Lorne Brown 

I want to welcome Anne Marie Jensen to our Conscious Fertility podcast. And this episode is very much focused on fertility. As our listeners know, a good almost maybe two thirds around consciousness, which anybody can benefit from listening. And then not the majority, but the others are related specifically to fertility. And this will be one of those podcasts that’s really related to fertility. And we’re going to be talking about low level laser therapy nicknamed cold laser, scientifically known as photobiomodulation for fertility. And Anne Marie Jensen, she is a physiotherapist that actually specializes in reproductive health and fertility. And we met because we both have the giga laser and she was part of the Integrated fertility symposium. They introduced us. Actually Emory, I think it goes back further because I read your book in English and wrote the forward to your book as well. So we got introduced by the people at paramedics in Giga because you were part of the self-reporting practitioners to giga laser sharing who is using giga laser and who is getting women pregnant. And you had the largest population with really good success rates. So we started geeking out over email and on the phone, right? That’s how it started.

Anne Marie Jensen 

Yeah, I think so. Yeah.

Lorne Brown

And so she practices in Copenhagen. She’s going to talk about photo, my modulation today. Hopefully we’ll get into her passion around scar tissue and reproductive health and some of the body work she does. And as I was mentioning, she does have a book out in English, so I don’t know how many languages you have it in, but she has the book on fertility and physical therapy where there are sections on photo by modulation and laser for fertility. And she translated into English and I got to read the English version and write the preface or forward to that. So thank you. Thank you. And I wanted to catch up with you because I got in my hands a piece of paper here of a pilot project that you’ve done back in 2022 using the giga laser. So I thought it’d be great for us to connect and share with the listeners a little bit about photobiomodulation. So that’s my long informal introduction to say Welcome to the Conscious Fertility Podcast. Anne Marie.

Anne Marie Jensen

Thank you very much. Good to see you again.

Lorne Brown 

Yes, good to see you as well. So I would like to start with, can you share how you actually came across or got into photobiomodulation? Is it actually part of your training as a physical therapist out in Denmark?

Anne Marie Jensen 

Yeah, but it’s well part of our basic training, but normally we don’t use it for fertility. So I have used it ever since I was educated for OSIS and tendinosis.

Lorne Brown

Yeah, you’re trained to use it for pain. That’s what most people have. Skin issues or

Anne Marie Jensen 

Inflammation.

Lorne Brown 

Inflammation and pain and injuries to help heal it. So how did you come to use it for reproductive health in particular for those trying to conceive naturally or go through IVF? How did that happen?

Anne Marie Jensen 

Well, actually I will. I bought a giga laser a long time ago and I had only had it for I think a couple of months. And there was this woman from Sweden who contacted me and would like to book some laser treatments for fertility treatment. And I was quite surprised and I started saying, ah, I don’t work with fertility. I would advise you to call somebody else. She said, oh, please, can we try? Because I heard that they worked with giga in Norway with a very good success rate and she was from Sweden, but the closest giga laser to her private poem was in Copenhagen. So she would really like to come to try this out with my giga laser. And I really tried to say, no, sorry, no, I can’t do that. But she kept pushing me. So at the end I said, okay, let’s do it like this.

I go for lunch every day at 12. I will let you use my giga laser while I’m having lunch. I didn’t want to get involved, but I allowed her to use my giga laser. At that time she had tried to become pregnant. She had one child, she had tried for five years to become pregnant again. She would like another child and she had spent a huge amount of money on all kinds of treatments. So she came six times and I went for lunch and I just said hello and goodbye. And after two weeks she called me and said, thank you very much, I’m pregnant. After having tried everything for five years, it finally happened. And then we waited for nine months to see if the child was okay and she had a very healthy baby and a great birth. Actually, she came back to me a couple of years after she would like to have a third child and we just did the same again, six laser treatments and she was pregnant again.

 

That’s how it started.

Lorne Brown 

So you fell into fertility by accident. And that reminds me of Shiro, the medical doctor from Japan. And for those that don’t know, he also fell into it by accident. So he was focusing on pain. He was an MD that was a pain specialist and he used photo modulation, low level laser therapy to treat pain. And he has this approach where he treats proximal meaning around the head, so around the carotid and the back of the net like ganglia, the vagus nerve areas get impacted with the low level laser. And a woman who I remember you shared this in your book, by the way, a woman who was in menopause did this treatment for back pain and although he resolved her back pain, her menstrual cycle came back, which she wasn’t happy about and dismissed it, go see your gynecologist. Doesn’t have anything to do with what we’re doing until a second woman who was also in menopause with back pain went through a series of treatments, resolved her back pain, and her cycle came back.

So he concluded, oh, if we’re bringing blood flow from head to toe, because that’s why he did that approach around the neck to increase the parasympathetic response to blood flow. If we’re bringing blood head to toe, then we’re bringing more blood to the ovaries in the uterus, so maybe we’re rejuvenating the ovaries. So they went on and did a pilot study. It was about 74 women, average age 39 9 years of infertility, and they had a nice access rate of 23% pregnant, over 60% live birth rate. And they expanded that study to 400, similar 23% pregnancy, 50% live birth rate. So you guys have a lot in common. So when I first met you and learned about you, I don’t remember now, I hadn’t reviewed that chart, but I think you had well over 150 cases at that time where you had treated people with the giga laser and saw some really good benefit in pregnancy success, correct?

Anne Marie Jensen 

Yeah, actually I can’t remember the numbers right now, but they’re in my book I think,

Lorne Brown

And I bring that up. It wasn’t just like four or five cases. I mean you had over a hundred cases and then in the pilot project that you did, I thought we’d talk a little bit about the pilot project where you broke it down in age groups and how many treatments and frequency treatments and how long just so people can get an idea. And we have some people that are familiar with the laser and then we have some people that may be hearing this for the very first time. So I thought we could hit all levels from beginner, intermediate to advanced in our discussion here. And do you want to discuss what you think the mechanism is from photo by modulation also known as low level laser therapy? What is the mechanism that you think could be impacting reproductive health fertility?

Anne Marie Jensen 

Well, we like to work with what we call the five flows. We like to increase blood circulation and we like to increase the, I’m not sure about the English. You have to have the blood coming through the reproductive organs, but you also have to have the blood.

Lorne Brown 

Yeah, so the returns, so you have to have it coming and then you have to remove the waste. Right, exactly. Has blood flow to come and go. Okay. So blood circulation, I think you’re calling it venous flow. So yeah, artery and venous flow, venous

Anne Marie Jensen 

Flow and lymph flow is very important. And then we talk about the energetic flow and the nerve flow or the innovation.

Lorne Brown 

When you say energetic, are you talking from an energetic like holistic or energetic as an A TP from the mitochondrial function?

Anne Marie Jensen 

When we talk about the energetic flow, feel free to think what you want. When we travel in some countries it’s a very spiritual flow. Other countries it’s like we can call it, it’s the stress hormones. We can talk a little bit more about a TP later, but we like to think the five flows need to work optimally.

