Lorne Brown:

By listening to the Conscious Fertility Podcast, you agree to not use this podcast as medical advice to treat any medical condition in either yourself or others. Consult your own physician or healthcare provider for any medical issues that you may be having. This entire disclaimer also applies to any guest or contributors to the podcast. Welcome to Conscious Fertility, the show that listens to all of your fertility questions so that you can move from fear and suffering to peace of mind and joy. My name is Lorne Brown. I’m a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine and a clinical hypnotherapist. I’m on a mission to explore all the paths to peak fertility and joyful living. It’s time to learn how to be and receive so that you can create life on purpose.

We have Dr. Olivia Pojer back on the Conscious Fertility Podcast to talk about male fertility. If you have not listened to our original podcast, do check out episode 19. It is called, I should say, sperm EdDin, the decline in male fertility. Now I’m going to give another introduction to Olivia, and then we’re going to kind of continue this conversation because it takes two to make a baby, as in you need an egg cell and a sperm cell to have a healthy baby and to reduce the chances of miscarriage. And so I want to talk to her more about how and why this is because I was inspired by a conference. I intended the Society of Acupuncture Research that was held in New York in May of 2023, which she spoke at. And so background on Olivia, she’s a medical doctor. She studied medicine at the University of Gras.

She holds an acupuncture diploma as well as an acupuncture diploma for Chinese herbal medicine. She is a fellow of the acupuncture and TC and Board of Reproductive Medicine. That’s the A BRM, as am I. We’re both fellows of that. She has an integrated fertility clinic GRAS where she has a focus on male fertility and she’s also the core organizer of the international TCM Congress called the TAO in Graz, which I’ve had the privilege to attend and speak at. And she’s an author. She’s written two books. One is Secrets from the Chambers of J, treatments of Erectile Dysfunction and Lack of Libido using Chinese Medicine. And her most recent book is the Integrated Treatment of Male Infertility. And so welcome back Olivia to the Conscious Fertility Podcast.

Olivia Pojer:

Thanks for having me. It’s so good to talk to you again.

Lorne Brown:

It’s nice to have you back. And what I want to do is I want to talk about the lecture that you did, but that was for health professionals. This one’s going to be really for the public and emphasizing the importance or why you think it’s important that men are involved in the equation when it comes to optimizing fertility. Now in our original podcast, the one I mentioned, number 19, which was called Spermageddon, there was a research paper that had shared that there is an issue with sperm, that there’s a major decline, and then it had been refuted and people said it wasn’t a good study. But at the conference you said there has been even more research. So can you share a little bit of what they mean by Spermageddon and what is the current understanding of what’s happening to sperm quality in men?

Olivia Pojer:

So this paper that created that term, Spermageddon, which was first used by the newspaper the sun, was because there was a huge study done in 2017, and this was a meta analysis you have to say when it comes to the hierarchy of the quality of studies. And meta-analysis is really the one that is really above. So this is really to be taken seriously. And even in 2017, it showed that the sperm quality was declining by 50%. And then a lot of people said, well, but in this study, several countries and even continents are missing and nobody knows whether if we take cell phone continents in account two, the sperm quality will not be that back. So they updated the paper and included all the continents now, and the result was that the sperm quality worldwide is even worse than assumed in 2017. So there has been a decline by 62.3% when it comes to the total sperm count. That means that over the last 40 years you can say it’s sperm count, the number of sperm that is in an A cate roughly has declined by 62.3%. So that is really, really a sad and worrying situation we are in at the moment. What is the course for that then? That’s a good question. If you wanted to ask me

Lorne Brown:

That, that was going to be my question is why do we care in a sense, and what is the cause?

Olivia Pojer:

Okay. Why do we care is a great one. We do care because it affects a lot of couples when it comes to becoming parents. It takes a good quality act and good quality sperm and enough of good quality sperm. So obviously we have a problem not so much with quality, but more with the count. So the number of sperm that is in the ejaculate has declined by more than 50%, and that causes problems. And also the quality of that sperm of that genetic material that the sperm brings into the egg or is able to bring into the egg is also getting worse. So that’s to worry because if over the last 40 years that decline is more than 60%, what’s going to be the situation in the next 40 years? So we are not able to father a child at all.

