Low AMH: Treating Low AMH with Ancient Chinese Medicine with  Dr. Scott Martin, OMD – #40

0:26 Charlene Lincoln: Okay, welcome back to another episode of The Fertility Hour. I’m your host Charlene Lincoln. And today I have a very special guest, Dr. Scott Martin, and I’ll introduce him in a second. I’m very active on YouTube and I love to, you know, kind of explore around and see what other fertility experts are talking about. So I came across Dr. Scott and he was talking about AMH and, of course, you know, that’s a big discussion in the fertility world and we’ll talk about that a little bit more. A lot of women and couples get diagnosed with low AMH and it becomes an extremely stressful diagnosis because a lot of people interpret it as “Oh, you know, unless I can somehow increase AMH, I might not ever have a child or whatever.”

So we want to discuss about AMH, what is it, when is it important and what has Dr. Scott found in his clinical findings and working with different clients. So let me pull up your bio here. We should have it more prepared but we kind of got this over in the last minute. Let me get it going here.

Dr. Scott Martin is a registered practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine in Australia. He started TCM back in 2001 and has gone on to start Australian Natural Fertility and is the head of research and development for Advanced Fertility Solutions. He is also the developer of Ovance, a Chinese medicine formula that can assist with the treatment of low AMH levels. Fertility has been a strong focus of Scott’s since 2009, and today, he is very happy to be on the show. Well, we’re happy to have you on the show. Thanks so much. Welcome.

Scott Martin: Thank you, Charlene. Thank you very much.

2:28 CL: So, you know, talk to us. You’ve been in the fertility world for quite some time working with clients and you saw that this was something that was coming up for women, right, they’re getting diagnosed with low AMH. So let’s talk about, I don’t know how this formula came about, what you’ve learned about AMH, anything you want to share with us to kind of educate us on this topic.

SM: Sure Charlene, thank you very much. I suppose I should start with where it started. I was at my clinic, Sundays in Central Queensland, Australia. It’s not a very large area but fortunately, we’ve got a very strong clientele here. We found that the local IVF clinic started using the AMH test to help women understand further what might be the problem with their fertility issues. And so it’s certainly how IVF use AMH levels, it’s almost a death sentence for a woman’s eggs. Success rates for using IVF for women with low AMH levels are problematic, to begin with, with very low success rates. So women are coming clearly very upset being told perhaps that they can’t have their own children, that they need to use a donor egg and certainly that IVF is the only chance they have of falling pregnant. Failure rates, of course, are very high.

So my office started filling up with women with low AMH levels that couldn’t fall pregnant and wanted a solution. Being a scientifically minded person, we like getting before and after scientific data. This is certainly what I feel is proof that things work apart from, of course, women saying that they can’t have babies and all of a sudden being pregnant, you know, like I think all of this, it makes us realize, “Oh, we’re on to something here.”

And so, I don’t want to get into too much Chinese medicine jargon because it boggles the brain a little bit, but we’ve got a thing that we call Pre-Heaven Essence or Jing. Basically, I’d like to relate to that as our overall vitality. You know, sometimes you wake up in the morning and you’re like “Yes! So full of energy and I’m ready to go. I can take on the world, it’s great.” And in other days, you wake up and you say “Oh, please. Romeo, I’m going back to bed. I don’t think I can deal with this.”

So our vitality, our energy levels can vary day to day and some months. Certainly in summer here everyone’s full of energy and running around, and in winter everyone is hiding and saying “Well, keep me out of the cold.” And so I think with our vitality and how we feel just varies on a day to day basis. Now for some people who are very tired, rundown, worn out, you know, they’re not having a good time with their job, they’re not having a good time with their life, they’re unhappy, they don’t like where they’re living – now all of these stresses and pressures and challenges, the drain in energy and vitality on a day-to-day basis, this can be a really big problem for fertility as well.

And so when we look at a person’s vitality, we’re referring to this as Jing. In Chinese Medicine, Jing is vitality which we suggest is stored between the kidneys. It’s what goes on to form sperm and what goes on to form eggs and most specifically, the quality of the vitality of them. As a Chinese medicine practitioner, you’re familiar with Pre-Heaven Essence and Jing, Charlene, I imagine.

6:04 CL: Yes.

SM: Yeah. And so, we discovered there was a study done, it was on men and on their sperm quality and they got 10 men and tested their sperm count twice a week for 18 months. One of the extraordinary things they found across the board all of these men, that their sperm count could very incredibly, some men could fertilize the entire state with one go, and then other times they’re clinically infertile. They discovered that the variations in men’s sperm count over that time varied so much that there was no apparent rhyme or reason for why that would vary so much.

So thinking that even though men and women are clearly very different, clearly also very, very much alike and even though you know it’s testosterone versus estrogen that differentiates a lot of male and female hormones. The actual processes that go towards growing out egg quality and their overall fertile health are in essence I would suggest the same and can be influenced in the same way.

So there was a formula that we’ve used that we knew that would improve sperm count in men within Chinese medicine, certainly in the herbal medicine we realized that men and women are different and we’d like to suggest that men are more Yang by nature and tend to use more fiery and warming herbs. And women are Ying by nature and tend to enjoy cooling herbs. So we adapted a formula a little, to each a little for it to be more female-friendly and started prescribing it to women with low AMH levels, hoping that in fact it could assist with raising those levels but most importantly, it was designed to help improve egg quality so that women could in fact have their own eggs and grow their own eggs once again.

So we started handing out this formula and the results came back, yes it was working. Women were falling pregnant. We started getting before and after blood serum test analyses to make sure that what in fact was going on, we discovered there was a rise in AMH levels for women taking this and most importantly, some women were falling pregnant which was wonderful news and everyone was very happy.

So I suppose that’s how the formula came about. It took a bit of tweaking, it took a little bit of imagination but it worked, which was wonderful, and that’s where we got started and that’s where we started testing it on more people, prescribing it to more people and as more results came in, we realized that it seemed to be effective in many instances and women were getting rises in that and having natural pregnancy rates. So it was certainly a wonderful time, we were very happy to help the local people and now we’re helping people, if I’m allowed to say it.