Lorne Brown 

I’ve interrupted you. So what are the five flows in just so we can hear what you’re calling the five flows, energetic blood flows, the

Anne Marie Jensen 

Blood flowing to the reproductive organs, we need the blood flowing away because you need to remove the waste products. You need the lymph flow to work optimally. And we like the innovation to flow optimally. And then we have the fifth flow, we call it the energetic flow. That can be

Lorne Brown 

Many levels.

Anne Marie Jensen 

I get that you have your Chinese medicine way of looking at the

Lorne Brown 

Energetic

Anne Marie Jensen 

Flow. Yeah, although you find spiritual flow and or the flow of stress hormones in your body. So what we think that laser can do with the five flows is definitely increase the blood circulation, the blood coming to the reproductive organs, but probably also the venous flow and definitely also the lymph flow because you will increase circulation altogether that will also affect the lymph. When it comes to the energetic flow, we sometimes use lasers to decrease inflammation around the nerve roots to increase nerve innovation. Can you call it nerve flow?

Lorne Brown 

I like nerve innovation that makes

Anne Marie Jensen 

Innovation. Yeah. When we talk about the energetic flow, I often think talking about stress hormones makes sense. We would like to lower the stress hormones and increase the feel good hormones and maybe we can also do that with lasers. It can be very relaxing to lie under the giga laser. Probably the sound and the warmth and you can’t move the feeling. But we also know that lasers have a great impact on the microbiome in our intestines.

Lorne Brown

That’s right. The microbiome is becoming really important in overall health and when it comes to reproductive health as well,

Anne Marie Jensen 

And we have research showing that laser therapy increases the diversity of the microbiome that affects so much in our body.

Lorne Brown 

That microbiome that came out of Australia originally and that’s where they looked at it was in a Parkinson’s study because they linked the microbiome and its inflammation to brain health. And so their approach was to use the photobiomodulation on the brain stem, so the back of the head and over the abdomen over the microbiome and they showed an improvement in certain biomarkers looking at dopamine and on symptoms as well. And then they did some gene sequencing of the microbiome before and after. So they definitely saw a positive change in the good bacteria in the gut microbiome, which can lead to so many health benefits. Right, exactly. Because the microbiome affects our skin, our gut health, our mood, our hormones, and so there we go into reproductive health. Right? So yeah,

Anne Marie Jensen

It has a great impact on our estrogen levels.

Lorne Brown 

Yeah, the hormones for sure. And estrogens and serotonin, all those important hormones. And when you talk about the stress level, one of the features of Oshiro, the medical doctor from Japan that we talked about, his whole focus when he did around the neck was, and he did another point we call in Chinese medicine run 12, so halfway between the xiphoid and the belly button, we now know through other research that anatomical feature there will create a parasympathetic nervous system response, which you talked about. And O’Shea’s whole reason for doing that was for blood flow. And so there’s the whole Newtonian materialistic, what happens when you engage the relaxation response And then what you alluded to was there’s also this more spiritual flow and receptivity which Chinese medicine talks about fertility. So when you can engage that feel good endorphins, engage that parasympathetic response and create more flow and receptivity on what we call in Chinese medicine on a chi level, other great things can happen. So those are your five flows that you’re saying you’re believing the mechanism can help with.

Anne Marie Jensen 

I also work with a small handheld laser that we do a lot of work up here,

Lorne Brown 

So you’re pointing to we’ll also put, you can go to the YouTube video for those that are listening. But Anne Marie’s showing, so you’re doing the back of the neck and then was it along the SCM, like the upper trap is what you’re doing? Is that what I saw?

Anne Marie Jensen 

Well I always search for tension trigger points in this area and I think it also affects the vagus nerve, which would also de-stress my patients. I think

Lorne Brown 

We have the probes as well and we’ll do around the neck and the satellite ganglia to engage the PNS, elicit the relaxation response to create good blood flow. Oh, do you want to talk a little bit about your ATP mitochondria as well? I know that was something that is a great interest to

Anne Marie Jensen

You. Well we also need to remember to talk a little about inflammation because we know that laser therapy in general has an anti-inflammatory effect.

Lorne Brown 

I actually like to go there even before the A TP or the mitochondrial because when I read o’s, she’s paper and he concluded that he thought the treatment was bringing more blood flow to the reproductive system and then why he saw in these difficult cases the English translation was severe infertility in the Japanese paper

And he thought it was blood flow. And I actually thought, well you know what? There’s people like you that do the body work or people who do femoral massages that bring blood flow acupuncture, especially electrical acupuncture, which is excellent for bringing blood flow. And in my mind I thought, I think the reason the photobiomodulation in his study worked so well is because it engaged the parasympathetic response which has so many benefits, not just blood flow including reducing those stress hormones, but I thought it’s its ability to regulate inflammation because inflammation leads to accelerated biological aging and premature degenerative diseases and premature fertility decline. So I think that’s one of the features why the systemic effect it has on inflammation, why it can benefit so much. Is that what you kind of think as well?

Anne Marie Jensen 

Exactly. Yeah, I totally agree. You have so many patients with inflammation, intestine herpes, all kinds of endometriosis, adenomyosis. We have so many women with inflammation in their lower abdomen,

Lorne Brown

Gut inflammation. Then the pelvic you mentioned endometriosis, scar tissue they may have from diseases or surgery

And then just chronic inflammation like pain and inflammation in the body can tap on the adrenal system which affects the whole hypothalamus pit ovarian axis. So we all need some inflammation to stay alive to heal, to ovulate and implant. It’s when we have this chronic systemic inflammation that it leads to disease, that balance and the laser is really good at regulating the inflammation. I don’t know if you saw this paper, it came out a couple of years ago, I think it was from maybe even the NIH was part of it because they were talking about using for back pain rather than going to the NSAIDs and these strong painkillers, they suggested things like body work, yoga, acupuncture, low level laser therapy. And then from that we jumped into that. What they noticed when you take a pain med, an anti-inflammatory, it shuts down the bad inflammation that we don’t want and the good inflammation that’s needed for healing. So when you do the anti-inflammatory meds, you’re shaking your head. So you know what I’m talking about here. How do you want to

Anne Marie Jensen 

Share

Lorne Brown

A bit about it?

Anne Marie Jensen

I’m not sure I know exactly this study, but I so much agree, especially when you work with fertility, the anti-inflammation drug is not a good thing.

Anne Marie Jensen 

Will, if you use a lot of painkillers that will decrease your pregnancy chances.

Lorne Brown 

Yeah, because we need some inflammation for implantation, some inflammation ovulation. And the difference with laser therapy is it downregulates the uncomfortable cytokines or prostaglandins the bad inflammation, but it upregulates the good ones. And so in that back pain study, which we can kind of jump off and talk about reproductive health, the laser helped reduce the pain by reducing inflammation but it didn’t reduce the good inflammation that you need for healing. So when you take the anti-inflammatory drugs that shuts down all of the inflammatory responses. You have short-term relief but long-term chronic pain. So you end up with chronic pain conditions and with the low level laser therapy you’re getting the pain relief. It does bring down the inflammation but it doesn’t shut down all inflammation. And so I often say rather than saying that lasers reduce inflammation, photo modulation, we’re not talking about lasers that burn or cut or heat you up like you do for body sculpting or hair removal or surgery.