Lorne Brown:

And you talked about couples, but if it’s same-sex couples, women or single women, they still need to use donor sperm. So we still need sperm and good quality sperm to make the baby

Olivia Pojer:

True. So whichever constellation wants to be a parent just needs good quality sperm. So that affects everybody and that is going to be a huge problem over time. So that is really, really one of the big topics in the future, how to solve that sperm quality problem. And the main problem is that hardly anyone is aware of it.

Lorne Brown:

Okay. So it’s hard to change or correct a problem if you’re not even aware of it, if your head’s in the sand. Are there others with the big decline in sperm count, are there other things that they see that are in decline also through this research and what you know about the men’s health and hormone health? Or is it just the count they’re seeing?

Olivia Pojer:

It’s not the count. If you would dare to assume that with the decline of the sperm quality, and there could also be a general decline in male overall health causing hormonal problems such as a lower testosterone level for example, then it aggravates the problem. So you could say it’s not just sperm. Some men don’t really want to father a child and still for some reason their semen gets tested such as if they are at the military for example, or for some research or at university or as an overall health exam, whatever. And then just without intention, they realize that they have a bad semen quality. And even if they don’t want to father a child, that gives you a clue about the overall health of this man. So it’s not just representative for the general health of a person, you could assume. So we do know that if the sperm test is bad, then this male person might be more likely to develop certain kinds of cancer, for example. That is proven.

Lorne Brown:

That reminds me of Dr. Paul Turco. We both know he’s a reproductive urologist and he had shared that a semen analysis where you see poor quality is a canary in the mind idea. It is a window into overall health. And he suggests that if there’s a poor semen analysis, the man should have a real good workup. Now, as you said, certain cancers and hormonal health issues. So it’s not just about having a child, this is a marker, a biomarker of then.

Olivia Pojer:

Yes, true. And that is really, really important to be aware of.

Lorne Brown:

I wanted to, because I think for our listeners, I want them to stay tuned. We’re going to talk about things that can be done to help improve sperm, but what are the things that we’re noticing then with male factor? As I’ve been in this field since 2000, the men were almost ignored. They had a normal semen analysis, and do we now know that the men are impacting pregnancy rates? Is the sperm impacting miscarriage rates? What’s the data on that?

Olivia Pojer:

It is really important to point out that a good sperm quality is not only necessary to fertilize an egg, but it’s also necessary for the embryo to be able to have further development and to kind of secure the pregnancy. So what I mean is that there is a huge amount of women that suffer from abortions. So they have one abortion after another.

Lorne Brown:

I want to clear when you say abortion, because the medical term, not that they’re choosing to terminate the pregnancy, you’re saying they’re having early pregnancy loss when you say

Olivia Pojer:

Abortion, early pregnancy loss. That’s what I, yes, that’s what I mean. So they really have early pregnancy loss and then they get checked up and there’s nothing to be found at the side of the woman, but now there’s this sperm that has to be taken into account. So what I want to say is that sperm really contributes a lot to the quality of the embryo. And if that contribution is not of good quality, the pregnancy might not be able to continue. Yeah, it’s interesting. So be reason for early pregnancy loss, especially when that pregnancy loss happens within the first, let’s say nine weeks, then you always have to hear the alarm bell for checking for sperm, DNA fragmentation.

Lorne Brown:

So I want to talk about that test DNA fragmentation, because what I’m thinking of or what you’re reminding me of is that it used to be that it was always on the women, right? Because the semen analysis would look normal for a lot of guys. And as you just shared, normal today would be subfertile 20 years ago. So we got to be careful with normal. Normal means most men are subfertile, I guess, or it doesn’t necessarily mean that these are robust healthy numbers that we’re seeing because we keep lowering the bar for what we consider

Olivia Pojer:

The

Lorne Brown:

Normal. But a lot of times the male’s worked up as in sea analysis, it looks normal, nothing’s flagged because they’ve adjusted the ranges and yet the partner, the females having early miscarriages, and I’ve even heard of unexplained infertility. So are you seeing that in your clinical practice that the miscarriages and unexplained can often be attributed to the men and that’s what you’re sharing?

Olivia Pojer:

Yeah, definitely. That’s often the case. And then a normal basic semen analysis isn’t the end of the exam story the male has to go through. You have to really dig deeper and look at the quality of the genetic material of the sperm. And that is called the DNA fragmentation test. That means if there are strand breaks within the DNA, that sperm could maybe fertilize an egg, but the embryo quality would be low causing eventually pregnancy loss.

