle to not only avoid or achieve pregnancy, but also have a means to fix what is imbalanced.
If you are having difficulty in your cycle, you are not alone. Fertility education helps to bring unity and partnerships between the woman, her body and her healthcare liaison. Handing a woman a pill, a blanket diagnosis, or an app to download often makes her feel isolated in her struggle. Fertility education is designed to allow a woman to know her body through a face-to-face encounter with a healthcare professional who treats the whole person, not the symptom.
Are you having trouble with PMS (premenstrual syndrome)? Medical providers address the symptoms through hormonal contraceptive prescriptions, but these synthetic drugs interrupt the natural cycle and mask the hormonal imbalance behind these symptoms. This doesn’t address the root of what is really wrong with the woman’s cycle and often leaves the woman feeling more imbalanced and hopeless.
Premenstrual syndrome affects 20-30% of women, and 2-10% of those women are faced with more than fatigue, mood changes, irritability and abdominal bloating; they can become so debilitated that their function and quality of life are impaired.
Where medical providers turn to antidepressants and mental disorder diagnoses, we turn our ears to hear the cry of women; they are not a disease or a mental disorder, they are people who deserve to understand the root of their hormonal imbalance. Perhaps, the hormonal imbalance is causing the emotional distress or mental instability or vice versa.
PMS and dysphoria are caused by a hormonal imbalance and the subsequent effects on the brain. There should be a balance of estrogen and progesterone produced in the cycle, but if these hormones are insufficient, it can cause the premenstrual symptoms.
EH, a fertility education client, had been introduced to fertility education in college but she never applied it. One of the reasons she wanted to know more about her body was to give her peace of mind that “I’m not crazy!” She said even though she knows her cycles are exactly 29 days, she didn’t understand why she felt angry and would often go through emotional distress and have tempertantrums mid-cycle. In addition, she was taking a great deal of Ibuprofen to help with unbearable cramps prior to menstruation. Through fertility education, we tracked three of her cycles. In the beginning, she wasn’t capturing what was happening with her body during her cycle. Through teaching her the anatomy and physiology of her reproductive system, the roles that hormones play throughout the cycle and how to chart her biomarkers, physical and emotional symptoms throughout her cycle, we were able to predict that these symptoms occurred around ovulation and the end of her post-ovulatory phase. We were able to help her identify sources of anxiety and stress, how to manage them through proper nutrition, exercise, stress management and self-care. At the end of three cycles of charting, she no longer reported anxiety, temper tantrums, was not taking any Ibuprofen and had a healthy, balanced cycle. The success story was that we got to the source; we didn’t just manage the symptoms!
At True Choice Medical Clinics, we provide fertility education resources that address these issues. By teaching women to chart their menstruation and cervical mucus quality, they know exactly what is happening during their cycle and the roles that hormones play. They know the exact time of ovulation during each cycle by using the body’s natural hormones to work with them, not the synthetic hormones that work against them. Low estrogen and progesterone levels contribute tremendously to anxiety, depression and insomnia. Many women take a pill or have an implant, but they are not aware of what is happening in their body because they have no personal health record. Fertility education helps bring back the peace, rest and joy that women deserve and gives them a better quality of life.