We’re talking about low level laser therapy. This photobiomodulation regulates inflammation so you don’t shut down all inflammation. We do need some form of inflammation for healing and in this case when we talk about fertility, ovulation and implantation, so we’re aligned on that idea that a big part of the PBM photobiomodulation is its ability to regulate inflammation. I think just to tie in the inflammation I love because I remember hearing you talk about scar tissue, it seems to be something you like to work with when you work with the scar tissue. Can you talk about, because I think you said it creates a little bit of inflammation, that’s why you like to use the giga laser right after to help clean up. It’s kind of like when you cut your lawn and then you rake it up and get rid of all the leaves.

Anne Marie Jensen 

When we work with scar tissue, it’s first of all manual physical therapy. We can call it traumatizing therapy.

 

Anne Marie Jensen 

We need to destroy the scar tissue. Every time you have your menstrual cycle, your uterus and tubes need to move in a specific pattern like the uterus has to contract to get the endometrium out and then after the contraction the uterus will start moving in an outgoing pattern and after ovulation your uterus has to grow rice and extend to get ready for the egg. All these very important movements can get very disruptive. You have a lot of scar tissue in your pelvic area. It will make it very hard for the uterus to move. So we do a lot of manual therapy on women with scar tissue in the pelvic area, but every time we do that we kind of traumatize the tissue and we start an inflammation.

Lorne Brown 

Oh because breaking up the scar tissue, so you’re

Anne Marie Jensen 

Breaking up the scar tissue and the immune system will react. So we like to combine the manual therapy with the laser therapy. So I often work with my hands underneath the laser

Lorne Brown 

When with

Anne Marie Jensen 

Scar tissue

Lorne Brown 

Because the laser is this big square, about 500 centimeters squared. So you have that above and so while you’re doing the body work and breaking up the scar tissue in the lower abdomen, the light is also happening at the same time they’re getting the photons

Anne Marie Jensen 

And we can see from research that the scar tissue will decrease in size when we use lasers.

Lorne Brown 

Yeah, because there’s some research showing that it softens and reduces scar tissue. Have used it for women. I do it in my practice. I’m curious about c-section scars.

Anne Marie Jensen 

Oh yeah.

Lorne Brown 

Have you found

Anne Marie Jensen 

That? I do that every day.

Lorne Brown 

The color lightens up and the thickness up

Anne Marie Jensen

Immediately.

Lorne Brown 

Yeah, you can see that. And again, bringing blood flow, regulating inflammation, softening scar tissue, waist

Anne Marie Jensen 

Tissue waste products,

Lorne Brown 

 

Waste products, and then the healing of the A TB, the mitochondria so the cells can proliferate, can replicate and heal. Right.

 

Anne Marie Jensen 

You break down the old tissue and start a new healing process and that’s where the laser comes so handy.

Lorne Brown 

How soon after would you do somebody with a c-section scar? Do you have a time they need to wait or as soon as they’re able to come into your practice, will you use it?

Anne Marie Jensen 

Well you can start very soon after. Not with the manual therapy though, where you have to, we start with the breathing and some slow moving stretching home exercises and then you can use the laser. I seldom see them after one week, but I think you could do it after one week.

Lorne Brown 

Yeah, I mean some don’t think of it and they’re busy obviously with their baby at home, but we do have some that are aware of it. They come to our practice before and they come to help with the C-section scar and this is not a leap. I mean anecdotally we’ve seen some changes, but there is actually published research on low level laser therapy for surgery. So if you do it before surgery and immediately after they show reduction in pain, that reduction in swelling and acceleration in healing and c-section surgery. So it’s very aligned and has the evidence to support that. That would make sense. I also encourage patients that are going through IVF, we’re already seeing them at least twice a week during the stimulation phase leading up to the retrieval and we ask them if they can come in within 24 to 48 hours from the retrieval because again it’s surgery and because going in and you mentioned your five flows, one of them is lymph, the other one’s blood flow. If we can help move the lymph and blood circulation, the more blood to the area and blood carrying away waste and more lymphatic and immune response, then hopefully less pain and accelerate the healing because usually shortly after either they’re going to do a transfer on day five fresh or usually the next cycle they’re doing a frozen transfer. So I also like to do it that way. Have you been using it that way at all your lasers?

Anne Marie Jensen 

Always. We always advise our patients to come after retrieval. Having the X retrieved can cause a pain and inflammation, so

Lorne Brown 

That’s why they give you a lot of pain meds when you go into the procedure.

Anne Marie Jensen

It would make more sense to try to ease pain with a laser.

Lorne Brown

I want to talk about some of the data that you’ve collected. I don’t remember how many years ago it was, but it was pre covid that you wrote the book and talked about yours, and then you did kind of a pilot project and again you sent me the summary of it. Do you kind of want to go through it because you kind of broke it down with age. I just read it the other day, but if my memory serves me right. Was it about 60 women that you looked at? Was that the number for this paper?

Anne Marie Jensen 

That was the year 2021. I had 60 women using the laser for self-treatment.

Lorne Brown 

Okay, so this is without your body work. I actually want to, so we’re going to talk about the paper P, it was just a photo by modulation where they come in on your lunch hour or whatever and use the laser. It’s a program 6 -23 minutes. That’s what we have it. We both have the giga. So yes, you can do this with other laser systems mind you. But you’re using the giga. I have the giga as well as I have multiple systems. I like my toy so I can’t just have one. But in your practice it’s not like just come and get photobiomodulation. You do a full on assessment, you do dietary therapy, breathing exercises, stretching, and then you’re trained in not only physical therapy but multiple body works, especially body works that are related to the reproductive system. Correct.

Anne Marie Jensen 

Exactly.

Lorne Brown 

So this study is with just doing the laser and I would imagine because we see it in our practice, if you add supplements, if you add diet, if you add stretching and all the body work, you probably would see even different results. But can we talk about just the photo bi modulation group first or

Anne Marie Jensen

That doesn’t in my project it doesn’t mean that they did not have any other treatments.

Lorne Brown 

Okay. So tell us what this group would’ve had and tell us what you would have talked about. I want the listeners to see when you are looking to get similar results that you’re going to share in this pilot study, you would want to do similar or the same to get similar or the same results. Right.

Anne Marie Jensen

Actually I normally don’t call it a pilot study.

Lorne Brown 

What do you call it?

Anne Marie Jensen 

It’s not scientific study. It’s just what I did. I have a giga laser. Actually, we have a giga laser in our waiting room that people can come and use. You have to contact me first. You have to have an individual consultation first.

Lorne Brown 

So initial consult first, they don’t just show up in your waiting room and use your laser. I want to make sure for those that are in Copenhagen, you don’t have them walking into your waiting room. So you have to have a consultation with you first. Okay. Next

Anne Marie Jensen 

To make sure that it makes sense to use a laser in this case.

And then you can actually just book on my website, book the laser. You get the code for the door for the waiting room. So even when we are closed, you can come in and use the laser in the evening. These 60 women, I could see in my system that they were using the laser for self-treatment. This doesn’t say that they didn’t do anything else. We could have had other treatments, but they used it for self treatments. I was curious about how it works when I just let use my laser while I’m not here? Are they doing well because I sometimes have less contact with them? I see them maybe once they are fine. No scar tissue, no pain, just maybe unexplained infertility or also related infertility. They might not need any other treatment or they’re not interested in any other treatment, but it also might be a combination of something else.