Lorne Brown:

I had a question around that, Olivia, the DNA fragmentation test today at the time of recording, more people are aware of it being used more often, but it’s still not a standard of care. And in Canada it’s a paid test. I don’t think it’s covered at this point in time, somewhere around 500 Canadian plus or minus a hundred, I can’t quote me on that, but it’s not an inexpensive test. But they used to say that, so injecting an IVF where the injected sperm into the egg is how you bypass DNA fragmentation, but it’s still the DNA that you’re injecting. So wouldn’t that still result in early pregnancy loss or unexplained fertility if you do ICSI, do you have any thoughts around that? I don’t know if that’s still the standard of care in Graz, but that’s kind of what they would suggest.

Olivia Pojer:

So what you could do, you would finally, if a guy has a lot of broken DNA in his genetic material, you would better go for ICSI. But still ICSI wouldn’t be the solution because what you really want to do is check out the DNA of that sperm that you want to fertilize the egg with without busting that sperm. Okay. So you don’t want to just test it and lose it. You want to test it and use it. So there are certain methods, for example, it’s called the pixie dish where you can have the single sperm checked for a DNA strength break or a good DNA material and then use it for ICSI. So that’s what they have to

Lorne Brown:

Do. Now in your book that you’ve written, you talk about a lot of natural ways to help improve sperm quality, including DNA fragmentation. So can you share some of the factors that can lead to DNA fragmentation and then what would be your approach?

Olivia Pojer:

So one of the main issues causing DNA fragmentation is infections. So they are really, really often not noticed. If you have an infection of your testicles, for example, of your prostate, of your epi, most of the men don’t notice that they suffer from an infection, but still that harms the sperm. And the simple thing to do against it is use antibiotics. So with antibiotics, you really have to be careful in use, but if you test for that infection and which bacteria is causing it, then you really have to go with that certain type of antibiotics to use against that infection and that will just lead to better sperm after a certain period of time. Sperm development takes two and a half to three months to change, to recover whatever. So after that time, the human quality will be really, really different than far better if you just go against that infection. And the next thing is we do not live a sperm friendly lifestyle most of the time. So everything that is heating your donate might lead over a certain amount of time to DNA fragmentation, that’s for

Lorne Brown:

Sure. So you’re talking like so fever, sickness, long bicycle rides or sitting hot tubbing, the varicose seals that some men get as well,

Olivia Pojer:

Using the heat in the car seats is really bad. So overheating the go nets, yeah, is a huge problem. And that always ends up in DNA fragmentation. Yeah, so if you are aware of that, it’s quite easy to keep your go nets. Cool. Yeah, but you need to know about that. Yeah, then you certainly have to because we are using such a stressful life, which also stresses the cells and sperms are cells, so they suffer from any kind of, we call that oxidative stress to the cell, which really harms the sperm quality and what you can hold against that oxidative stress is antioxidants. So it’s really, really good to have an intake of certain supplements that increase the amount of antioxidants.

Lorne Brown:

And you choose, I saw in your book you’re recommending both diet, antioxidant diet and antioxidant supplements.

Olivia Pojer:

Definitely

Lorne Brown:

One of the things. And the stress part, again, reducing the stress. And you talked about stress causing oxidative stress because stress leads to those stress hormones, it leads to inflammation and oxidative stress. So reducing stress. And I know you use acupuncture in your book to bring blood flow to the testes. I believe in your lecture that I was at the conference, you talked about acupuncture impacting oxidative stress and I think nitric oxide as well. Can you share a little bit about that and the importance of that?

Olivia Pojer:

What do you mean by that? Exactly? Now what do you want me to, I

Lorne Brown:

Wanted to talk about the varicose seals. I’ll rephrase the question. You were talking about heating the test seeds, the gonads and how that can impact both heat motility and count, right? And then you also talked about DNA fragmentation. The varicose seals are like these. Well, if you can share with the audience kind of what a varicose seal is, something that comes up in a fertility workup, and then you’re sharing your presentation both using herbal and acupuncture for varicose seals as well as surgery. So I’d love to hear a little bit more about that.