9:09 CL: What was the percentage of women who were trying to naturally conceive versus go the IVF route?

SM: I think where we live, western medicine is certainly the dominant medicine and so I was finding obviously if a woman has an AMH diagnosis, she’s been to a gynecologist, she’s been running through the modern medicine system for some time, and so the people that I was seeing tend to not to be people that I was the first port of fall. In fact, where I am, my practice has pretty much been a lot. There has been people trying and one of the most common things I have heard for years and years is “Oh, I’ve tried absolutely everything and now I’m willing to give anything a go.” It’s nice to still be able to help people at that state.

To be honest, most of the people that come and see have already had some kind of infertility diagnosis and they’ve already had those tests done by the gynecologist and most of them have failed the IVF system, which was something that really it distressed me. Because obviously, you know, when somebody comes into your office and you’ve been told “I don’t have my own baby” or “My eggs won’t fertilize,” “I’ve tried 3 to 4 rounds of IVF and nothing is working. Can you help me?” it’s a challenging scenario and my heart really goes out for the women in these circumstances. And I honestly felt that the information that was available for women under these circumstances, I did think it was very helpful. It really gave them a lot of hope. I respect the fact that gynecologists now are surely well trained in their field of modern medicine but also at the same time they have very little, if no training at all in anything outside of modern medicine, pharmaceuticals and surgery, which are of course very, very powerful agents.

But when they in fact don’t work anymore or unable to produce results that women are after, then it’s up to them to find something else to help them out, and respectfully and unfortunately, they tend to be the least qualified people to know where to go if western medicine has failed them. So as a Chinese medicine practitioner and I’m sure you know, we both had to study western medicine and modern medicine while doing our Chinese medicine degrees, so we’re fortunate to know both worlds and to be able to help the people under those circumstances is a wonderful thing.

11:51 CL: We were discussing briefly before like I was saying in the introduction, that is a big stressor for women but one thing that I really want to emphasize, Dr. Iva Keene who work at the Natural Fertility Prescription, that question gets asked all the time. “What do I do increase low AMH?” If you’re trying to conceive naturally, honestly, we have found many women when they focus on egg quality, they’re able to conceive and have healthy babies. But it is when you go the IVF route. So say you choose that path and you get diagnosed with a low AMH, I mean depending on how low it is, they’re probably going to recommend donor eggs, right? And if you’re not a good candidate for donor eggs, then IVF is just going to be off the table for you.

So that’s a population that you’ve really helped and that’s amazing because, I mean, yeah, it makes me very curious to learn more about the Chinese formulation. Is there any kind of contraindication? I’m sure probably can’t help all women across the board. Have you found that there’s a certain situation where it doesn’t help versus where it would be more beneficial for a woman?

SM: Sure. Certainly I think the further the distance between the AMH levels and the FSH levels seems to be much harder and I think once FSH has risen significantly and is well above the 30’s and 50’s, that it’s harder and harder for the formulas to work. So, say, if we’re talking in ng/mL, if a woman comes in and she’s .5 or .2 ng/mL and her FSH is still sitting under 20, then that’s certainly a lot easier to help than a woman with similar levels of say .5 or .1 ng/mL with levels of 30, 50 and above that seems to be the crux that we’ve found. The further the distance between AMH and FSH, the harder it is for the formulas to get the job and which will return the eggs back to fertile health.

14:05 CL: Okay, that makes sense. What about like when a woman does go through and IVF cycle? Like what’s your treatment protocol for helping a woman kind of get back into balance after that? Because that’s something that’s not really talked about a lot but I know a lot of women experience it. It’s quite hard on the body to kind of go through a round of IVF or several rounds in a lot of cases. So talk to me about that.

SM: Sure. I suppose I’m really big on preparation. The reason why women end up in IVF clinics typically is because they have fertility problem. One of the challenges that we have is, first, fertility problems are unable to treated. Then they go through, they take the IVF drugs and they’re treated in essence almost the same as every other woman that goes in. So if you’ve got poor egg quality or you’ve got normal egg quality, you will still get very similar or the same drugs as somebody with fine egg quality. I think for me the biggest challenge is that if your body is struggling to grow you one good quality egg per cycle, then how is it supposed to grow you 5 or 10? I think this is really big crux of the issue, is there’s usually about 20 antral follicles in a woman’s ovary at any given time. This is certainly for a woman with a healthy egg count. The dominant follicle is always going to be the number one and the best quality. The number two follicle will always be number two and the best quality as well. And three and four and so on…

The egg number 10 in the row is not going to be a wonderful egg, it’s not going to help. So by trying to harvest many eggs out of a woman undergoing IVF with low AMH levels, this is a very, very difficult thing to do. If it is not going to grow you one properly, how is it supposed to grow 5 or 10? It just doesn’t seem to work. And so I think the challenges is the gonadotropin hormones, they’re to be used and the growth hormones that tend to be FSH-dominated, that what it’s shown is that yes, it can help a woman harvest more eggs in the short-term. But in the long-term, it actually lowers serum AMH levels. There was a 2014 study that actually showed that stimulated IVF cycles on woman with low AMH levels in fact further lowered AMH levels which is why I think it’s very common that a woman with low AMH would go in to do a stimulated cycle, typically a woman with less than 5 eggs from a stimulated cycle is put into a lower bearing reserve in each ovarian reserve. Or low AMH diagnosis.

And the next time I’ll go and stimulate her, and she’ll get less eggs. The next time, she’ll get less eggs and that’s very, very common that repeated stimulated cycles of IVF will actually lower AMH levels and women will get poorer and poorer quality eggs every time which is a really big problem especially when doctors are suggesting that AMH is the only treatment to help them but in fact, if that treatment doesn’t work in the short-term, then long-term outcomes are even worse.

17:30 CL: Are the women that you consult with, are they aware of this possible outcome?

SM: I’d suggest not.

17:39 CL: Yeah. I mean they’re intelligent women but they’re just sort of overwhelmed and become kind of hyperfocused on the end results of trying to get this done.

SM: Absolutely.