So they come and use the laser and then sometimes I kind of lose a little bit of contact with them. I send an email once in a while, how are you doing? But basically they can come and use the laser while I’m not here. So I decided all these women who used my laser for self treatment in 2021, let me just see how they did afterwards. So I waited a year and then I contacted all of them and asked how have you been doing since last time? And then I gathered all this data and put them in what you call a pilot project.

Lorne Brown 

Okay, so I get it now. It’s a chart review case study or chart review. 

Anne Marie Jensen

Yeah, something like that.

Lorne Brown 

Yeah. This is where studies get built from actually is when you start to notice a trend in your practice.

Anne Marie Jensen 

Exactly. This could be, you could call it pilot study. We could do, yeah,

Lorne Brown 

But we could do

Anne Marie Jensen 

Big study after that.

Lorne Brown 

A retrospective chart review, right, of looking at your data. Got it. Okay.

Anne Marie Jensen 

 

I asked them, are you naturally pregnant or did you do IVF or ICSI or did you have a donor or I-U-E. But I didn’t ask, did you have acupuncture or did you do exercises or did you change your diet? I didn’t ask that. What these 60 women have in common is they all use the giga laser for self-treatment. It’s interesting because the price is so low and it’s so easy. It’s so convenient for my patients. They don’t have to book appointments with me. They have to do it online to see it online. Yeah, it makes it easier.

 

Lorne Brown 

Oh when I don’t book. That means because you’re not there with them. So they’re coming in lying on the, Hey, you’re making me think if there’s a way we could do that. One thing I like about the system is that we have multiple laser systems and with the giga one you have such good case study reviews to show the positive impact.

The other part is from an acupuncture perspective, so many laser systems are on the skin, which is actually really beneficial. You don’t have any reflection, you get a lot of absorption that way. But with the giga it’s nice because we can put the needles on the abdomen and

Lorne Brown 

Then put the laser

Anne Marie Jensen 

Laser

Lorne Brown 

Above it and it just allows

Lorne Brown 

Flexibility. So good. Alright. 

Anne Marie Jensen 

What I also liked about this way and working is that the women going through IVF, they often have so many appointments all the time. They have to go and see the doctor and it always has to be in working hours and they’re getting a little stressed because they’re running to treatment in different places. So this is very flexible.

Lorne Brown 

So if I can understand your setup, which is we don’t have a waiting room with a lock on it. We have a public waiting room. But if I understand the way it works for you in Copenhagen is you’re using it when you’re in your clinic hours. So it’s not available because you’re getting your hands treated while you treat your patients. That’s why you’re going to last so long as a physiotherapist because your hands get treated while you treat your patients under the laser. That’s so much.

Lorne Brown 

And also, but when you’re not treating rather than the giga just sitting there not being used outside of your treatment times, there’s a way that they get a code to your waiting room. They book online and then it’s available for, it’s about 23 minutes of the treatment. So maybe every 30 minutes it can turn over for these people. I got it.

Anne Marie Jensen 

Well, since we talked about it last time, I bought another gigawatt, so I have two now. So I have one that is always in the waiting room, so it’s always available for self-treatment and it is really nice. They can use it in the evening, in the early morning lunch hour or the whole weekend.

Lorne Brown 

So let’s talk about frequency of treatment because one thing that I know is that the company that makes the giga paramedics, a lot of the public are buying the probes that you can also use clinically. And I do coaching calls for a lot of people. They send them to me to ask me how I would suggest using them so I can show them their shero. We use it on the neck, on the abdomen, the microbiome on the sacrum and a few acupuncture points. So

I know there are a lot of people are using those probes and those probes by the way, they have the probe 1500, I think it has three diodes, not that I think, and the giga laser, same diodes, but the giga laser has 36 of those plus 144 red diodes. So it’s a much bigger area and many more diodes. Some people are just using the probes on themselves and that’s something you can do at home and you don’t have to go and travel and see somebody like us. So it helps. But if somebody is going to, because the gig is a little, it’s cost prohibitive for most people. These things, most individuals are not buying a giga for themselves. There’s always somebody that can afford it, but they’re not as affordable as the probe and even the probes are cost prohibitive for some.

So now I remember my question was how often are they coming to you? How often are you seeing the need to come? So I’d love to know how many cycles until you see the benefit. When do you say, you know what, you’ve done it enough. We haven’t seen a change at this point, so we don’t expect it and how many times in a week, et cetera. So can you walk us through, and I know you talk about that in your chart review so you can review it and then maybe tell us a little bit about what you saw for the different age groups as well.

Anne Marie Jensen 

I normally advise my patients to come two or three times a week inspired by the doctor. You mentioned before Dr. Ohshiro, he preferred two or three times a week. He said maybe optimally three times a week. But in practice it didn’t always work. So sometimes it was too, it still worked. So what we say is try to come here two or three times a week until ovulation or implantation, then you may be pregnant, then we don’t use lasers.

Lorne Brown 

When you say implantation, do you mean like a transfer day for an IVF?

Anne Marie Jensen 

Yeah.

Lorne Brown 

Well I’m thinking if it’s a natural cycle, like five, six days after the implant, but I don’t think you use it after ovulation. So the embryo will implant five or six days later. It’s

Anne Marie Jensen 

Either you use it until ovation or if you are having a transfer, you can use it until transfer

Lorne Brown 

Just on languaging because the IVF clinic transfers the embryo but the embryo does the implantation.

Anne Marie Jensen

Okay, I didn’t know that.

Lorne Brown

Not all embryos implant, right. So yeah, they do a transfer and then we hope the embryo implants and whether you have an IVF or a natural cycle, there will be an implantation usually when the embryo is around six days old. Right. So I’ll say it a different way. You’re not using the laser over the sacrum or the abdomen. If there is an embryo in the fallopian tube or an embryo in the uterus, we use photo modulation in the luteal phase or after transfer, but we don’t do it over the sacrum embryo. We may still do the technique for blood flow, regulate inflammation and we’ll treat the microbiome still or the vertebrae, the spine that goes, the ovaries in the uterus, but we won’t put it over just because that’s what they recommend. Nobody’s done research over the sequence for safety.

Lorne Brown 

We just don’t do it over a growing fetus. There is no reason why we think it would cause harm, but nobody knows. So they say don’t do it

Anne Marie Jensen 

For safety reasons. Yeah, probably it would be beneficial. But since we don’t know and we don’t do research like that on newly pregnant women, we better be safe.

Lorne Brown 

I interviewed years ago when I had interviewed Michael Hamlin who’s had a lot of publications on photobiomodulation. He was just sitting there, I told him what I was doing. He was like, oh my god. It would be really interesting to treat the women when they’re pregnant because using the laser on the tibia or the sternum can help with stem cell proliferation. So this would probably be really beneficial for the baby if the mother was being treated during pregnancy. So theoretically so again, but we don’t know over the uterus or over the sacrum, the safety issues. And because it’s photons, the baby is at the development age where their eyes are open, it could be dangerous to the eyes. So if you’re doing home systems or seeing a practitioner, basically the current literature says don’t use photobiomodulation over a growing fetus. So don’t do it over the lower abdomen or sacrum if you know there is a pregnancy, so you’re saying around ideally three times a week from menstruation to ovulation. So just during that follicular fades, the first half of the cycle you would treat. So that would be a one cycle treatment and they’d get on average six treatments, four to six treatments in that cycle.