Olivia Pojer:

So seals are really, really common in men. You have to say even infertile men do a high percentage such as 25% of fertile men suffer from seals as well without knowing. Yeah. So obviously just having a very concealment does not always affect the sperm quality, but sometimes it does. It’s like puzzle pieces. If that’s the only puzzle piece that might affect the sperm quality, the body can hold against it. But if there’s lots of puzzle pieces, then the scale is going to go to the wrong side. So work seals are seen in about 80% of infertile men that have father a child before. So obviously that’s a common cause of secondary infertility and what they do, you can just think of it, it’s just there are varicose of the Siemens range, so they kind of heat the testicles that that’s one harm they can do.

And the second thing is that they diminish the oxygen flow to the testicles. So that’s the two main reasons why vari seals are so bad. And fortunately in the new neurology guidelines, it is to be read that they have to be corrected by surgery if they are palpable and they really have a certain grade. So from grade two to grade three, they should go for surgery. But some people don’t like to have surgery and some people are not offered surgery by their oncologist or urologist because he isn’t aware of the update of the guidelines. So such a thing happens unfortunately. And then we are lucky enough to have another tool out of our TCM toolbox and offer them treatment via acupuncture or herbs to correct their vari seals and according to studies worth a try.

Lorne Brown:

And I wanted to share, I’m a fan of the integrative approach. So you have this underlying, say, imbalance that has led to the varicose seal. This is like varicose veins in the testes. And so like you said, the standard of care is now surgery to reverse it. And I still like acupuncture and herbal medicine while you’re waiting because in our province it still could be quite a weight to have that surgery. And also the idea is to treat the underlying cause so it does not reoccur. And so there are some small studies, but there are studies using Chinese herbal medicine and acupuncture. So can you discuss a little bit about that just that does exist using herbs and acupuncture for varicocele repairs?

Olivia Pojer:

Yeah, there is some study done with a very famous herbal formula called GU fooling one. Yeah, using cinnamon. We all know cinnamon. So that’s the main herb which is in that formula. And that study went quite well because it corrected 71% of varicocele. So it’s worth a try, especially when you have waiting time to have your surgery done. So maybe you might not need it in the end.

Lorne Brown:

And acupuncture as well. There was the study

Olivia Pojer:

And acupuncture as well. And really a good TCM therapist would always combine acupuncture with the herbs. So that’s in Chinese medicine that is called the DMA group, which means that you have a horse carriage, is that the correct word? And you have two horses that would carry your carriage and it’s always wiser than just having one

Lorne Brown:

Horse all I like that. So you got two horses, one’s acupuncture , one’s the herbals. So again, the integration. And I was curious about your practice, again, I want to share talking to reproductive urologists. Theoretically after you do a varicose repair within 72 to 90 days the time for spermatogenesis, you would expect the sperm to be okay. But they said clinically it can sometimes take up to six months, which is interesting versus just three months. So I just wanted to share with the listeners and check in with you Olivia, but give yourself that six month window to see a shift. It doesn’t always, for whatever reason happen after three months, although theoretically it should be clinically reproductive urologist, it was Dr. Paul Turk who shared with me that sometimes it can take up to six months after the repair.

Olivia Pojer:

That’s what I see in my clinic as well. So I always tell my patients at the start that we should better assume a treatment time of six months and then talk about the results. The three months checkup is kind of where we checkup, but it might not be part of the journey. Sometimes we are all different and sometimes the recovery potential of a person is lower and sometimes it’s bigger. We don’t have to have the same amount of energy that could be used for that recovery.

Lorne Brown:

So Olivia, I want to talk about covid and male fertility first. I just kind of want to recap some of the issues that we were talking about. I think we went into some DNA fragmentation issues, like things that damage the sperm and quality. So we talked about heating the sperm and there’s things that you can avoid that heat the sperm. There’s varicose seals that can heat the sperm and cause oxidative damage. And so you mentioned surgery is now the standard of care and there’s also acupuncture and herbal medicine to support that. And then there’s other things. There’s hormonal imbalances, diabetes, there’s poor diet. We’ve talked about at the conference you talked about stress and just lifestyle and aging. All that can affect sperm quality. So there’s things through diet and lifestyle that people can do, men can do to support their sperm health as well as acupuncture, herbs and supplements. I want to ask you a bit about covid. Kind of a recent thing. We had the pandemic and you shared at the conference some of the impact that covid, I guess you can call this kind of post covid infection has on sperm. So can you kind of enlighten us with what you’ve been seeing in the literature and in clinical practice?

