Mercier Therapy for Fertility and Conception (Episode 418)

Full Transcript: Episode 418

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Welcome to the Fertility Friday podcast, your source for information about the Fertility Awareness Method and all things fertility. I’m your host, Lisa Hendrickson-Jack. I’m the author of the fifth vital sign and the Fertility Awareness Mastery Charting Journal. I’m a certified fertility awareness educator and holistic reproductive health practitioner with nearly 20 years of experience teaching women to connect to their fifth vital sign through menstrual cycle charting, balancing hormonal health, and optimizing the menstrual cycle without hormones. I’m outspoken about hormonal birth control and its impact on fertility and overall health because you have the right to know how your body works and how artificial hormones disrupt that natural process. I teach women’s health professionals how to utilize the menstrual cycle as a vital sign in their practices and I host live coaching programs to help you achieve optimal fertility and health because it’s important to have healthy menstrual cycles regardless of whether or not you want to have babies. I’m also a wife and mother of two beautiful boys. I know I’m a busy girl but I managed to fit it all in. This podcast is designed to empower you to take full control of your cycles, your fertility, and your overall health. And I’m so excited that you’re here with me today.

Today’s episode is all about optimizing conception. And in today’s episode, I’m thrilled to welcome back Dr. Jennifer Mercier. She was on the show quite, I think, a few years ago, episode 257. And in that episode, we spoke about Mercier Therapy for pelvic pain and infertility. And so Dr. Jennifer Mercier created Mercier Therapy, which is an abdominal therapy modality that supports women to conceive through breaking up adhesions and scar tissue. There’s so much more to it. Definitely have a listen to episode 257. If this is new for you, it’ll be a great complement to today’s episode. So today we get into a number of very interesting topics. We talk about artificial reproductive technologies like IVF and IUI and those different procedures and some of the positives and negatives — not necessarily of the procedures themselves but how they’re approached. So for example, often women are encouraged to jump into these procedures without a whole lot of attention being spent on some of the potential underlying factors or issues that could be contributing to the fertility challenges. Some of the challenges within medicine — one of the things that we talk about on this podcast all the time is the tendency to really push period problems under the rug, so to speak, by suppressing the cycle with hormones instead of finding the root cause for symptoms. And so all of these things can lead then into a highly medicalized approach to fertility before we even look to potentially improving some of those underlying factors. So lots of great topics for today. And one topic I’ll mention that we briefly touch on towards the end of the episode is the topic of the jabs and changes in the menstrual cycle.

So what has Dr. Mercier seen? What have I seen? This is a question that I get in my DMs probably every other day. Have you seen any changes in the menstrual cycle? What have you noticed? And I think by now, many of you have probably heard of women experiencing different changes in their cycle. And we do talk about that a little bit. So I suppose this is a bit of a cliffhanger — you’ll just have to wait until the latter part of the episode to hear what we have to say about that. So before we jump into today’s episode, I just want to share a little bit about Jennifer Mercier, and then we can jump in. Dr. Mercier has been in practice for over 20 years. She is a published author, documentary film producer, director, and loves serving the women of her community and from around the world. Her practice Expect A Miracle provides a gentle and effective hands-on site-specific pelvic and abdominal therapy which helps women with issues such as infertility, sexual trauma, and surgical recovery, as well as gastrointestinal issues. She also specializes in natural hormone balance by using only the finest bioidentical hormones. Dr. Mercier’s new book Conceive: The Mercier Approach came out recently. And in this book, she really highlights her approach to conception and how she marries abdominal therapy modalities with conventional medical modalities to support women to conceive. So without further ado, let’s go ahead and jump into today’s episode with Dr. Jennifer Mercier.

I’m so excited to have you back on the show, Jennifer. It’s been a while. Thank you for coming on the show.

Dr. Jennifer Mercier: Thanks for having me, Lisa.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: And congratulations on your book. I’d love to start there. Would you tell us the story behind Conceive and why you chose to write it now?

Dr. Jennifer Mercier: Conceive was born purely out of necessity for propelling forward the work of Mercier Therapy. And it really goes into detail and explains how we can apply the protocol, the shared journey fertility program, to so many different fertility scenarios. I actually started writing the book back in 2017 — why I wanted to start writing a book while I was going through a divorce with two small children is beyond me, but my creativity was a bit quashed during that time. So I kind of put it down and I thought, I’ll pick this up at another time, which I did in 2020. There was a great blessing of time that I was finding. I’m like, oh yeah, this is the time. And so I felt that I could also add some newer perspective as well, because from 2017 to 2020 a lot had happened for me personally but also in practice. And it just became evidently abundant that that was the right thing to do. So I picked it up. I called my editor. I’m like, all right, I’m on it. And by May 2021, I had the manuscript back in my hands. I’ll edit it down, put together my watercolor illustration artist down in South Carolina — Kristen Hunsbett had all of the illustrations. So all I literally had to do was go through and plug in the pictures, really read everything, make sure there wasn’t anything I was missing, and off to the publisher it went. It was a great process for me in delivering this beautiful book. It’s not a lengthy read. It is a book that is straightforward and touches on the medical industry, the medically assisted reproductive technology industry, as well as standalone cycles and how to monitor them. But moreover, looking preconceptually at what women were doing. I mean, there are so many great books out there — your book, The Fifth Vital Sign, and It Starts with the Egg by Rebecca Fett — just great resources that I thought, yeah, I can start with some of those ladies and the work that they’ve done and add to it. And so I really can vacillate between the medical world and the natural fertility world well and get them all sewn together pretty decently so that women can look at the big picture and say, okay, well, this really jives with me and maybe I want to try this. So yes, my book is a little bit edgy because I worked in the Center for Human Reproduction very early in the 90s and I saw these cycles not really be fruitful and I don’t see that they’re very fruitful now. So I really paint that honest picture in the book.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Awesome. Well, I mean, the longer that you’re in business, the more you realize that you really can’t appease everybody, especially if you take a stand on anything. I was thinking, so we did do an episode quite a while ago — it’s crazy how fast time flies — but I would also love for you just to take a moment and share a little bit about yourself and about Mercier Therapy, just for the listeners who may not be familiar.