And how many cycles do you recommend? Is it a one cycle and it should work or do you think it requires a few cycles?

Anne Marie Jensen 

I think it often requires three or four circles because it takes about three months to mature an egg. So if you want to have a really good healthy egg, maybe lots of the women coming here suffer from age-related infertility. So we want better eggs, we want a better egg quality. So we like to stimulate through three cycles. And actually what I was curious about when I did this last study, is it sometimes too much? Can I give too many? Because I realized that I had patients who came here every month for more than a year. So I was curious to see if I should tell them to stop? Is it too much? Is it in the papers I sent you? I can’t remember. But I had some women who came here more than 60 times.

Lorne Brown 

Okay, more than 60 treatments,

Anne Marie Jensen

But it worked out well. Some of them got pregnant after 60 times or 70.

Anne Marie Jensen 

You can’t say that that’s too much. You should forget it. If it doesn’t work within half a year, forget it. It’s not like that.

We still see some women who are severely infertile. Maybe because of age it still makes sense. And the women who came here for so many months, it was often women who had tried everything for maybe five or six years, nothing worked. Then they do the giga laser treatment for maybe three or four months and they become pregnant, but they lose it again. So we try again and try again. And almost all of them succeeded.

Lorne Brown 

In some cases it depends. Some of them have PCOS or endometriosis and I find clinically they’re going to be more of a six month treatment than a three month treatment.

Anne Marie Jensen 

Yeah, I think so too

Lorne Brown 

Because of the pathology and what’s going on versus something that’s more simple maybe that’s causing the infertility.

Anne Marie Jensen 

What do you think about H related infertility? Do you think sometimes we need more than three or four circles?

Lorne Brown

Yeah, just like they may need more IVF. They need more acupuncture. They need a higher dose of coenzyme Q10. I use this metaphor, Emory of the fertility journey. It’s like the ancient times where you’re in a carriage and you got a horse or horses to take you over this journey and your goal is to get to place as efficiently and quickly as possible with your carriage intact. And so sometimes you need just one horse that would be photobiomodulation. Sometimes you need to add acupuncture and supplements and herbs. So each one of those is a horse. So if you come in at age 21 with unexplained infertility, you may need a horse. But if you come in at 44 and you have endometriosis or PCOS or multiple failed IVFs or miscarriages, you’re going

Anne Marie Jensen 

To Laura Aspen with low semen quality.

Lorne Brown 

Well that’s not her. That’s him. We need to treat, right? Yeah, exactly. That’s another horse. We need to put a horse on his carriage. Yeah, yeah. That’s a whole other problem where it’s the partner or the male contributing, the person contributing the sperm is the issue and we’re only seeing the female. So that’s going to be my next question. So we’re going to talk about the men. I just want to kind of hear then, did you find there was a certain age group you didn’t see much help with? Was there a certain age group? What was the age group that you predominantly saw that you saw the benefit after three to four cycles of treatment? And if you’re doing it three times a week now this is in your case review that you did. How many treatments did they do total then when these women became pregnant that did the self-treatment with the giga laser in your clinic? What was the number that you recall? And I’ll look to

Anne Marie Jensen 

Average, they came here for 16 treatments.

Lorne Brown 

16. So there you go. So 16 treatments. And it depends how many average, that’s the average, right? And if you’re doing it for three cycles and it’s six treatments, a cycle is what you intended. So just for doing the math, everybody again, three sessions a week in the first half of the cycle, the way you have done it, so that’s six treatments per menstrual cycle. So three menstrual cycles would be 18. So these individuals either did it less than three times a week on average. And then if you did it four cycles, there’s 24 treatments up to 24 treatments. Or if you did it twice a week, that would be 16 treatments. So you’re looking on average 16 treatments over three to four months. And it’s been my experience treating other things besides reproductive health. Like pain is easy to see. Fertility is a pass or a fail.

So it’s not always easy to see how much you’re helping until you see the pregnancy. We can see a change in flow and pain and clots, PMS, we see those things, but with pain, we can see right away. And it’s been my experience and when I look at the research those three times a week for the first two weeks is kind of what we do for an acute injury. And then we start to do less. And for my reproductive patients, I encourage them to come three times a week for the first two to three cycles. If they’re just doing the follicular, if they’re going to come all month, then twice a week for three cycles and then we can usually do it less.

Anne Marie Jensen 

I have patients flying in from other countries, so I have been not sure how to do that because maybe they’re here in Copenhagen for one week.

Lorne Brown 

We have the same, they fly to my Clinic

Lorne Brown 

Or drive from.

Anne Marie Jensen

So I’ve been trying to do maybe laser once a day. And actually then I had my own son coming in from c Miller Cole, Hawaii where he’s surfing. He had an injury. So we gave him laser one day, two times a day, the next day once and then the next day again two times morning and evening.

Lorne Brown 

So two times a day.

Anne Marie Jensen

And that works so well. So now at the moment when I have people coming in from different countries, we actually sometimes do it twice a day.

Lorne Brown 

Oh wow. So I have not done that. Interesting because we’ve done, let’s geek out here for a minute. I want to think about this. And again, it depends on the individual. It’s too much for some or not. But when people travel from, I’m in the Pacific Northwest, so we get from California or they’ll drive in from Oregon or Washington state.

Some do get on the planes from other parts of Canada in the states and they’ll come for a week and Vancouver’s an amazing place to visit. So they’re coming, they’re enjoying themselves, they’re getting nutritional IVs, they’re getting their acupuncture and their laser, but we’ll tell them maximum four times in the week. So if they’re here for four or five days, we will do two days in a row or even three. But we usually have a day off after three in a row. And I just say because the cells have to do something with it, they have to kind of process it. And I think of it as drinking out of a slow hose, like a little water or fire, like a fire hose. You do want to have it that the cell can take it in and drink it in to use that metaphor properly. But I agree with you, it’s possible that twice in one day may be okay for some people. I don’t know.

Anne Marie Jensen

I did some testing on myself as well. I had some neck shoulder pain recently so I could play with the ency and sometimes I felt twice a day is actually really nice.

Lorne Brown 

I did it with my home system, I broke my ribs a couple months ago, three ribs, and I was doing it twice a day at the beginning just to help with the pain and to really accelerate the healing was my goal.

Anne Marie Jensen

But I agree, I don’t think it’s optimal for women who stay who live here in Copenhagen. I wouldn’t do it twice a day because you might keep filling energy into cells that are already full.