Olivia Pojer:

The thing is that covid affecting the testing cause and almost any cell type of tissue that is in the testicles could be easily entered by the virus because from the very beginning of the pandemic, we do know that most of the patients suffered from lung issues. You remember that? And that is because the lung has so many, so-called CE receptors. So it’s easy for the virus to enter a cell via those receptors. What we didn’t know at the beginning of the pandemic is that there’s even more ACE two receptors in the testicles. What we do know now, because we now have to deal with the side effects of covid infection, just imagine the virus entering not only the lung but also the testicles. And of course it damages all the structures that are necessary to produce proper sperm. So sometimes when I see a semen analysis, and not sometimes but always one of my first questions I ask the man is, did you suffer from covid? And if he says yes, I asked him, okay, how long ago? So because we now know that up to six, but definitely three months, covid has a huge impact on sperm quality. So it takes one or two complete changes of sperm to kind of wash out the impact of the virus.

Lorne Brown:

For our listeners, this is where there’s a difference between the men and the women that all their eggs are born with, but men are making sperm all the time, a thousand to 1500 every heartbeat. So when you say two cycles, since it’s 72 to 90 days, is the spermatogenesis on average to produce immature sperm? You’re saying that if you had a covid infection, it’s kind of one or two cycles of that three month process, so three to six months to clear it out of the system?

Olivia Pojer:

Yes, definitely. Thank you for that. And that is really relevant because if you want to father a child with covid affected sperm, you are unlikely to succeed. Just don’t give up, go over that three month, six month period, just take more time, give yourself more time to recover,

Lorne Brown:

More time to recover, to

Olivia Pojer:

Recover. And don’t go straight into IVF because your sperm quality is not that good. If there is an explanation such as post covid infection, the last three to the last three months,

Lorne Brown:

I always like to strategize. And so I’m going to share a thought and I’m curious what you think IVF is quite, it gives us some babies. So it’s amazing technology and it’s an expensive and an invasive process. And so if I was knowing I’m planning an IVF in the near future, I’m the man or I’m with somebody that’s male that’s going to produce the sperm and they have not had covid or they haven’t had COVID for over six months, I may want to free sperm as backup so I don’t have to worry about getting covid during my window of doing IVF. I mean, it’s not like everybody can do that, but it’s just a strategy of banking sperm because covid is still going around,

Olivia Pojer:

Might be a backup opportunity. So just talk to your IVF doctor about it and I don’t know if you have a bad immune system, for example. Yeah, it would be a useful strategy.

Lorne Brown:

I think about it, and it’s not a great comparison, but I’m going to use this as a comparison, that when a woman gets diagnosed with cancer, for example, that does not have children, wants to have children here, they will go in and do an IVF immediately to retrieve eggs before they start chemo radiation.

Olivia Pojer:

Same with men. So they are really told to kind of really,

Lorne Brown:

So if a man has cancer, they’ll do the same thing, right? Yeah. So I’m thinking, thinking of a similar idea, but here’s a case where you can catch it, it’s not like you’re thinking you’re going to catch cancer, but we know covid is there and people are still getting infected. So it’s just another strategy. I want to clarify. I’m not saying you need to go do this. I’m just giving you some thought. I’m thinking out loud here where if I was planning for an IVF coming up or even trying naturally, especially if I or my partner, if my partner’s female of advanced maternal age, I don’t want to lose three to six months. So I may want to talk to my medical doctor about freezing sperm as backup. So I continue to do my normal natural, fresh sperm through intercourse or I UIs. But if I got covid then during those three to six months, then I may want to use my sperm that I froze pre covid.

Olivia Pojer:

Yeah. So then might actually be A useful strategy especially for couples where the partners have advanced age and it’s not only the women that’s

Lorne Brown:

Really, you know what I made that mistake right there. We’re always focusing on the female. So I want to talk about it, so if you have anything more to share about covid, please do so. But I think we talked. It was nice that you shared information that a lot of us weren’t aware of. And two are men in age. And then let’s talk about men in weight as well.

Olivia Pojer:

So men in ages, you always think you need young eggs to have more potential to conceive, but that’s not true because it’s also the paternal age that comes into account. So with men aging, the probability of fertilizing an egg is also going down With advanced paternal age, you might really want to use every strategy you have to improve your sperm quality, such as eat a good diet, use supplements, have a proper intake of antioxidants, watch your temperature of the donates, have enough sleep and all the thing and avoid everything that could harm the sperm. So that’s really, really important as well.