17:52 CL: I mean, I’m sure they signed a waiver somewhere, you know, the paper work-up. You know, I mean, honestly, right? We sign all this crazy stuff all the time without really reading the fine details because I think women are pretty disheartened when they feel like of course by harvesting that any embryos, that it sometimes can lead to premature ovarian failure or different things. Even women who freeze their eggs because I remember as a person, I had my baby at 42. In my 30’s I was like “Oh, should I freeze my eggs?” not really thinking of the repercussions of that. You just think “Oh, I need to just freeze my eggs and then it should be fine.”

SM: Yes.

18:35 CL: Then that could be problematic as well. Yeah, it’s interesting. I think part of your treatment protocol also is just helping a woman become balanced again after going without the IVF. Is it ever like do women come into your clinic who… because I had a conversation with Dr. Lara Briden, I think she’s from Australia too, she did The Period Repair Manual and she was saying kind of the thing that happens is women that are on the birth control pill sometimes 10-20 years and they get off it and they’re not able to ovulate right away because they’ve been on synthetic hormones for years and years and years, and then they go right into consulting with a fertility clinic which is actually just an IVF clinic and then they start seeing if they are a good candidate for IVF. They never get a chance really. It’s kind of like the synthetic hormones and then “oh, you’re not ovulating right away, let’s go with this route.” It’s sad a little bit but do you see women who kind of go, “Well, you don’t really have to go the IVF route. I mean, we can try to get your balanced so that you can do this naturally.” I mean, there’s some cases where the partner has missing vas deferens or the fallopian tubes are blocked or where there’s some other way. But there’s a lot of situations where women don’t need IVF. Right?

SM: Yes. I agree. Just like you said, if there’s some physical obstruction that prevents a woman from falling pregnant like you’ve had to break up your pregnancies and you don’t have fallopian tubes anymore, or the husband needs to have his sperm excavated directly from the testicle because they can’t get any semen out, then yeah, absolutely.

One of the things that I’m really proud of certainly with Chinese medicine and I won’t speak for other modalities because that’s not my training, but I’ll certainly speak for the Chinese medicine, is the ability to solve problems at the root, is a real feather in the cap of Chinese medicine. So much like you don’t wake up one morning wanting to get healthy and feeling a bit overweight, you chuck your running shoes on and go and run a marathon. That’s a really good way to still get training and never run a marathon. But you build up to it, you go and you do the training and you do your work and you do the effort, and then after a certain period of time, yes it’s possible for almost anyone to go and run a marathon if they wouldn’t break their feet.

Now, if women are suffering infertility but don’t actually address the problems of the primary infertility, what’s causing infertility in the first place, then yeah, it’s far less likely, fertility treatments are far less likely to work. And so if you got endometriosis, polycystic ovarian syndrome, low AMH levels, all these different sorts of things that some can be assisted through surgery and modern medicine, absence of period or amenorrhea, dark menstrual flow, solid rusty menstrual flow, no menstrual flow at all, these don’t seem to necessarily be things that the IVF medicines address and they go straight in for stimulating the eggs, harvesting the eggs, fertilizing and popping back in.

I think one of the things with low AMH it reminds me, it’s like we’ve all done popcorn, we’ve all made popcorn and you’re eating the popcorn, it’s great, and you have a look in the bottom and then there are these kernels that just haven’t popped. They look the same as every other kernel that you try to pop but these ones don’t. I think this is the same with low AMH levels as well, is that women, yes, they ovulate normally, yes it looks like their eggs are growing normally, but they just won’t fertilize, they just won’t pop like that popcorn. I think that if women do the proper preparation for their fertility when once they know they got a problem, yes they’ve been diagnosed a problem, do the correct training, do the correct groundwork, prepare yourself, deal with the issues that you have and then go off and do IVF.

I think if IVF were far more successful at dealing with the array of gynecological problems that women can present with, certainly after 10, 15, 20 years of synthetic hormone manipulation with a contraceptive pill, things are much more likely to work and this is something that I’m really, really big on is do the work, prepare yourself before you go off and do it. You’re going to save a fortune and you’ll be able to boost the IVF success rates by that. But also at the same time if your body has a hard time running you, it doesn’t have enough energy to grow your baby, I think it’s pretty simple. It takes a lot of energy to grow a baby; it takes an enormous amount of energy. And for most women who’ve already discovered, it’s not up to you whether you get pregnant or not. In fact, your body will decide it for you. But you can’t fool it. Your body has to grow the baby. You don’t. You just have to put yourself to sleep, eat properly and try not exhaust yourself too much. It’s your body that does all the baby growing. It says “yes, this is the sperm, yes this is the right time to grow it.”

So if you’re out of whack, your body’s out of whack with your mind, your heart, your life is all out, it’s a good example. Some of these, you know, house… they’ve been trying to renovate their house in 5 years. It’s stuck, it’s not going anywhere. They don’t like their job. There’s things are strained and stressful with their husband because of the ongoing fertility problems and most days you’re just unhappy, that’s a huge drain on the body on the mind, the emotions, and a person’s life. And it’s much harder to fall pregnant under these circumstances because it’s not just the body that’s out of whack. It’s life, it’s the heart. And so for women with long-term infertility and there’s a few I’ve helped with about 7 years, and we’ve actually found that helping them with their house and helping them with things that are going on in their life and finding things that are stuck in their life or stuck in their house, we suggest fix it up.

A really good example is I had a lady, 7 years, she’s spent about $100,000 on IVF treatments. But she knew more about reproductive technology than I did because she had done it all. Naturopaths… she had literally done everything that was possible. She comes into my clinic with her husband and said “Can you help us?” I couldn’t make them any promises, I really couldn’t say much at all. But I said, “Look, if you want me to do my treatment, I’ll do it for you but I won’t promise anything.” How could I under these circumstances?

Anyway, I said we’ll give it three months and see how we go. So anyway, three months came and went, no surprise, she wasn’t pregnant. But she decided to keep going back fortnightly and I said to her, it’s like what’s in your baby’s room? She said, “What do you mean?” I said where the baby is going to go, what’s in that room. She said, “Oh, it’s just filled full of stuff. Things we’ve forgotten about and we haven’t dealt with. But basically it’s just full of junk.” I was like, “Oh, alright. Fair enough.” I said, “Well, what is it you love doing?” I really wanted to connect to her, she was sad. You know, 7 years of wanting to have this child and eluding her, you can imagine how upset she was, how her mindset was over this.

