Infertility is one of the taboos of society that can be challenging and frustrating for couples who are giving their all just to conceive. Couples feel helpless and isolated when they learn that they have a low to nil chance of conceiving. While this is not necessarily a disease, this disorder can cause the same amount of stress and hopelessness.

Male infertility is a disorder that can make men feel heavily burdened. However, knowing more about male infertility will strangle the misconceptions associated with the inability to conceive. By arming ourselves with what we should know about male infertility, we can assess the different options to make the right decision.

Defining Infertility

Infertility is the inability of a couple to conceive after trying for one year. Infertility for women is the inability to deliver a baby to full term.

Defining Male Infertility

Male infertility, also termed as male factor infertility, is simply the man’s attribution or cause to a couple that has no ability to conceive. Male infertility is generally connected with hormonal disorders, obstruction in the reproductive system, sexual dysfunction, or recurring illness.

Male infertility is actually the state of inability rather than a specific disease, although the definition is interchanged. Thus, diagnosing the disorder requires a holistic approach that should cover everything regarding a man’s health. Half of infertile men have irreversibly infertility conditions, which restrict their ability to father children.

Causes of Male Infertility

The causes of male infertility can be categorized into two, which are congenital condition and acquired condition. Congenital male infertility means that the involved causes are present since birth while acquired male infertility is developed later in life, mostly due to illness that affect the male’s reproductive system.

Male infertility can also stem out from treatment of other diseases such as radiation treatment for cancers and medication for high blood pressure. Diseases such as diabetes, cystic fibrosis, and sexually transmitted diseases increase the risk of male infertility. Systemic diseases, which are diseases that render most of the body ineffective, also contribute to male infertility. Examples of these systemic diseases are high fever, infection, and kidney abnormalities.

Testosterone Deficiency

Testosterone deficiency is a male condition that represents the declining production of testosterone. Testosterone is a male hormone that is responsible for the growth of the male reproductive system. Thus, the lack of testosterone can often result to male infertility due to the lack of sperm development and undergrowth of the male reproductive system.

Diagnosing Male infertility

Fertility specialists have developed a number of diagnostic methods to find the causes of male infertility. Looking for the causes of infertility in a couple starts with the male as it is easier to look for inconsistencies in the male’s reproductive system than in a female’s reproductive system.

An investigation of family history is the first diagnostic method in detecting the causes of one’s infertility. The doctor will try to establish if the causes are congenital or acquired as they learn more about a patient’s family history. Then, a semen analysis follows where the male’s fluids is examined as the doctor looks for the concentration of sperm cells, sperm shape, the mobility of sperm, total number of moving sperm and the total volume of the semen. Fertility doctors factor in all observations to develop a result for semen analysis.

Advanced tests measure the behavior of sperm cells in specific conditions. The sperm-mucus interaction test measures the ability of the sperm cell to swim through the cervical mucus. This gives doctors an idea if the sperm sample can swim through the female tract. The sperm penetration assay tests the sperms ability to break through the female egg by testing its strength against a hamster egg. Finally, the immunobead test looks for antibodies in the semen that can damage sperm cells.

Treating Male Infertility

Once the cause of male infertility is established, the doctor can now recommend a set of treatments to make conception between the couple possible. Each treatment addresses a certain cause. Unlike other conditions, male infertility can be solved with specific types of treatment.

Electro ejaculation is a treatment for men who lack the stimulus to produce an ejaculation. In this treatment, an electrical current stimulated the nerve so that erection and ejaculation can take place. Men with nerve damage can opt for this treatment.

If an obstruction between the testes and the urethra is present in such a way that a viable sperm count cannot be ejaculated, doctors pursue sperm retrieval. This surgical procedure involves incision of the scrotum and uses the outlet to gather the sperm cells from the testes. A needle injection is also used to extract the sperm cells. These sperm cells can be candidates for artificial insemination. Meanwhile, sperm washing is done to collect the healthiest class of sperm cells from a semen sample or after a sperm retrieval procedure. This process separates the sperm cells from the fatty acids and mucus to increase sperm motility.

Sperm injection is a process used where an immobile sperm is directly injected to a mature egg. The egg is then incubated and transferred to the uterus. The matured egg can also be placed in the female’s fallopian tube so that the egg can be implanted naturally.

To improve sperm production and treat hormonal abnormalities, doctors will suggest drug therapy. These medications when taken in can cure infections in the sperm cells, defeat antibodies that attack sperm cells, reduce estrogen, and may be used to stimulate the release of male hormones.

Home Sperm count Tests

To conveniently screen male fertility, TestCountry offers the home based Fertility Sperm count Test. This sperm count test determines the concentration of sperm cells which will help your doctor assess your fertility conditions.

Sperm count is one of the simplest factors to predict a person’s ability to conceive. Simply put, the ability of a couple to conceive is dependent on the probability of a sperm to attach to an egg. Thus, the more sperm cells that surround the egg cell, the better chance there is to conceive. There is a critical level of sperm concentration to represent male fertility conditions. If a sperm concentration level is greater than 20 million per milliliter, then the sperm count is at a healthy level. However, this does not mean that the male is fertile since there are other reasons of male infertility.