Lorne Brown

When we eat a meal, three meals a day, you’re going to eat three meals a day. We don’t sit and eat all three at once right in one sitting. We got to. But like you said, if they’re in the area then do it every other day like we’re suggesting or three times in a week having some breaks if you can. But if it’s a better scenario, if you’re from out of town, then I can see doing it three days in a row. I usually like to give people a break after three days in a row from my laser just to again allow the body to do something with the photons or

Anne Marie Jensen 

We do it in the front in the morning and on the back in the evening. Especially if they have some kind of bag egg, we could use it on the back,

Lorne Brown

But to be efficient with their time and my time, I can just do the front and then flip and do the back as well.

It’s two different areas of the body. So you’re doing on average six treatments a cycle. In our practice we’re often seeing people eight times in a cycle. We’re already doing it twice a week and we just change a little bit of our strategy in the luteal phase, if there’s a chance of pregnancy, if they’re not trying to get pregnant, there’s no chance of pregnancy, they’re suppressed because doing a frozen or an IVF cycle, they’re being suppressed. There’s no chance of a pregnancy, then we’ll treat the same way the whole month. If there’s a chance of pregnancy, then we’re focusing on blood flow regulating inflammation and the microbiome.

Anne Marie Jensen

Yeah. So you use the laser, you put it a little higher or

Lorne Brown 

Yeah, a lot higher. So the navels kind of is our baseline. So it’s the navel and above. I’m not convinced that the photons reach the ovaries yet. I think we’re helping with blood flow. I think we’re helping with regulating inflammation and lymphatic and we’re improving cellular health. So it absorbs more food and more vitamins when we start to improve our health. I’m not convinced that the photons can reach the ovaries. That’s why I think somebody’s going to have to invent a probe. It’s just like they do the vaginal ultrasound to look at the ovaries to count the follicles or do an IVF retrieval. If somebody can put some laser diodes on that ultrasound camera on the probe, then they can just point it from the vaginal wall at the ovary that’s closer. And then I think that could have some good mitochondrial effect. And that’s what they did similarly in that mouse study where they showed improved embryo quality.

When they put the mice through the IVF, they only lasered one of the ovaries. And what they did is they did an incision, pulled the ovary through the incision, they lasered it high too. But mice, ovaries are different from human ovaries. Put the ovaries back in and then they put the mouse through an IVF the side, they got lasered and had better embryo qualities. So for humans we’re not going to do that. But putting the probe and pointing it at the vaginal wall, at the ovary, two things. One is you have the camera so you can see the ovaries there because most ovaries don’t look like they do in the textbook. They can move and get pulled by adhesions and scar tissue, et cetera. So they may not be where you think they are, which is why I like the giga laser you’re using because it covers such a large area, you’re going to get on top of where the ovaries would be.

But with this probe, if you have the camera on there, you can see where the ovaries are and then point the diodes at it. And there’s just the vaginal wall now that you have to go through to get to the ovaries versus whether they’re bladders in the way or intestines and all the muscle tissue that you have to go through to get there. Which is why Roberta, when I chatted with her when she was using it for fertility and pelvic inflammatory disease pain, she just said, just get a lot of photons into the pelvic bowl. So kind like how you and I treat, we just put a lot of photons, lower abdomen.

Anne Marie Jensen 

I don’t think you necessarily have to reach the ovaries. I think there’s a lot of domino effects going on

Lorne Brown 

With the

Anne Marie Jensen 

Energy there is cascade energy and the blood circulation.

Lorne Brown

Well there’s two things we’re looking at, Anne Marie. First of all, you have case studies to show that it helps, right? We’re just trying to figure out the mechanism, but we often know it works before we know how it works. So we’re just trying to play with the mechanism. I’ll give you one more that’s a little out there. As in quantum physics. So I had somebody I chatted with and they were saying that they’re noticing that when the photon hits the cell, there’s the whole increase in aTP production through cytochrome C. But they say that when the red light hits the cell, the cell then emits like yellow or other photons light. So there is a domino cascade of effect.

Anne Marie Jensen 

Yeah, exactly. And

Lorne Brown 

I asked what’s that? He goes, we call that quantum biology now it’s less of a chemical process and it’s a photon process. So quantum, so when we’re talking we just like to understand the mechanism, but I’m interested in whether it works. And when I looked at your paper, you thought that if the women were younger, you saw less benefiting. You thought maybe because they don’t have mitochondrial health issues from an egg quality perspective. Was that what you were thinking?

Anne Marie Jensen

Yeah, I have to, when they’re young, I have to look for other problems.

Lorne Brown

If they have endometriosis or PCOS though, even if they’re young, I still like the photobiomodulation.

Anne Marie Jensen 

Me too. But I have to look more into how they eat, for instance, or how they exercise or are they very stressed or could they have closed tubes or there could be so many other things.

Lorne Brown 

Yeah, that’s a given for me. So we always want them to have the hyster cell ping agram to confirm tubes are open. And when we see people at our clinic in Vancouver, we always address stress. We address diet, we address movement, sleep. All those things have to be working. And then we’re looking at regulating the cycle with our tools, one of them being photobiomodulation. 35 to 39 seems to be the error where you saw a lot of benefit. And then even 40 to 44, you saw some benefit as well. You only had two people above 45. So I know those two who were pregnant, but to me that’s so small.

Anne Marie Jensen 

One of them only came to see me three times.

Lorne Brown 

Okay, yeah. So

Anne Marie Jensen 

The other one 11 times.

Lorne Brown 

So on average, that’s not enough. That’s not enough, especially if you’re

Anne Marie Jensen 

Over 45, not when you’re 45.

Lorne Brown 

So here’s the downside that you need to do multiple treatments over three to four cycles. So it’s not a magic bullet and it’s multiple treatments. So you’re going to a clinic multiple times. I think that’s why I’m seeing more people call me to have the coaching call for the home systems, the probe, because A, they can’t get to people like you or myself or they’re just like, that’s too much in a week. And so they’re doing it at home. And so average three to four cycles. Nat Mura, when I interviewed him from Japan, he said at least three cycles. He showed that the photobiomodulation that he did acupuncture plus the photo bi modulation, he treats similar to us over the neck area for the blood flow, parasympathetic response over the lower abdomen to get photons into the pelvic bowl and over the sacrum and the denal nerve as well, that area.

He showed that they doubled blasts rates, which is great. And he said on average you need about three cycles of treatment. And he said after six cycles of treatment, they found that if you don’t see results by then, if they didn’t see results by after six cycles of treatment, they usually found there was a big drop off because there’s something much more complicated. He didn’t say it was impossible. Emory, I’ve had multiple women thinking of one now that had a premature variant insufficiency. So she was in her mid thirties, no longer ovulating, antral follicle count, negligible. They couldn’t find any. The overlooked a little smaller and non-functioning, A MH undetectable. We treated her again, diet, lifestyle, herbs, acupuncture, laser. And she started ovulating again and she ended up having a child naturally. But that was nine months of treatment, regular treatment. So we’re just saying after six months the chances go down. But it doesn’t mean impossible, but it does mean it goes down. Alright, now we’re going to talk about the man. So are you using photo bi modulation for the guys and how’s that helping?

Anne Marie Jensen 

Well, I didn’t do any studies on that. I haven’t done what I did with the women. I didn’t contact all the men. Actually right now I am changing the way I treat men. So from August, I’m going to do it a little differently.

Lorne Brown 

Can you share it?