So I wanted to connect to her back with something that she really loved. And she’s like, “Painting. I love painting.” I said, “Great, alright, this is what I want you to do. I want you to go home, I want you to clean up that room. I want you to get everything out of it and make that room perfect like it’s ready to receive a child. I want you to set up an easel in there and start painting.”

Anyway, she took my advice. And two weeks later, she came back, she’s just this completely different person. I almost didn’t recognize her, the transformation was incredible. I said, “How are you doing?” She said, “Oh, I’m painting again, I feel so happy. It’s great, it’s so nice. All that stuff in that room, they’re sorted out.” I can just see this change, this shift in her and four weeks later, she was pregnant. Miracle! It was marvelous.

So I authentically think that when it comes to long-term infertility, that there’s so much more going on. We all know that women have emotional and mental blocks when they haven’t been able to fall pregnant for a long time and if you’re able to find things in people’s houses and in people’s lives that can help shift that mental state and help shift that emotional state, and bring their lives and their heart and their mind and their lives back into balance, then the body will follow. And under those circumstances people are far more likely to fall pregnant. That’s something that you can’t pick up on a blood test or you can’t get a diagnosis from what your gynecologist offers. So we all know that when big changes happen in our life, it can make big changes in how we feel and how we think and that can sometimes be the turning point that people need to help them back on their fertility path.

27:34 CL: When I first started studying Chinese medicine and they said something like 70 percent of all diseases are rooted in the emotions, it’s so fascinating to know that but when you’re stuck in a situation, a health situation, it’s kind of like… but that’s the hardest part to deal with, right? Seventy percent is because you’re not taking the right fertility supplement. Oh, okay, well I can lose all of that. Instead of like “Oh, I’m having big emotional blocks.” Fortunately, there’s great tools to kind of deal with those like emotional freedom technique or tapping is a great one and seeing a good therapist. And a plug for acupuncture and Chinese herbs, I’ve been able to process major emotions getting an acupuncture treatment and treating herbs, you know, depression and anxiety and just feelings of overwhelm. I mean, the medicine treats that as well.

SM: Yeah, it’s true. I agree.

28:39 CL: Then I wanted to just talk about real quick because we always talk about this but I think it can’t be talked about enough because it’s so easily overlooked as men and sperm quality. So, are you treating partners with Chinese herbs? How compliant are they to kind of come in and get treated? Because I know as a Chinese medicine practitioner, you’re always treating the woman. “Oh, when is your husband coming here?” “Oh, I don’t know” kind of that type of thing.

SM: It’s true. It can be really frustrating.

29:09 CL: And they’re only 50 percent of the equation of having a baby, so it’s not that big…

SM: I know, I know. On my website I’ve got a very short video on male infertility and it’s basically giving the guys a kick in the pants saying, you know, it’s like you can’t leave all of this up to your partner. One of the things that stresses me is that 95 percent of people that get treated for fertility issues in a female, but we know that 40 percent of fertility issues lie with the men. So there’s this enormous disparity between who gets the treatment and who needs the treatment. So if guys are out there and they have problems with their sperm, their motility, morphology or count, I know through experience that those can be fixed and brought back to normal levels and to be honest, it’s not that difficult. Respectfully, fixing guys isn’t that hard, Charlene, I’m sure you’ve discovered this yourself.

30:02 CL: A lot. More straightforward, right?

SM: Yeah, a lot more straightforward. I don’t know why it is but I’m glad that’s the case.

30:09 CL: I know. Me too. They’re not compliant people. Oh gosh, I kind of lost my train of thought but it was about sperm quality in men. Because a lot of times if someone asked me a question and I say, “Well, what about your partner?” “Oh, he’s okay, I think.” But we don’t know that because a lot of times, when I dug deeper, they say “Oh yeah, my partner got his sperm checked. Yeah, he went to some lab that tested a bunch of different things. They gave him a phone call. Things looked okay.” And what we know now is that 4 percent of sperm needs to look normal for you to be okay. If you’re trying to conceive naturally, that’s not sufficient and even if you’re trying to do IVF, they can do some things with your sperm but you can still have DNA issues with the sperm that no likely a clinic can fix. So that’s the part that Chinese medicine and your own diet and lifestyle can do a lot to help with.

SM: Yes. I think people get a diagnosis like their DNA fragmentation in the head of sperm and things like that and it’s like, oh, it’s a genetic thing. I think when it comes to genetics nowadays, people think that if there is a problem somewhere there in the genes or in the DNA that it can’t be fixed and it’s like “Oh, that’s it” and certainly chromosomal abnormalities in women with low AMH levels and women who are more advanced in life in their 40’s will see more chromosomal abnormalities and it’s like oh, there’s nothing that can be done about these chromosomal issues. It’s a genetic thing, it’s DNA thing.

I’d suggest that it’s quite proven, that our genes change over time, how our DNA sequencing will change over time depending upon the circumstances in our life, we know that you can change your genes, we know that the DNA will change will over time to help with that in certain circumstances. So I think the chromosomal issues that eggs and sperm have are in fact more to do with an infertility issue than in fact it’s a genetic certainty that no, there’s nothing to be done about this. And as we know that, as we get happier and healthier, our body tends to function a lot more effectively and we just feel better as well, you’ll find those egg quality, those chromosomal abnormalities can actually change and become less over time because a person’s happier and healthier. I mean, the genes can change. And so I’d suggest that for guys out there with issues with chromosomal abnormalities, DNA fragmentation in the heads of their sperm, if they use these formulas that Chinese medicine has to help improve their sperm count, help improve their motility, women to help improve their egg quality, that these issues can be addressed and they’ll find less and less instance of it as their egg and sperm health improves.

33:16 CL: I’m glad you brought that up. It’s really interesting, the whole study of epigenetics showing that that’s fascinating and that’s a whole other conversation, but really, it’s just instead of us feeling like “Oh, my family is rife with cancer and things,” I mean, everybody is touched by all these “genetic” chronic disease conditions, but that doesn’t mean that you’re destined to them, you know.

