Balancing Life and Medicine
Welcome to "Balancing Life and Medicine," where we explore the intricate dance between health, wellness, and the pursuit of a fulfilling life. As an Acupuncture Physician trained in both Eastern and Western Medicine, I'm your host, Doctor DeWayne Baugus, guiding you through a journey of holistic healing and personal growth.
In each episode, we delve into diverse medical issues, from conventional treatments to alternative therapies, bridging the wisdom of both worlds. Joining me are esteemed guests, ranging from physicians to professionals in various fields, sharing their insights on navigating the complexities of health and success.
But here's the unique twist – we're not just about treating symptoms; we're about nurturing the mind, body, and spirit. As Christians, we believe in a holistic approach to well-being, where faith intertwines with medicine, empowering us to lead balanced and purposeful lives.
Together, we'll uncover strategies for maintaining vitality and resilience, not just in our careers but in every aspect of our lives. From employees to business owners, our guests reveal their secrets to success while staying grounded in their faith and values.
Join us on "Balancing Life and Medicine" as we discover how to find the best answers for our ailments, embrace healing in its entirety, and cultivate a life of abundance, health, and harmony.
Tune in and embark on a journey towards holistic wellness and spiritual fulfillment. Let's navigate the path to wholeness together.
Balancing Life and Medicine
Transforming Fertility: Harmonizing Acupuncture, Mind, and Body for Successful Conception
Can managing stress and cortisol levels significantly increase your chances of conceiving? Join us for an insightful conversation with Dr. DeWayne Baugus from Maplebrook Acupuncture Clinic in Tulsa, Oklahoma, as he unpacks how acupuncture and oriental medicine can transform your fertility journey from a stressful ordeal into a hopeful experience. With over 23,000 fertility patients under his care, Dr. Baugus brings a wealth of knowledge on addressing not only the physical but also the psychological and spiritual elements essential for successful fertility treatments.
Discover how Dr. Baugus seamlessly integrates acupuncture with the hormonal treatments prescribed by fertility clinics, ensuring a harmonious and effective approach. By working closely with fertility physicians, he highlights the importance of avoiding common pitfalls and incorrect acupuncture practices that could otherwise hinder your efforts. Learn about the vital role of aligning the mind and body, and how creating a supportive environment can turn the inevitable bumps along the way into moments of grace and patience. Whether you're from Tulsa or traveling from afar, this episode offers invaluable insights to help you navigate your fertility journey with optimism and success.
Welcome to Balancing Life in Medicine. I'm Dr DeWayne Baugus. I work at Maplebrook Acupuncture Clinic in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and today I'd like to go over some of the things that we offer at our clinic the highlights of what we see, what's common, what isn't common and some expectations as far as how can acupuncture and oriental medicine, or an alternative approach help you in bettering your health care? So I just wanted to give that one a pause. Do you want to pull your microphone just a little bit closer to you? There you go. Perfect, all right. One of the topics I'd like to cover today is something we see quite frequently. In fact, every day we come into the clinic and we do work. I'm always helping fertility patients.
Dr. DeWayne Baugus:Fertility has become a major issue for young couples as they're trying to grow their families, having those beautiful little children. It's an obstacle in the world we live in today, with high stress levels, with both parties husband and wife out working, trying to make ends meet, but at the same time wanting to grow their family. It's a pleasure that my wife and I have to work with those families, and we work with many of them. In fact, we've worked with over 23,000 patients as far as fertility is concerned. When it's difficult for you to conceive on your own, you're looking for other options and many times you'll go to a fertility clinic. In the Tulsa area, where we're located, there's two major fertility clinics and one third clinic that is rarely talked about, but ladies come from each of those clinics and that's where those 23,000 plus treatments have been thrown in our direction. It's where we're blessed to be on the journey with a young family while they're trying to navigate some very personal obstructions, some personal understandings about themselves, as well as the frustrations of learning how to communicate as a young couple. So we work in all those areas, combining not just what the body's doing but what the mind is doing and a spiritual aspect to have some grace for each other, to learn faith in a process and understand that timelines aren't always under our control. Just because we want to do something at a certain time doesn't mean that it's going to happen at that time. And if it doesn't happen, sometimes there's psychological ramifications where people start to become depressed, angry, frustrated, or sometimes they feel like they're not good enough in their marriage with their partner. Those are all major things that we see and I like to approach each of those aspects. The body, mind, spirit approach is necessary, especially when a couple is coming to me from a fertility clinic.
Dr. DeWayne Baugus:Fertility clinics in the the area as well as around the state of Oklahoma, have recommended us. So we have patients that come from not just Tulsa or Oklahoma City. We have them coming from Fort Smith, from Denver Colorado, from Dallas Texas, Phoenix Arizona, Los Angeles California, San Francisco. There's so many different areas that these couples come in from and their journey in trying to get pregnant, and when they arrive here at our clinic they're usually exhausted Psychologically, they're beat down and they have questions. They don't know why. Maybe something isn't working, and my job is to calm their hearts and minds, get them relaxed and to knowing that this is a joyous occasion because it almost turns into work.
Dr. DeWayne Baugus:It becomes very stressful and that's not the right environment to get pregnant. Believe it or not, um, stress, it's right there with cortisol levels. If you've heard of cortisol, you know it's. It's an enemy. It's not a friend, um.
