the tao of fertility (a review)
Monday, May 19, 2008
I knew that my wife would be game. La dra. is a family physician dedicated to the core ideas of family medicine and preventive primary care, to a “womb-to-tomb,” holistic practice that treats patients as partners and sees the role of the primary care provider’s office as that of a “medical home” for its patients—and she also happens to be a woman who got her bachelor’s degree in medical anthropology before getting her M.D. She knows that the Western “scientific” tradition of allopathic medicine isn’t the only game in town, or shouldn’t be, and has always wanted to know more about how to integrate traditional and complementary methods into her practice. Now, however, we find ourselves contemplating how we might integrate these things into our lives as patients instead, as we grasp toward anything that might help us bring another baby into our family.
We weren’t surprised that it hasn’t been easy to have another child, considering the challenges we faced when we were trying before. We know that we were lucky—The Pumpkin was conceived with relatively little intervention, but intervention nonetheless, and the prospect looms, as time goes on, that the same or more will be needed this time as well. Adding ideas, methods and tools from Dr. Dao’s fusion of Taoism and science, of traditional Chinese and Western medicine, seems to be something we can do to try to increase our chances.
The Tao of Fertility is packed with information, and I’m still trying to digest it all. Patients’ stories of specific challenges intermingle with fascinating explanations of how certain TCM practices are supposed to work, and then there are the detailed plans of what we are supposed to do—28-day programs and diets and teas and exercises and meditations. I, personally, have never been a “program” kind of person. I’ve never tried to adopt, for example, a prescribed, regimented diet plan. My wife implemented much of Dr. Dao’s 28-day program over the course of one month, as much as we could manage—exercise and visualization, dietary changes. Though we were already eating pretty health—whole grains, lots of vegetables and fish—we added a lot of sweet potato to the menu that month, and tried to cut down on sugar, though that’s my biggest downfall. She’s even stuck to some of the changes, eliminating cow’s milk for soy and almond milks, substituting green and herbal teas for even decaf coffee. Knowing how often Dr. Dao sticks in a line about how nutrition affects sperm motility as often as he talks about how it affects female reproductive health, I tried to follow suit, I really did—but after a week of iced green tea, I ran, panting, back to my very-light-and-very-sweet iced coffee. I’m sorry. I tried.
The most interesting thing that the book hit home, for me, is the importance of having someone knowledgeable on your side. You can feel, from the women’s stories in the book, how much they’ve come to rely on Dr. Dao. It’s like what I hear from my wife and her colleagues when they talk about how and why they do what they do as family doctors—about how they transform their role of “doctor” into one of coach, friend, ally, guide, interpreter, all in one. There is so much in this book that, despite its obvious intentions of being as good a substitute for the real thing as a book can be, it’s only reinforced, for both of us, how much we need a real-life coach, an interpreter, an ally, a friend. After re
ading this book, my wife doesn’t just want to follow a written plan and use its shopping list to buy ingredients for tea—she wants to find someone like Dr. Dao who can guide us through this. She doesn’t want to open up the phone book and see if we even have any acupunturists in this town—she wants to find someone like Dr. Dao. I guess that’s as good a recommendation for a book as any.
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