SM: So true, yes. I think somebody aptly described it, it was one of the TED Talks I was listening to, he said if you’re born to two morbidly obese parents but you eat right and exercise, then it’s unlikely you’ll become morbidly obese. Even though they have a genetic predisposition to this type of obesity, if they look after themselves they’ll be fine.

So they said that genetics is like the gun but epigenetics is the bullet, and a lot of it depending on what happens in our life and where we’re sticking them out and how we feel will determine if in fact what happens with our genes and how our DNA will sequence and help our body adapt to our environment.

34:23 CL: Wow, it’s a really exciting time all the things that we’re learning about the human body and I feel like we’re only really brushing the surface.

SM: I agree.

34:32 CL: A lot of the medical treatments that we’re doing today to treat any kind of chronic disease or treat fertility, I mean it’s not going to look anything the same 10 years, 15 years from now. We might look back and go “I can’t believe that that’s how we’re treating that” because…

SM: Yeah, I’m really glad. I know it’s 100 years ago that modern western doctors still had to taste their client’s urine. I’m glad we see if it was something wrong. And that term to blow smoke in your butt or blow smoke up your butt?

35:05 CL: I haven’t heard that one.

SM: Right. It’s a term we certainly use here in Australia, “to blow smoke up your butt” and it basically means that someone’s being really, really nice things to you to make you feel better about it.

35:21 CL: Oh, okay. I thought that was a medical treatment that they used to do.

SM: It is. This is the root of it is that 120 years ago, the treatment for drowning was to get bellows, you know the pump they used to use at the end pipes and literally get nicotine and lit nicotine and blow that into a person’s rectum as a treatment for drowning. And that was a little bit over 100 years ago.

And so fortunately as Chinese medicine practitioners, you know, the formula that we based the answer on is nearly a thousand years old. And we’ve had a lot advancements in that time and I think we know when the Chinese tend to come, leave China and settle in other nations, that they work very hard, their kids tend to be the smartest kids. The Chinese can be some of the smartest people in the high schools and universities and they go on to take these good quality jobs. I think culturally from Confucius times, it was said when there was only one exam in all of china, it was like the public service exam, and depending on how well you did on it determined what your station in life was going to be.

So for two and a half thousand years, we’ve got the smartest people studying very, very hard trying to get the best jobs that they can and in China, to be a Chinese medicine practitioner is highly esteemed. It’s one of the most esteemed jobs that we can get in China and they’re almost given this kind of aura of being magicians with all the stuff that they can do. And we’ve had two and a half thousand years of the smartest people in China wanting the best jobs which one of them was to be a Chinese medicine practitioner and then they’ve tested this on a population, the largest extent population in the world and over all this time they’ve managed to produce some really, really good stuff.

I think while we’re in western dominated nations which is fine, we’re beholden to the modern medical industry, we’re beholden to the pharmaceutical industry and they’re the number one, they’re the top dogs but I think when people fail and they’re looking for alternatives, I think Chinese medicine can be very effective and when used correctly can perform these miracles that some Chinese medicine doctors are suggesting that they have these special powers… but it’s not special powers, it’s just a very long period of time of trying to help people and getting the job right.

37:50 CL: Yeah, I agree. I don’t want to say the word ‘magic’ because then it makes it seem like it’s not scientifically based, but sometimes it’s kind of magic, you know, like wow, if people knew, I mean in a sense the language in which it’s described with the different terminology and the herbs and things, it’s so removed from kind of western terminology that I think that’s why it’s not more mainstream. People don’t get it. They feel like, I don’t know, but people who experience it, they’re like, it’s incredible medicine. It’s incredible medicine. The thing that kind of makes me a little sad is people will reach out to me and say “I’m going to acupuncture and I don’t think it’s working or whatever.” It’s very little information. I don’t think acupuncture can always compensate for a poor lifestyle and diet and things like that.

SM: Absolutely.

38:51 CL: And so sometimes people kind of go and that’s the whole western mindset and I don’t blame people, I have it too. I wish there was like a magic pill. I’d take that in a second.

SM: Totally.

39:01 CL: But sometimes people go, “I went to a few acupuncture treatments, I don’t think it’s working.” Yeah, it’s sort of a whole system of medicine and if you’re not willing to really make the lifestyle changes and things like that, it will help but might not do the whole job for you.

SM: I agree. I think that’s really important and something that people should understand. I think almost every practitioner in the world will have people coming to their office that have got nothing wrong with them. They’re perfect on paper and still can’t fall pregnant, and they’ve tried IVF, they tried all different sorts of things and they still can’t fall pregnant. What does it say? Well, to me, it says that the tests don’t tell us everything. There is a lot more to health, vitality, feeling good, and in the end falling pregnant than what you can get in your hormone assay.

So by knowing this if in your heart you realize… and I read an article on my website called “What All Women With Low AMH Have in Common?” and it’s something that I’ve discovered hundreds and hundreds of women, they all seem to have this. They say “Have you had some period in your life where you’ve just been exhausted, tired, run-down, just not coping or deals with stress?” And yeah, a vast majority of them say “Yes, you know, this was happening around about this time” in trying to fall pregnant and in fact getting a diagnosis that you have fertility issues. That can also have the same emotional drain.

I think we were talking before about how 70 percent of disease is rooted in emotional health. There’s no science to back this up but I would suggest that a woman’s emotional health makes up about 95 percent of her overall health. So a woman is happy in her art and happy in her mind, then her body is going to follow suit. But if she’s unhappy and this is so important for the ladies, it’s really important to be happy in your heart and to be happy in your mind if you want your body to be healthy itself, and I would suggest that…

Sometime in the ‘50s, this is something I found absolutely fascinating. So longest running scientific study that we’ve got so far is called The Happiness Study. It’s been done by Harvard since the early 20th Century. They wanted to find out what in fact made people happy. So they tracked men, they only recently included women in this study but they tracked men for a long period of time to find out what in fact made them happy. One of the conclusions that they came to which was quite surprising, is that the quality of your relationships in your ‘50s determines, can determine how well you age in your ‘60s and ‘70s. So if you’re in a toxic relationship with people around you, you really don’t like, then evidence suggests that you’re not going to age terribly gracefully in your ‘60s and ‘70s, but even outside of diet and health and exercise, if you’ve got a really happy heart in your ‘50s and the people that you’re around and that you love and that you’re flourishing, then the likelihood of you aging gracefully in your ‘60s and ‘70s is significantly higher. If that’s not a plug for good emotional health and how it impacts your overall health, I don’t know what is.