Lorne Brown:

And we know men can father children much later in life, but our goal is always a healthy baby. And so that’s the research where they’re showing the health of the child can be impacted by the health of the father and the age of the father. So again, there’s chronological age and biological age. So you’re talking about sleep, exercise, rest, eating well, diet supplements, things to kind of keep you as biologically young as possible. And then sometimes I know because of your book and how you practice, you use acupuncture and herbal medicine as well. We’re going to go into the weight. I wanted to ask you this. So based on the research, what’s the dosing of acupuncture in your practice and what’s duration? Because when I looked at some of the studies that you shared at the Society of Acupuncture research conference, and I’m asking if I’ve interpreted it right because kind of how I like to do my practice, it seems like the norm from the research is twice a week and anywhere from 10 to 16 treatments over twice a week. So people could be going for up to eight weeks of treatment at

Olivia Pojer:

Least.

Lorne Brown:

Yeah, at least. So can you share, so is that what you’re seeing clinically? And that’s what the research is showing because some people say, do I come twice a week? Do I come once a week, every two weeks? Do I just come once? What is the research that you’ve looked at so far sharing and how are you seeing this clinically? Anecdotally as well?

Olivia Pojer:

The question, if acupuncture works the way we want it to work for a certain issue is really dose dependent for every strategy. It would be better if they came in twice, so then the results would be perfect, but sometimes people don’t have the time yet. They just can’t make it twice a week into your clinic. And sometimes they don’t have the money. And then sometimes a strategy where it’s okay to have them have acupuncture once a week is to set them on herbs.

Lorne Brown:

So now we’re back to the two horses with the carriage. So yeah. Yes, definitely.

Olivia Pojer:

So Daniel, you need a second horse, whatever that is. Yeah. Is it supplements? Is it a diet? Is it western herbs? Is it Chinese herbs or whatever. But you would definitely want a second horse or a fur or a form. The more horses you have, yeah, the more likely you are to end up where you want to be on your journey. So that’s kind

Lorne Brown:

Of good. That makes sense. And again, the reason I wanted to share this is sometimes people come to me after they’ve gone somewhere else and they’ll come to my practice and often they might’ve seen somebody, but it was once a week or every two weeks or once a month, and they were getting good treatment, they just weren’t getting it often enough. And the idea, my understanding, my experience is we’re helping the body find that homeostasis balance to help it do its own innate ability to heal. And so it’s not forever you’re doing this and it’s concentrated treatments, but you get to pull away the treatment as the body takes over and it finds that balance when you reduce that oxidative stress, when you increase the nitric oxide as you’re sharing in some of the research at the conference, increasing the blood flow, balancing the hormones, once the body’s in balance and they’re eating well, they’re living well, now, they’re doing all the things they can do, then it should hold, right?

Olivia Pojer:

True. What I think is so important is that becoming healthy, improving sperm quality or egg quality or whatever issue you are treated for is not a passive process. It should be an active one with a little help from your therapist. The therapist gives you one or two horses, but then you as a patient are responsible for the other ones

Lorne Brown:

We’re facilitating it there. And there’s some accountability on both sides, but definitely it’s not passive, and you probably know our patients aren’t very passive. They’re pretty proactive.

Olivia Pojer:

Yeah, that’s good. Yeah, that’s what I love about them. But do you know where this once a week acupuncture for 20 minutes comes from?

Lorne Brown:

I believe it came from back in the day, the Nixon days when body workers brought it over. They saw people once a week.

Olivia Pojer:

Yeah, true. So when acupuncture was brought from China to the vest, they kind of tried to figure out which therapy was similar to acupuncture because they couldn’t really deal well what acupuncture is and in which kind of drawer that fits in. So they assumed it might be just like physiotherapy or massage, and therefore it became usual to use it once a week for 20 minutes because that’s what the physiotherapist and massage therapist

Lorne Brown:

Did. But that’s not what they were doing in China and Korea.

Olivia Pojer:

Totally not. You get acupuncture every other day

Lorne Brown:

For a series of 15 or 30 treatments and then reassess. Alright, let’s finish up with weight. And the reason I want to talk about this is when we see a couple, a male and female couple, we’re always looking, talking about the female weight, and that’s part of our society, right? The women work really hard to be in shape and have that flat belly, and then men that really can have a really large belly. So does being overweight, male being severely overweight, affect the sperm DNA? Does that damage the sperm DNA? Does that impact miscarriage on explaining infertility? And if so, how?