Anne Marie Jensen 

So it’s because there is a new study, you probably heard of it from, I think it was from Japan as well with laser acupuncture with some really good results. So what I used to do is just stimulate with the laser on the testicles and the prostate

Lorne Brown 

And with the prostate. And you’re using the probe, not the giga laser for that.

Anne Marie Jensen 

Exactly. You don’t want to heat up the testicles. So I use a small hand rope. So we would do that every cycle. Just before her ovulation we would treat the men.

Lorne Brown 

Alright, so the week before the ovation, the men would come in how many times?

Anne Marie Jensen 

Three or four times.

Lorne Brown 

So three or four times they would come in

Anne Marie Jensen 

And then afterwards we would take a break. Because I’ve read in all the studies that if you keep boosting the semen cells, they get tired. So they need breaks. So that’s how we did it. We boost the cells and then give them a break and then boost again, give them a break. But now I read this study from Japan where they use laser acupuncture with really nice results. So we are practicing now here to prepare to work inspired by this new study. That means a list of acupuncture points. I think it was also twice a week for six weeks.

Lorne Brown 

Well, that kind of follows the acupuncture studies, not laser acupuncture where they showed morphology changes, motility sometimes counts. And on average it was twice a week. A minimum was five weeks and a lot of ’em were 10 or 12 weeks. So you got the acupuncture points. With the laser acupuncture, will you still probe the testes in the perineum, which is in the direction of the prostate as well, or just do the laser

Anne Marie Jensen

Acupuncture. But then I would still probably only do that by the end of the treatment period.

Lorne Brown 

Just closer to ovulation. When they have to give the sample, you wouldn’t do it.

Anne Marie Jensen 

I would boost directly.

Lorne Brown

Okay. Yeah. So if you’re doing twice a week for 10 weeks, you would only do it when they’re going to either give a sample for IVF or have intercourse for the purpose of

Anne Marie Jensen 

During

Lorne Brown 

The fertile window.

Anne Marie Jensen

What do you think

Lorne Brown 

Anne Marie, I always love talking to you. I get ideas like us treating the men that were from you when we talked about it using the probe and just for the guys that are listening or the women we’re not holding the testes and probing it with the laser. I think you give them a probe and they go to the bathroom to use it. Right. And in my practice we have a sheet. So we hand the probe to the guy and then under the sheet they probe over each testicle and then they place it over the perineum, which is between the scrotum and the anus. And direct it towards the prostate.

Anne Marie Jensen 

Yeah. That’s how we do it. But I’m planning to work in different ways and see if I can get an impression on what works better.

Lorne Brown

 

I like it.

 

Anne Marie Jensen

I’m always testing new ways to do things.

Lorne Brown 

You are, and you keep such good data. On the chart review that you shared, you wrote it up, how many got pregnant, how many treatments, how old? I thought it was really beneficial. Did I hear you say somewhere when you looked at all of your over 40, you had a percentage of that got pregnant? I can’t remember if I heard you say that. Is that not in this document, but I once I might’ve heard you on another talk that you shared that, does that come to mind or am I hallucinating?

Anne Marie Jensen 

It’s in my book, the old book?

Lorne Brown 

No, but have you liked something recently?

Anne Marie Jensen 

Yeah, now it’s about 50%, no wait, yeah, over 40. So the age group, 35 to 39, my success rate is 97%. No, 87.

Lorne Brown 

Yeah, 35. So age 35 to 39. Those that come in for a period of at least three cycles on average. 16 treatments. You said about 87% of those have reported back. Of those that reported eight, seven. Did you hear back from all of them? These are from all the people that you contacted and they responded. Of those that responded of the total 87%

Anne Marie Jensen 

That was high that was, I can’t remember. I must’ve written it down somewhere. Maybe 95% responded.

Lorne Brown 

So it’s pretty impressive. And I want to remind the audience, a lot of this group though, they were just coming for self-treatment, correct?

Anne Marie Jensen 

Not just

Lorne Brown 

Oh, okay. So you don’t know that 87% of those because you do stretching and you get in there and do some body work and just, I didn’t say it earlier, but I’m thinking of it now. We know you’re talking about the uterus and the structure and how it has to shake off the lining and it changes position based on the cycle. So in osteopathic medicine, I’ve often heard them say structure determines function and function determines structure. So do you kind of subscribe to that idea that if you have a lot of adhesions and scarring that’s pulling on the ovaries, the fallopian tube or on the uterus, often evidenced by clotty periods or painful periods, that this then is interfering with function.

Anne Marie Jensen 

We often touch our patients, we can feel the adhesions or you can even see them. The navel is drawn to one side. You can see the poster has changed.

Lorne Brown 

The structure determines function and function determines structure.

Anne Marie Jensen 

Definitely

Lorne Brown 

It’s not just that it’s inconvenient that it can be uncomfortable or the navels off center. You are suggesting then that the structure can interfere with the function of healthy follicles. But in this case, at least healthy implantation and menstrual cycles.

Anne Marie Jensen 

We should meet again and talk about the maiava method. We can talk for a couple of hours about that. Was a physiotherapist from the Czech Republic who worked with fertility back in the seventies and eighties before IVF was invented. She did some really great studies, so we’ll have to talk about that, about structure. And she said that you can be a functional, sterile functional, like your reproductive organs are not working properly, they’re not moving the way they should.

Lorne Brown 

And this work, they found that by doing this work they were able to improve reproductive health, pregnancy outcomes.

Anne Marie Jensen 

Yeah, they could say quadruple?

Lorne Brown 

Quadruple four times?

Anne Marie Jensen

Yeah.

Lorne Brown 

Okay.

Anne Marie Jensen 

Yeah. The chances of pregnancy, it’s a lot of home exercise. I have her exercise program on my website, the mahi program. So we work with these specific exercises that you should perform at home once or twice a day for a while, but that’s going to take some time to explain.

Lorne Brown 

Is that on your website? Under online, yeah. So there’s an online course for that, right? For people? Is that what I saw?

Anne Marie Jensen

Yeah, there is a small online video that everybody can buy access to. It’s not very expensive

Lorne Brown 

Online. Yeah, there’s an online course for your self-treatment at home. Alright, so that website I’m going to put in the show notes. Sun, well, I can’t even say it because it’s in Danish. It’s spelled differently than we would for fertility. But I’m going to put the link in the show notes and on that link, just so everybody knows, that’s where you can see books or your book on fertility and physical therapy. You can see your online course that you talk about and other workshops that you offer. And if you’re in the Copenhagen area or you want to come to Copenhagen, Anne-Marie now has two giga lasers.

Anne Marie Jensen 

Yeah. And we have three handheld lasers now in Clinic

Lorne Brown 

Do you use just the Pro five hundreds or do you have the pro 15 hundreds in your practice now?

Anne Marie Jensen 

I have both.