42:18 CL: Yeah, absolutely so important. How do we find out more about you and Ovance and like reading about what the product is?

SM: Sure. We published everything. Basically my entire brain is laid out on that website, all the research that I’ve done and everything that we looked through. All the studies that we’ve done and how we’ve achieved, that’s all published there on the website. I’m pretty sure I’ve got a page on there, it’s called Everything AMH and it’s a list of everything that I think is relevant and pertinent and important for women to know about low AMH levels and how it can be influenced. And certainly what the most important AMH levels required for natural pregnancy, very different from AMH levels required for successful stimulation of the ovaries, I won’t say successful pregnancies for IVF because that’s different, but to get the results that IVF specialists want women to get, they certainly need much higher AMH levels than what they need to fall pregnant naturally. The reason why I can say this is because we see women, we get their tests back, we see yes they’ve hit this certain level, and natural pregnancy seems to occur after that.

So we found that women can get to .8 or 1 ng/mL that natural pregnancies seem to occur at that level and above but to have a successful IVF stimulated cycle, a woman needs to be at 1.96 ng/mL and they’re likely to get the correct stimulation from the IVF drugs. This doesn’t mean that women need to have AMH bang on with and specialist says “We need you at 1.96 if you want to fall pregnant naturally.” I’d suggest that that’s not the case. But also, the results that we’ve got worth women that have been taking the formulas that we have, and so if we did a study where women weren’t treated at all with low AMH levels and then treated with the formulas that we have and then just IVF on its own, to see what kind of natural pregnancy rates there are, I would suggest clearly that the women that don’t receive any treatment would be the lowest group for successes. The women that did IVF without any other treatment could still, realistically it’s between about 2 and 8 percent for IVF cycles and that varies on how much their AMH levels are. Versus the people that are using the formulas, certainly the success rates are much higher than what IVF is able to boast under those circumstances.

45:06 CL: Okay, great. What is the URL of your website? I’ll put them in the show notes just so…

SM: Sure, no worries. It’s Advancedfertilitysolutions.com is the name of the website and everythingAMH, I’ve put everything I know about everything to do with AMH levels. Even I went and read all the studies behind all the supplements because, you know, it’s like alright, who else out here is helping egg quality and what are they taking? And I had a look at a lot of the naturopathic things that have been prescribed. I went and read the actual science behind them because I wanted to know, okay, so if advanced formula works, what else is helping women out there? So I went in and researched all that as well. In the blog section there’s articles on all the different supplements and the science behind them. I wanted to make… I know most people can’t sit down and read a scientific paper. It can boggle their brain. After I had my Master’s degree I found that that was pretty much all I could read and everything else would be kind of really boring.

46:14 CL: Yeah. Some pretty dry stuff.

SM: Yeah, it was pretty dry stuff and so I’d try and take the scientific information and moisten it up and make it readable. So all the things that I’ve got on there are heavily referenced and referenced, you know, the studies that have launched these products and one of the things I found quite extraordinary is that science is really good at making more mice. If mice have fertility issues, they can make those mice get fertile health and have more babies.

46:47 CL: They have no problems.

SM: No worries. Pharmaceuticals are brilliant for the mice industry, God bless them. But they don’t seem to be terribly affected in improving pregnancy outcomes for women. And this is the thing that blew me away. I think the biggest challenge we’ve got is that the mouse model that we use for medicine is really effective in many circumstances. But when it comes to fertility, the average mouse can have between 4 and 14 pups and grow them in 3 weeks and do that 5 to 10 times a year. A mouse can have 120 other mice in a year! A woman, respectfully, a baby, has one every 2 years and so we’ve got this spectacular breeding animal and sure, when we tweak it, it goes back to breeding spectacularly again. But I don’t think mapping the mouse model onto female’s fertility is an accurate thing. We need to find something that would breed a lot slower and then use these tests on these other animals.

And I really don’t promote animal testing at all, so please don’t interpret it like that, but this is the way that science is done nowadays. And if they found something that was a little more simple, chimpanzees, apes, I feel actually quite awful suggesting that we should go test these things on animals, but it certainly feels a way if we had something that was more comparable to how humans are and use these supplements and treatments on these animals to see what differences they would bear, I think we’re going to get far more realistic outcomes than the promises that the mouse model has done for women in the field of supplementation.

48:34 CL: That’s such a good point, yeah. We are not mice and so that’s not a good comparison. One thing I was going to bring up is you said that there was a commonality between so many of the women that have low AMH and because people always kind of chalk it up to an age thing, but you were saying about going through a period of exhaustion, do you categorize that as what they call adrenal fatigue or adrenal exhaustion? Would that be the term used? Because, you know, some people call it like the 21st Century Syndrome.

SM: Yeah, that’s fair enough.

49:19 CL: I’ve experienced it, yeah. It’s pretty crazy.

SM: I remember years ago a woman coming to me and she said “I’ve got adrenal fatigue.” She had a checklist of 50 different things and she ticked 48 of those different things. I went through it and I had a look and I agreed with only one of them. Even though she certainly had issues, I think all these symptoms and signs associated with adrenal fatigue don’t necessarily… if you’ve got them, clearly you’ve got adrenal fatigue but there are people that are stressed out, that with the cortisol from the adrenal gland sitting on top of the kidneys is blocking oxytocin, the women can’t feel love. When you can’t feel love, all you feel is that stress with the cortisol in your system, which messes up your entire body. It’s wonderful. Those stress hormones are great.