Olivia Pojer:

Definitely, yeah. So if the father is overweight, the couple is more unlikely to conceive. That’s what it is because in the fat tissue, the test the one gets converted into estrogen. So finally the male partner will lack testosterone, and that will of course show up negatively in the sperm quality and in his erectile functioning and everything testosterone is for. So that has kind of an overall effect of his whole well feeling,

Lorne Brown:

Right? So if you have any decline, testosterone, there’s the sperm production, there’s muscle mass and mood, there’s

Olivia Pojer:

Brain function,

Lorne Brown:

Brain function. We start to get,

Olivia Pojer:

There’s energy level,

Lorne Brown:

What was that?

Olivia Pojer:

Energy level?

Lorne Brown:

Energy level. And that’s when we start to get the male breast pattern right, where they start to, yes. So you can start to see it in your body. There’s biomarkers, you can measure through blood and SEMA analysis, but there are subjective feelings. And then there’s things that you can observe, body shape changing. And if both partners are overweight, we know from the research you shared that that reduces the chance of having an IVF take home baby. And then if it’s the male, we know that also as you’re sharing increases potential miscarriage rate and pregnancy rates. So weight is important. And can you talk a little bit about, because it was nice to see you shared a paper about using acupuncture for weight loss based on how it impacts some of the hormones related to our cravings.

Olivia Pojer:

Yeah, there is a good research study out there that just tries to investigate whether only acupuncture without any lifestyle changes with change. The BMI of in this case, it was done in women and it could, yeah, so they had a mean weight loss burn down a little. They had a mean weight loss of about three kilograms within the five weeks period of treatment. And what I personally as a medical doctor find really, really interesting is that the serums of insulin, leptin rein, which are responsible for how the body works with the intake of glucose and how hungry we are, how many ravings we have could also be lowered.

Lorne Brown:

And that study was on women, and again, we were talking about dosage. It was for five weeks only, but twice a week for five weeks,

Olivia Pojer:

Twice a week, yes, you

Lorne Brown:

Wouldn’t need that. It has a compound effect. I think of it like the earthquake Richter scale, that if you have an earthquake that goes from a three to four, it’s not a power of one. It’s like a power of 10. From three to four, there’s a magnitude of change. And from one to two acupuncture treatments in a week, it’s not like you just doubled up. There seems to be a much more magnitude or compounding effect. We didn’t talk much about it, but you talked about the two horses and we talked about herbs. So there is research also using herbal medicine and male fertility. So let’s talk a little bit about that horse that you call Chinese herbal medicine.

Olivia Pojer:

Yeah, Chinese herbal medicine is really good when it comes to boosting sperm. So there are certain formulas that are really, really well studied and really, really ranked high in the hierarchy of types of studies done. And there is one really, really famous one, which is the pill of the ancestors that would be the translation into English. And that is easy to start with for every TCM therapist to be

Lorne Brown:

Honest. So Olivia, I want to thank you again for coming on to the Conscious Fertility podcast. For our listeners, check out episode 19, the declining male fertility. And today we talked about the many factors that can impact male factors: diet, lifestyle, stress, the environment, our body weight, and there’s an integrative approach. We talked about using surgery. Now it seems to be the standard of care in western medicine to reverse varicose seals. We also shared how there’s research and approach using acupuncture and herbal medicine to help reverse varicose seal repairs. And you’re sharing as a medical doctor and trained in acupuncture, herbal medicine, you like those three horses. If you have it, do all three. And you shared, again, just summarize some of the cool highlights, dosage matters. So for men, usually it’s twice a week and you’re looking at a minimum of five weeks up to eight or 12 weeks of treatment to see some changes.

And that covid covid, they’re starting to show that it can impact the sperm quality, allowing us to have two, at least one or two cycles before you see a shift back in the sperm because we’re always making sperm. And that would be three to six months when we say one to two cycles for that. And then there’s things that men can do to optimize their fertility. Why do we want to do this? Well, it takes two cells, an egg in a sperm cell to make a healthy baby. So healthy eggs, healthy sperm. And you’re sharing that the research is showing that the men can contribute to unexplained infertility and to early pregnancy loss, or somebody’s having recurrent pregnancy loss. There could be a contributing factor from the men. Semen analysis is not enough. Often it may say normal and normal has changed from what it was 20 years ago. And so DNA fragmentation tests are another test. And then when doing ICSI, what was the procedure you liked? It was pixie that you said to help pixie

Olivia Pojer:

Dish, for example, or max whatever selection methods that the clinic chooses and offers. Yeah, yeah.