Lorne Brown

And if you’re in the Vancouver area, you come to the Vancouver BC area, we have the giga laser as well. And we’ll have to figure out some method for people to access that more easily in our practice. Now that you’ve given me some ideas, and we’ll have to have you back to talk more about some of these other techniques that are using to support reproductive health because I know we’re trying to close here, but we didn’t talk about the mitochondria, but the cellular mitochondria, I think it was one of the Webers, the pediatrician Micro Weber wrote a book on laser acupuncture. They’re both actually medical doctors both in Germany, both talk about low level laser therapy. One is a pediatrician, so it’s the pediatrician version. And we were chatting and he talked about how photobiomodulation improves that again, cellular proliferation, so mitochondria health and we’re seeing increase in nutrient absorption.

And there was a study because of course if the cells are functioning better then they’ll be able to take the nutrients from your vitamins or from your herbs or from your supplements. And we’ve seen this in a mouse study where they did coq 10 for pain in mice. I think it was pain related, but they showed that the mice that got photobiomodulation had an increase in coq 10 absorption. I think you talked about it once with me too about vitamin D as well. I dunno if that was a study exactly or is it something you’re aware of? Can you remind me of

Anne Marie Jensen 

That? We talked about that or I often talk about that, so I’m sure we did.

Lorne Brown 

Do you want to give, just as we wrap up here, what’s your idea with photobiomodulation and vitamin D? Because we have a lot of vitamin D deficiency in my area and vitamin D deficiency. There’s literature, how it can impact cycle regularity and infertility and miscarriages. So what do you know of vitamin D and low level laser therapy?

Anne Marie Jensen 

Well, there’s not been a lot of research on that, but I think it comes down to some kind of respiration, is that the right word to use? The cell respiration. So the whole absorption of vitamins and minerals and oxygen and the pushing out the waste products. I think it goes for Q 10 and it goes for vitamin D.

Lorne Brown 

Well, it makes sense just so here’s where we go back again, where we’re seeing it works and we’re trying to understand the mechanism of photobiomodulation. There was a study showing how it regulates blood sugar levels right in the blood. So if it can regulate blood sugar, if it has the possibility of regulating inflammation, if it can improve cellular circulation, cell proliferation and respiration, soft and scar, I mean if it has that mechanism then it makes sense that we would absorb better, we would eliminate more weight. It just sounds like it can be beneficial to health depending on again, dosage, wavelength, and what’s going on there. And then we got to individualize it for each person to see what they need. And that’s the harder part. But the mechanism makes sense that it could do all these wonderful things.

Anne Marie Jensen

A lot of people here in Denmark and probably in Canada as well, have vitamin D deficiency. We actually have a lot of vitamin D under our skin in our fat tissue. It’s there, but you got to get it out of the fat tissue into the blood,

Lorne Brown 

Into the blood so it can circulate to the cells

Anne Marie Jensen 

And I think that the laser can help us with this process.

Lorne Brown 

Oh, I like that. And I have a

Anne Marie Jensen 

Lot of, if you get the vitamin D movement because it’s in our fat tissue

Lorne Brown

And I have a lot of fat tissue, Emory, so I’m going to put it on my belly a little bit more.

Anne Marie Jensen 

You see the problem with vitamin D is worse for obese people because the fat tissue absorbs the vitamin D and it’s stuck here as if the body is waiting for the dark season. So we need to put it here. It stores it. Yeah, it stores it, but you have to get it out of the storage. And I think movement, fat burning exercises, but also light therapy can help us with that. And I think that goes for not just vitamin D but all kinds of other vitamins and even hormones. They would get stuck in the fat tissue.

Lorne Brown

Excellent. No, excellent. So to recap, we’re going to put Annemarie’s website in the show notes. So you can check out her book and she does have an online course. Annemarie, we have to have part two to talk about body work more. And then for photobiomodulation, you’ve done some chart reviews and you have shown that they’re benefiting and on average they’re coming two to three times a week in a cycle. So on average four to six times a cycle and on average three to four cycles to get the benefit from your photo bi modulation and you have the giga laser in your practice. And so guys, check out her website again at Accu Balance. We’re in Vancouver, so if you want to know about what we’re doing with photo bi modulation, contact us as well and we can tell you more about what we’re doing. We have multiple laser systems, one of them being the giga and Emery. I always like talking to you because you think a little bit outside the box and then you get me thinking. So now I’m going to look at that, the research for the male laser acupuncture and continue to use it with the guides. And for the listeners, just as we wrap up, you’ve had this experience, as have I, most of our colleagues, men often are easier to treat than women. They just don’t show up to get treated, right, exactly.

Anne Marie Jensen 

Yeah, exactly.

Anne Marie Jensen 

That’s such a shame.

Lorne Brown 

It’s a shame because men are making a thousand to 1500 sperm a heartbeat. Unlike women that are born with all their eggs,

Men are making them. And so if they’ve had a poor diet, if they’re overweight, if they’re doing a lot of drugs and alcohol and they change the lifestyle and if they have something, a mechanism that’s off and we use antioxidant therapy, dietary therapy, acupuncture, photobiomodulation, then in three to six months of that 70, 90 days, so three to six months we can see a difference why to six months That came from a reproductive urologist, Paul Turk, where when they would do varicose seal repairs, this is like when you have a varicose vein in the sase, which creates heat, which then causes either reduction in motility or if it’s a lot of heat, a reduction in count. He said theoretically, after the varicose seal repair, three months later we should see good sperm because of spermatogenesis, but he says often we don’t see it until six months later.

For whatever reason he says it can often take two cycles of spermatogenesis. So for the guys, just so you know, if you do all these interventions and you don’t see a difference three months later continue and then retest five or six months later and you may see the difference then.

Anne Marie Jensen 

And so what I also like about treating men is that you can test the semen quality so easily. It’s so hard to test egg quality, but se quality is so easy.

Lorne Brown 

So I’ll tell you a fun little story here. So we played with the laser with sperm in the Petri dish, so the sperm was ready to be disposed of. So they already did the semen analysis and then we just took a couple of samples and before they tossed it away, I did some laser testing of the sperm about four JUULs, and then they saw the motility kick up again.

Anne Marie Jensen 

Yeah, exactly

Lorne Brown 

Right then and there. I’ve seen so easily with my own eyes. Alright, Anne Marie Jensen, check out her book Fertility Physical Therapy and check out her website and we’ll have you on again soon. Thank you Anne Marie.

Anne Marie Jensen

Thank you.

Lorne Brown 

Alright, we just wrapped up with Anne Marie and I wanted to add that I’ve been talking to Anne Marie about maybe having her even come visit me here in Vancouver and teach my associates and some of the body workers in my city the bodywork techniques that she does. I think it’s shown to be very helpful based on what she has shared. And what I didn’t share in our podcast is in our practice we also go on site at all of the IVF centers to do transfer day treatment. And in those treatments we are doing both combined acupuncture IVF acupuncture and laser acupuncture onsite at olive on your frozen embryo transfer day or your fresh embryo transfer day. And in our practice, olive did a chart review where they looked at over two years of data for those that did chromosomal screening. So the embryos were screened to be OID, meaning normal and that were frozen transfers. And they compared those over two years that also had Acubalance on site, and our patient population that had normal embryos transferred on frozen transfers had a higher pregnancy rate and a lower miscarriage rate than those that did not. So I wanted to share that with you as well. And if you want to know more information, do contact our questions. We do discovery calls. Alright, thank you for tuning into the Conscious Fertility Podcast.