Back in the day we found a cave and we know that saber tooth tigers lived in there, we need to stay on edge, so if the tigers come back home, we can be up and defend ourselves or run away. But nowadays, we don’t have those stressors. We’re worried about “Does my boss think I’m doing a good job at work?” or “How am I going to be pay for the suits? Oh my God,” which are no fight or flight kind of responses but the mechanisms inside our body that respond to these things are still the same. And so, what you’re saying with this adrenal fatigue, this 21st Century illness, is it’s very real. It’s very, very real and I think we all feel stress, we all know what it feels like. But is it valid? Does the stress that we feel and the circumstances that we have truly warrant how it is we feel? I’d suggest that a lot of it, no. We get caught up in our heads and caught up in our lives and all of a sudden, life happens to us, how we deal with it will determine how we feel. You know, if something bad happens but you got great coping mechanisms, you could be okay. Something bad happens and you got terrible coping mechanisms, then it can really do your head in, make your life a misery and before you know it, you got no energy, you’re lying around the house and you’re feeling terrible and all these illnesses come in.

For me, I think the root of autoimmune diseases are based in how it is we feel, and I think a good example is low thyroid which is a very common problem, and I’ve asked every single person I’ve ever treated with low thyroid, were you extremely stressed out around about the time when you got the diagnosis? And they’re like “Oh, my life was a mess. Things were so, so difficult.” And so they go to the doctor, they get a blood test and they’re like “Oh, you’ve got low thyroid. Well, we can give you this medication and you’ll have to take for the rest of your life but it will fix your thyroid.” I’d suggest that yes, their thyroid levels were low but what they needed to be treated for was stress. What they needed to be treated for was lifestyle. It’s like fix what’s going on in your life, fix what’s going on in your heart and then your body will start working properly again. Every time something goes wrong, you go in and take another pill for it, that’s what you’re going to end up doing, taking more and more pills and the doctors and the surgeons are waiting for you because you don’t fix the thing that’s the problem like “I’m in a toxic relationship” or “I hate my job” or “I live right next to a factory and I can’t get any sleep.” They’re big things.

52:45 CL: Maybe we can have a part two on that because that’s a whole other conversation, the thyroid and adrenal relationship are quite complex. One thing. I was interviewing a thyroid specialist and I said, well the thyroid medication, some people think of it as sort of a Band-Aid and it goes yeah, but sometimes you need to Band-Aid the thing while you’re dealing with the other thing.

SM: Absolutely.

53:14 CL: Because I agree. Everyone that I’ve ever treated with thyroid, they have deep emotional stuff kind of going on and what came first, well, maybe the emotional stuff. But it gets real complex and crazy and it can take over your life and make you feel like you want to die. And western medicine has been pretty mediocre at really dealing with it. So he was saying yeah, the thyroid medication, it can just take the stress off the thyroid while you deal with some rude issues and you don’t necessarily have to be on it for life.

SM: Well, that will be nice. I think this is a really important thing that people should know when using hormone therapy to assist with their problems, is that the body works as you know, Charlene. It works with homeostasis, natural balance. And so if the thyroid is low, for whatever reason the body actually thinks that’s natural. I would suggest it drops the thyroid levels to slow people down. It’s like buddy, you are so out of balance in your life, slow down, sit down. There’s that wonderful saying “you should meditate for 20 minutes every day. Unless you are too busy, then you should meditate for an hour.” I love it.

My favorite line. I think when people get these low thyroid issues, it’s like hey, this is autoimmune, this is like the thing that has looked after you is your closest best friend, your immunity and your immune system will protect you throughout your entire life and then all of a sudden, it turns around and starts attacking itself? This is precisely a life out of balance. Things are out of balance. If you can bring those back right, if you can find what’s in your heart and know what it is that makes you happy and live towards that, then you can reverse these issues. I think sometimes when we use psychiatric medications, antidepressants and things like that, you’re right it does help us cope in the short-term but it also can pause our maturity, and certainly not feel the pressures of our life so much and either make us ignore them which is what people who turn to drugs can do, just ignore their problems and it’s great, that’s their coping mechanism. Other people that don’t use that, they might use alcohol or talk to their friends or have a good time.

The point that I wanted to get to is that when you use hormones, say you use thyroxine to help with the thyroid gland, the body starts producing its own TSH, its own thyroid-stimulating hormone. So once you use thyroxine, your body starts making its own thyroid hormones and it works with what we call a negative feedback system. So the more hormones you add to your body, the less hormones your body will produce and I think this is a challenge is that when women are using the contraceptive pill for so long, the body switches off. It’s like “I haven’t had to do this for the last 20 years. Now all of a sudden you want me to get back to work and do everything the way it normally did?”

For many women, it does which is wonderful and I’m really glad that that’s the case. But you and I will both see the people that it doesn’t happen for and all of a sudden they’ve been adding hormones to their body for all this time and their body is downregulated its own natural hormone production and then when you stop, it doesn’t go back to normal. And I think if you’re using hormone therapy and you can get the job done in short period of time like we’ve been a couple of months, that’s great and your body will take this boost of hormones and will add to it and help it thrive more effectively.

But if after a few months you haven’t got the results and you haven’t got the pregnancy, then it seems the body once you stop taking those, there’s this lull of hormone production and it takes some time for the body to get back to its normal levels, and if in fact those levels were low in the first place and then you’ve added hormones to it which bumps it up temporarily, and once you stop using that therapy the hormone levels can be even lower after that. So it’s a bit of a double-edged sword with the hormone therapy short-term. If you get great short-term results, wonderful, but I would suggest long-term impacted hormone therapy shows that even stronger down regulation of hormone production in a person’s body and it makes it even harder to fix it under those circumstances.

57:44 CL: That’s an interesting topic and we’re going to have to wrap up in a second. However old I am now, 48, but like 10 years ago when I started looking at hormone replacement therapy with biocompatibles I was like, “Well that’s what I’m going to do. I’m just going to prop up my hormones like I’m 20-something years old and solve all the problems.” A decade later of really looking into it, you’re like, oh that’s probably not going to be the best solution, darn it.

SM: Darn it.