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Lena Butler, writes articles about TestCountry Health Information Resources, Things You Should Know About Male Infertility. Other articles are used such as TestCountry Health FAQ

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You and your spouse are happily married for 15 years now. Both of you have stable jobs, a dream house, several brand-new sedans, and a hard-earned fortune that you can be proud of to other people.

But there is one thing that bothers you both.

You do not have children to share all of these blessings and happiness with.

Although you love and understand each others very much, you are still bothered by the fact that you cannot have even a single child for over 15 years of your marriage with your spouse. If you didn’t bother for having a child on the early years of your marriage, now you are searching for a definite answer. You do not want to live the next 25 years without a child running to your arms and feeling your warm parental embrace.

At this point, you need not to ask who among the two of you (your spouse) has the incapacity, but rather what is the real condition of your respective reproductive systems. However, it is clear that both of you are victims of infertility.

Infertility is a disease of the reproductive system where any one or even both of you have the inability to conceive a child naturally. In the aforementioned case, you can say that they are plagued by infertility over the years because the diagnosis of such disease states that if a couple failed to conceive a child after a year of well-timed (the fertile period) and unprotected (without the usage of anti-pregnancy medications) sexual intercourse, then they are diagnosed with infertility.

In contrast to the popular belief that infertility is a “women’s problem”, medical studies show that 40 percent of recorded infertility cases are due to male factor, another 40 percent due to female factor, and the remaining percentage of cases can be either a combined factor (that is, the couple has infertility problems) or the cause of infertility is unexplained. The latter condition is rare, though there are instances when both your reproductive systems functions normally yet you are having difficulty in conceiving a child.

Who is at risk on getting infertility problems? The following age groups are said to be falling under the infertility diagnosis:

Couples under 35 years of age and have tried to conceive a child but failed to do so after one year of well-timed and unprotected sexual intercourse.

Couples over 35 years of age and still trying to conceive a child but failed after 6 months of well-timed and unprotected sexual intercourse.

Couples over 30 years of age and have previous medical history of PID or pelvic inflammatory disease, repeated pregnancy loss, painful menstruation cycle, or the male partner suffers from low sperm count.

There are varieties of medications that you can take to combat infertility. This may include artificial insemination, ovulation inducers, and surgery, if necessary. However, it is recommended that you consult with your attending physicians first before taking any treatment plan that would address your infertility problem.

Infertility problem should be addressed by the couple themselves. This is not the time to pinpoint who is infertile. What matters most is that both of you agree to consult a physician and support whoever found out to be having infertility problems. It is both your concern, and should be resolved without hurting each other’s feeling. A child may just be a few years away from now, if you will act immediately.

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Bob is the owner of http://infertility.knowsmart.com/ which is an up-to-date, informative infertility website.

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The ability to bear children is a glorious thing and equally devastating when infertility becomes an issue. Traditional Chinese medicine and infertility are discussed below.

Traditional Chinese Medicine and Infertility

Traditional Chinese Medicine has treated infertility in both men and women for centuries. The very first book ever written on gynecology is “The Complete Book of Effective Prescriptions for Diseases of Women†that was first published in 1237 AD. In the Chinese theory of Five Elements, infertility is influenced by the water element (bladder and kidney Meridians) and the earth element (spleen and stomach Meridian). The Four Examinations of Traditional Chinese Medicine is used to reveal the underlying disharmonies or other causes of infertility.

The focus in treatment is often upon building up of the kidneys which will increase the likely hood of a successful pregnancy. This might even include such things as adding black beans, which are said to be good for the kidneys, to the diet. Other treatments include acupuncture, herbs, movement, meditation, and even massage.

A form of massage known as acupressure is also used. Pressure is applied to specific points on the hands and the feet. This pressure can stimulate the ovaries, the uterus, and the glands to help balance out hormone production. There are about 150 different herbs and herb combinations that are used in the treatment of infertility. Although none are considered toxic, some can cause a certain degree of digestive discomfort. The herbs can be ingested in powered form or made into pills. Many can be brewed into teas.

In China, Traditional Chinese Medicine methods and Western practices are also used in common for the treatment of infertility although Western practices are considered expensive and not particularly effective. Clinical studies done on TCM methods have shown almost a 70% success rate in the treatment of infertility. The measure of success in these studies being the achievement of pregnancy.

As in much of Traditional Chinese Medicine, the approach to the diagnosis of infertility centers around discovering the basic imbalance that is causing it. This complete picture approach to treatment has the side effect of bringing about an overall improvement of the patients health and sense of well being. Once pregnancy is achieved, treatment is usually discontinued. In some cases, where miscarriages or other complications have been indicated, acupuncture and herbal treatments will continue until delivery. The treatments can reduce the pain of childbirth and aid healing afterward and so are often continued for these reasons.

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Alien writes for Medicinal herbs . He also writes for herbal remedies

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