Lorne Brown:

And then as you said, the accountability responsibility. You talked about acupuncture and herbal medicine as a horse, but then the accountability part is not being passive, and this goes for both the man and the woman in this. You add other horses, so diet and lifestyle and sleep and supplements, all these things. You keep adding horses to the carriage, there’s a better chance it’ll make the journey. I think that’s the big summary, right? Did I sum this up nicely? There’s things

Olivia Pojer:

Well done. That’s right.

Lorne Brown:

To connect with Dr. Olivia Poer. You can connect with you. Where do they find you if they want to find you? And I do want to mention your books one more time. There is the, and is it in English now? I think I got it, you sent me a copy, but I don’t think it was in English. The one on your erectile dysfunction.

Olivia Pojer:

The erectile dysfunction one hasn’t been translated yet. No, it’s in German. Yes.

Lorne Brown:

That’s the book I have. I got that signed. So for our English listeners, the book that you may want to look at and ask your practitioner to look at is the integrative treatment of male infertility, and then how can they connect with you as well?

Olivia Pojer:

Well, they could connect with me via email of course, or by having a look at our website, but still, I’m seated in Austria.

Lorne Brown:

There could be somebody Austria listening to this right

Olivia Pojer:

Now. Yeah, it could be. So yeah,

Lorne Brown:

That’s right. If you’re in local Vancouver and you want that integrative approach, then you can check us out at ACU balance. We’ll put Olivia’s social media in the show notes and also some of the slides that we shared from your talk. We’ll put that in the video version, which can be found on Lorne brown.com. So there’s a tab there called Conscious Fertility Podcast on the Lorne brown.com website. And so if you want to see the video of me and Olivia chatting with some of the slides from the presentation that she did, that will be up there on Lorne brown.com. Olivia, thank you very much.

Olivia Pojer:

Thank you, Lorne. It was great fun talking to you. And thank you for giving me that platform and going with me on the mission to change the approach to a 50-50 approach when it comes to creating a good quality embryo welcome and taking home a baby.

Lorne Brown:

People want a healthy baby, but as you know, and I know usually it’s the female that’s coming in for treatment, even when it’s known as male factor. And so yeah, it’s important. If the goal is a healthy baby, then we want not only the egg quality and uterine environment, but we also want sperm quality. Here’s the good news. Usually sperm is much easier to improve,

Olivia Pojer:

But still men have to be aware of the fact that they are part of the journey as well. Yeah.

Lorne Brown:

Yes. We really invite the men to get involved, and we know most of our listeners are females. If you’re in a relationship with a man and you’re trying to have a family, then have him sit down maybe and listen to this podcast and the one that Olivia did on episode 19, and there’s also one by Dr. Paul Turk, who’s a reproductive urologist sharing it. And I know men sometimes want that science and credibility. So Dr. Olivia Pojer, she’s a medical doctor and she’s also trained in Chinese medicine. So in acupuncture, herbal medicine, Dr. Paul Turk is a reproductive urologist. So hopefully if they hear it from them, that will inspire, motivate them to want to get more involved. Thank you, Olivia.

Olivia Pojer:

You are welcome. Thank you.

Speaker:

If you’re looking for support to grow your family, contact Acubalance Wellness Center at Acubalance. They help you reach your peak fertility potential through their integrative approach using low level laser therapy, fertility, acupuncture, and naturopathic medicine. Download the Acubalance Fertility Diet and Dr. Brown’s video for mastering manifestation and clearing subconscious blocks. Go to Acubalance.ca. That’s acubalance.ca.

Lorne Brown:

Thank you so much for tuning into another episode of Conscious Fertility, the show that helps you receive life on purpose. Please take a moment to subscribe to the show and join the community of women and men on their path to peak fertility and choosing to live consciously on purpose. I would love to continue this conversation with you, so please direct message me on Instagram at Lorne Brown official. That’s Instagram, Lorne Brown official, or you can visit my websites, Lornebrown.com and Acubalance.ca. Until the next episode, stay curious and for a few moments, bring your awareness to your heart center and breathe.