58:15 CL: I thought that was going to be my fountain of youth. It’s like oh of course, anything that sounds too good to be true, it’s a lot more complex than that. Even though some you’re like… I mean I know some people go, oh, Suzanne Somers, she’s not a doctor, she’s an actress but she did spend a lot of time researching it and you’re like, well, she’s almost 70 years old and she said she feels like a 20-year-old. But there’s a dark side to hormone replacement therapy, not HRT even but the biocompatible stuff.

SM: I agree. I’d suggest if you want a fountain of youth, yoga. Regular and consistent yoga practice would have to be probably the single most, smartest thing you could do as a physical exercise for your body and you’re thinking, “Oh, I used to love yoga. Maybe I should go back to it.” Do it. That’s my secret. That’s my secret to my fountain of youth.

59:10 CL: Okay, and you look like you’re glowing because I’m thinking, I want to do a plug for kundalini yoga because even if I feel like “But I’m so inflexible” I mean, kundalini yoga, you could do it in a chair and it’s all about breath work and people who do kundalini yoga, they glow and they look 20 years younger.

SM: Yes. I’m 46 now but I feel like I did in my 20s. I had so much energy, so much vitality. Flexibility is great and so yeah, I think like you, it’s a great plug and yeah, if anything, go do yoga.

59:53 CL: Yeah. And you won’t look weird after doing botox for decades, plus botox and trying to conceive do not mix. One thing, yeah, doctors say don’t do botox if you’re pregnant, I say don’t do botox if you’re trying to get pregnant either or fillers or anything like that.

SM: Charlene, what’s your foundation on that one?

60:16 CL: On the botox and fillers?

SM: Yeah. I like it, go on.

60:20 CL: Honestly if you’re trying to conceive, don’t do those because botox and the fillers, they both have thimerosal in them. It’s mercury. That’s an additive so that they always have shelf-life. They don’t belong in your body. I think in Chinese medicine all of the energy meridians, they start or end in your face. You’re kind of changing that. They’re doing studies now of women who’ve had botox for like 5-10 years, that they don’t even have access to their full emotional range anymore because the face can’t express that. They’re saying definitely do not do those things when you’re pregnant, but the preconception period which is 120 days where the egg is maturing, and so you’re going to ovulate, that’s a critical time period, don’t put those toxins in.

SM: Fair enough. That’s very sound advice. I’ll add that into my repertoire, alright? Thank you very much.

61:21 CL: Yeah, yeah. I mean there’s some women who look great with it but I think after doing it for so long, it alters the face a lot and you kind of freeze. It’s more the glow of you and your aura that makes you young. Right? It’s not just about a lack of wrinkles.

SM: It’s true.

61:43 CL: You’re like “Should I do that?” and then just Google “Botox made me sick” and read about all the stories around the world of women who go “I can’t believe I did this to myself.” Or feeling sick because…

SM: Okay, I’ll jump on and check it out.

62:03 CL: You were about to have an appointment, weren’t you, Dr. Scott? You’re going to rethink that. Gua Sha, cupping, and acupuncture on the face, it’s crazy, it works so well. It’s not like botox but it brings out the vitality and it releases that crystallized stress emotion of the face which I think that’s what creates youth.

SM: Fair enough. I think it’s one of those things, people say “I went away on holidays and I fell pregnant.” Or people have a whole host of different problems, this is something that I ask a lot of people. They’ve got different sorts of things going wrong, I say, “When you go and went on holidays, do you still feel the same way? Do you still have all these symptoms?” If a person says no, then we know it’s their life. It’s your life that’s causing the problem. You can go away on holidays and have 50 percent of your symptoms go away, it’s because you’ve got a problem in your life and if you change that, then you’ll start going better. Great, I went away… “oh, we’ve been trying to fall pregnant for three years, we went on a three-week holiday and fell pregnant.” What? People relax. Their life is different. They’ve made it, it’s a simple change but that’s such a common story I think. So, yeah. So go on a holiday.

63:20 CL: Let’s go back to yoga. There’s such great yoga videos and kundalini breath work videos on YouTube, it’s free, access those because holiday is, what, in America you do holidays two weeks a year and sometimes you drink a lot and eat. So yeah, that can switch you but if you do a practice of meditation or whatever, that can last long-term. I just noticed yeah, as you get older, these holidays, you get back, was that even on vacation? The relaxation lasts so short. You’re like, “God!” for the amount of money you spend and whatever. When you’re younger you’re like “I feel great from that for a couple months after” and now it’s like, “Okay.”

SM: Totally. It’s funny, it’s like people are still sitting at work, they know they’re about to go on holidays but three days before they go on holidays and they’re already on holiday and they’re sitting at work just passing the time. Then while you’re on holiday and so you know you’ve got to go back to work in three days’ time, you’re sitting there feeling like you’re already back at work. It’s like being present where we’re at is really difficult. Our minds can put us in all different sorts of places regardless of where we are. I think a very long mental health has probably become the biggest focus and certainly one of my really big focuses in practice and in life is realize you get people with terminal problems, terminal conditions who got a great outlook, and in fact their heart is happy and healthy. There are other people that have got nothing really wrong with them and they’re miserable.

65:00 CL: Yeah. Might as well get your mental state ready because when you have a child, man, you are in for a wild ride.

SM: It’s true.

65:14 CL: One thing to end it with is Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now is like how do you live in the now. It’s kind of that perpetual question but he says if you’re not feeling anything but at peace, you’re not in the now. And that’s a great reminder for me. I’m like, I’m feeling… okay, get back to that present moment because you’re thinking about some future event that hasn’t happened or you’re worried about the past, that’s over. Okay, get back into this. So it’s a daily reminder, right? Alright, you know what, God bless you. You are awesome. That was a great interview. Thank you so much.

SM: Thank you Charlene.

65:50 CL: Yeah, and I’ll reach out to you for a part 2.

SM: It’s been a real pleasure.

65:52 CL: Okay, keep glowing doing your yoga, and thanks for inspiring people. Appreciate it.

SM: It’s my real pleasure. Thanks so much for inviting me on, Charlene. I really appreciate it. Have a beautiful day.

66:01 CL: You too. Bye!

SM: Thank you.