Dr. DeWayne Baugus:But the fertility process itself can be very stressful, with a lot of lab work, um, a lot of injections, self injections, a lot of looking at hormones, a lot of ultrasounds. There's retrieval processes, there's the big day for transfers and all those events come with anxiety. There's a level of stress that families are going through when they do that process and I'd like to explain process. And I'd like to explain some of that process from our perspective, the biggest one being an understanding of acupuncture and oriental medicine isn't the same across the board. It's actually different. Acupuncture does have the ability to stimulate hormone releases and change hormone levels, and that can be very dangerous if someone is already working with hormone levels with a fertility clinic. In other words, their hormones are being balanced through patches, through injections. There's so many different things that are going on in different clinics. I won't go into those details, but hormone levels are being balanced by those fertility clinics. So when a patient comes to us, there's just a few things that I really have learned to capitalize to get the most success out of our treatments, one of them being is lower that cortisol level. So, as stressed out as you are, when you come into our clinic, my job is to be a supporter and encourager on your team and I think that that is across the board, with fertility clinics, physicians, nursing groups that are there to support you.
Dr. DeWayne Baugus:Remember when you're on that journey, as I've met so many ladies before. Sometimes they get caught up in it. It can be overwhelming and you start to forget that the individuals that you're going to for help are on your team. But at the same time, you're in charge, you're managing all of this and, as I've done in the past, I've had to stop ladies when they get overwhelmed. They get so nervous they become afraid. Hormones are taking you on a roller coaster ride and I'll have to stop them and say, hey, maybe we should pump the brakes, maybe we should remember this is about a joyous occasion. We're creating a little person, we're building a family. This isn't about being overwhelmed. So if that is a part of the process and you are going through it currently remember you're in charge, your team can be fired and you can always hire a new team of encouragers, of supporters, of those who are there to remember you are a part of the process, the main part, and your health comes first.
Dr. DeWayne Baugus:So many times ladies will come in. Husbands and wives are preferred, but sometimes it's just the ladies, and that's okay. Us guys don't like to go in medical clinics. I get it. I'm one of them, so I understand. If I'm going anywhere, it's because my wife tells me to. So, wives. Take your husband, he's a part of this process too. Sometimes it's us guys that are having the issue, not you ladies.
Dr. DeWayne Baugus:So when we figure out those things through the fertility clinics, testing and lab work and investigation, and start to understand where, where the problem area lies, that's when I usually see a couple come in and say we've tried everything, we're tens of thousands of dollars in into this, we're invested, Nothing's working and we were told to try acupuncture and we have absolutely no idea why we're here. And that's where I get to talk about cortisol, stress, proper communication between husbands and wives. Everybody needs to know what's going on with the fertility process and for some reason, ladies take on that full burden and try to encompass, to encompass all of it and try to try to do it all themselves. And that's just too overwhelming, especially when you're midway through the fertility process and hormones are cranking. You've got injections you're doing on yourself, you've got patches, you're having hot flashes, you're having night sweats, you're having questions about lab work All these things are going on and you need to be able to communicate that with your other half. And sometimes in that process I get to be that mediator.
Dr. DeWayne Baugus:So whenever a couple show up, we're treating stress, we're treating cortisol. We're also boosting serotonin and dopamine hormones that are relaxing, happy stuff. We're helping out sleeping, because sometimes ladies going through that fertility process they don't get good sleep. If we have this issue of control, sometimes that can cause more stress and more of an issue. Trying to control every situation in a fertility process yeah, that's a variable that you're just going to beat yourself up with. So I try to help with understanding what you can control and what you need to be able to just let go. Let go and know that you've got a whole team of people that are looking to help you succeed.
Dr. DeWayne Baugus:So what do I do with acupuncture? We do points to relax you, to calm you down, to help balance out those roller coaster highs and lows of hormones, of lab work, of waiting for answers, of waiting for results, of preparing for that retrieval, which there can be a ton of anxiety for getting the results after the retrieval, of how many of those embryos are actually usable, and then getting you ready for that transfer. All these things have ups and downs. There's expectations, there's anxiety with it. Acupuncture is great at helping you relax, reset and stay calm and kind of allows things to pass through as far as your stress and your psychology. We don't hypnotize you. We don't take anything out of the equation. What we do is we just help the body relax and in that process cortisol drops, and we all have heard of that cortisol. Once again, I keep mentioning it because that's a fight or flight hormone and it's hard to get pregnant when you're in fight or flight. It's nearly impossible actually. So if we can help with that, that's a big bullet, that's a big hammer that we can wield as far as helping you in your fertility process. The other thing is to understand who you're getting acupuncture from, because there's many great acupuncture physicians out there who have trained with fertility clinics, who are trained in hormones and balancing pediatrics for just overall health care, and a lot of us are tailored toward helping those individuals.
Dr. DeWayne Baugus:There's many different disciplines and interests in acupuncture. We take fertility as one of our top priorities. It's something we've done for a long time. It's something that we do very successfully and I believe one of the reasons that we have been so good at helping ladies with that success rate is the fact that we don't interfere with hormones when we do acupuncture treatments. There's a lot of acupuncture physicians that think that they can just do everything, and acupuncture covers a lot of ground. It's very legitimate, it does work, the body does respond.
Dr. DeWayne Baugus:So if it's done incorrectly, then sometimes an acupuncture treatment can go against a fertility clinic, the lab work and the hormones that you're taking. In fact it can cause more problems than good. So here at our clinic, understanding how those physicians work, working with those physicians for many years now, it's been our pleasure to be able to make this journey a good one, an easy one, without too many bumps on the road. There's always going to be bumps, that's part of the fertility process. But it's our job to keep you going, pick you up sometimes when you're feeling down, but to make sure that your mind is in the right place for the highest success rate. Thank you for joining me today. Once again, I'm Dr DeWayne Baugus, with Balancing Life in Medicine.
