Did you know osteopathy is a safe, non-invasive way to boost your fertility and improve pregnancy outcomes? Your body is working 24-7 to create a life, so ensuring it isn’t occupied with other forms of pain or trauma is key to optimizing your reproductive health.
By manipulating your soft tissues and joints, osteopathy restores balance and promotes optimal body function, while treating both the areas you are experiencing pain or discomfort and other systematically connected areas too. This is because osteopathic medicine looks at the body as one interconnected unit. Therefore, rather than just treating the visible symptoms, we take a holistic approach to get to the root of the problem and promote overall healthier well-being.
An osteopathic practitioner can help you align your body and your baby in utero to ensure optimal health for both of you during any stage of your pregnancy journey.
Benefits of osteopathy when trying to conceive
When trying to conceive, both women and men can benefit from osteopathic treatments to support their journey:
Female fertility
Infertility may be caused by both physical and emotional influences, so ensuring our body functions to its fullest capacity may increase your chances of conceiving a child. Osteopathy plays a role in your fertility by improving the function of your musculoskeletal, circulatory, nervous, and hormonal systems to increase your success and overall health.
As stress is considered to be the number one cause of unexplained infertility in women, osteopathy works holistically to help you calm and relieve all parts of your mind, body, and spirit of excess stress. At Thuja Wellness, our natural fertility and birth care plans may also include other stress-relieving treatments, including acupuncture and massage, to support you.
Another common cause of fertility issues is often linked to the structural misalignment of the reproductive system. Osteopathic techniques help to realign your lower back and pelvis by increasing joint mobility and blood circulation, improving the health of your spine and soft tissues, and aligning your pelvic region to ensure the right neurological signals get to your uterus and ovaries.
Male fertility
In men, fertility issues are most often attributed to sperm quality or quantity, but stress can affect the male reproductive organs as well. Men can benefit from osteopathic treatments aimed at not only realigning their joints, muscles, nerves, connective tissues & internal organs, but also to calm and relieve stress from the mind and body in preparation to conceive.
When to see your Osteopathic Practitioner
If you are undergoing IVF or other assisted fertility treatment, we recommend seeing an osteopathic practitioner before you begin or as a complementary treatment to increase your chances of a successful outcome the first time.
If you are attempting to conceive naturally, begin your work with an osteopathic practitioner as early as possible before trying to conceive. This helps us ensure your body is as optimally functioning as possible to help increase your chances of success.
We also find many couples will seek out osteopathic treatments when struggling to get pregnant. Depending on the reasons for infertility, we may suggest an integrated approach that combines osteopathic treatments, nutrition and lifestyle adjustments, and other alternative medicine treatments like acupuncture or massage.
Whether you see an osteopathic practitioner before or during your conception journey, we can help you align your body system to increase your chances of success.
Benefits of osteopathy while pregnant
Once you conceive, it won’t take long before you start noticing changes in your body. In a few short months, your body’s center of gravity shifts as your baby belly expands, and this affects everything from how you sit, lay down, and even walk. Osteopathic treatments can help relieve all types of pregnancy-related pain, including back pain, knee and ankle pain, and other general aches and pains.
Some women experience pain in the pelvic and stomach area during pregnancy because the ligaments around the stomach are stretched to accommodate your growing baby. Osteopathy techniques can help you find relief from this pain too.
Osteopathic treatments can also help with birth preparation to ensure that the birth canal provides an unobstructed path for the baby to be born. This means manipulating and balancing your pelvic bones so they are aligned and not twisted. Any twisting or misalignment of the pelvis could cause the baby to struggle getting through the birth canal, creating additional complications or a more prolonged labour.
During pregnancy, your body goes through many changes, and Osteopathy can help you find relief from many of these, including:
- Headaches
- Poor circulation
- Perineal tension
- Digestive issues
- Postural pains
- Fatigue
Benefits of osteopathy for postpartum recovery
Your body has just been through a miraculous event: the birth of your child. It doesn’t matter how your labour and delivery went, if you had a vaginal or cesarean delivery, or if you had a drugless labour or not. Your body has some significant recovery ahead, and an osteopathic practitioner can support you in your postpartum recovery.
Osteopathy can help realign the woman’s pelvis after birth so she can return to normal mobility. This alignment supports other physical recovery symptoms, including returning to regular menstruation and decreasing or eliminating stress incontinence or constipation.
New moms also often experience aches and pains from bad posture during breastfeeding, regularly carrying the baby around in your arms or a car seat, leaning over crib railings to put your baby down, and all the other new day-to-day activities you do with your baby. An osteopathic practitioner can help you soothe achy muscles and relax your body so you can enjoy time with your baby without worrying about pain.
If you experience Postpartum Depression, an Osteopath can also help. We can work on your craniosacral axis to help you rebalance your body, which helps support a healthy emotional state. Osteopathy can be used on its own or with other complementary natural therapies to help your mind and body relax.
Can osteopathy boost your fertility?
Yes! Osteopathy is an effective, non-invasive way to help you conceive and help guide you through the pregnancy and postpartum changes your body goes through. At Thuja Wellness, we have patient-oriented solutions to support you in this journey. We can create an integrative treatment plan with any combination of our natural health practitioners you need.
And, our holistic mindset means we treat your body as one integrated unit. We help you find relief from the symptoms while we dig deeper to find the root of the problem so you can achieve optimal wellness and health for you and your baby.
Feel better today and book an appointment with our Fertility Expert, Ila Casselman, at Thuja Wellness to help you through your journey to start a family.