Dr. Jennifer Mercier: Aw, thank you, thank you so much. Yeah, I’m certainly not the be-all end-all, but I did create something quite beautiful, and in my opinion, helped me get my own babies with stage 4 endometriosis and Hashimoto’s thyroid disease. I started off working for the Center for Human Reproduction. It was run by Dr. Norbert Gleischer here in the state of Illinois. It was the largest REI clinic. I was actually training undergrad to go to med school, do a fellowship in OBG, and then do a fellowship in REI, and ended up doing none of that. Being a clinician at the fertility clinic was really great because the language is still the same, and I speak it, and it’s really comforting to those couples and women that come into my practice. Mercier Therapy was born out of a necessity for my own need in helping to curtail the pain that I was experiencing with stage 4 endometriosis early in my 20s. Diagnosed at 23, I was told the only way out of that was Lupron suppression or oral contraceptives and that just wasn’t something that really jived with me. So I went to massage therapy school my last year undergrad and I learned about bodywork for the childbearing year. And I loved taking care of ladies. I thought, okay, well, I’ll just have to become a midwife. So I studied with some really great midwives in Florida and in El Paso, Texas and eventually came back to Illinois, opened up my own practice, and was a midwife for 12 years — and all the while still dealing with a pretty nasty case of endometriosis myself. So I’d been starting to kind of poke around on my own belly and feeling through the pain what I really needed to do, and found something quite magical: Mercier Therapy. I started a sequence of anterior, posterior, and medial-lateral pulling and tugging of the visceral organs in the pelvis, and in doing so found that women could have better cycles, less painful cycles, less painful ovulations, more natural pregnancies, and alleviation of overall symptoms in their pelvis. So anyway, I went on to naturopathic medical school. I did a dual ND PhD program at Central States College of the Health Sciences and graduated from that in 2007. So I’ve been practicing fertility exclusively for about 12 years at this point. We’re lapping a bit with midwifery, and 22 years in practice this May, so it’s been nothing short of amazing.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Well, I remember briefly flirting with the idea of becoming a midwife. And I just couldn’t get over the overnight schedule. So I echo what you said. So you had mentioned briefly some of the challenges. I mean, the medical system is certainly a blessing. It really is a blessing that there are so many options for us. But obviously it’s not always the be-all and end-all.

Dr. Jennifer Mercier: When I worked in fertility medicine — although we have more drugs now, we used to use Pergonal and Metrodin, now we use FSH products like Gonal-F and FSH, and we used HCG back then, but we use HCG now in different ways, we use human growth hormone, plasma rich protein, IVIG — all of these reproductive immunology protocols are now conflated into reproductive medicine. I mean, we’re currently at an $8 billion industry in 2024, looking at a $20 billion industry. So it is growing, and more couples are utilizing reproductive medicine, which yes, they’re a blessing. They’re a blessing if you have tubal factor. They’re a blessing if you have male factor. They’re a blessing if you’ve got some sort of medically underlying condition that requires that kind of cycle. But if you can avoid that and monitor and get to know your own body and what it’s capable of outside of a forced cycle — in most cases a forced cycle — it’s just better. And then if you need them in the long run, I mean, they’re going to always be there. The challenges, I think, are subjective. We’re not really taking into account the differences in reproductive medicine. We’re just giving more of a cookie-cutter approach. Maybe we take a few medicines out and add a few medicines in and it’s just really a trial and error thing with reproductive medicine at this point. So I think that in and of itself, that sort of cookie-cutter approach not really applying to individuals’ best interest. I mean, from what I’m observing in my clinical population, from CCRM in Colorado to CCRM in New York to all of the local clinics here, it pretty much all looks the same. And they pretty much have all the same outcomes. If you want to look it up yourself, it’s on SART.org. You can look it up yourself. And spending $30,000 on one IVF cycle to go from Chicago to CCRM in Colorado — I can send you to somebody just as good here in Illinois, and the outcome may still be the same. So it’s just a lot of guesswork. And certainly I’m not a proponent of telling a woman that, hey, glad you’re here, we’re going to get you pregnant. Never would I say that, but I do hear quite a few REI practices saying that. I will always give you the truth, and you can count on me for that for sure.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Yeah, this issue is so complicated. I think from my perspective, I feel — and I talk about it a lot — that we’re taught from a young age that fertility is just kind of a given and it can happen all the time. And so we spend most of our lives trying to avoid that. And add to that the suppression of any possible period problems, which is basically standard medical practice. And how many women might have a really serious issue — whether it be endometriosis or something else — that is kind of just stuffed with the birth control. And then once you get to that mindset that you’re ready to have a child, we just expect it to just switch on like magic and happen immediately. And so certainly the medical industry caters to that. The approach that I take with clients is based on the menstrual cycle and it’s not instant — there’s no magic. And typically we can get that menstrual cycle into better alignment with a lot of kind of basic things, but it’s not instant. And so the question for you, because obviously the Mercier approach is very different from the medical approach — given that the medical approach to endometriosis is typically surgery — so maybe share a little bit about those competing perspectives, and from your perspective, why women may benefit from waiting and doing things differently before they jump into IVF.

Dr. Jennifer Mercier: Yes, scar tissue comes to mind first, whether it’s endometriosis or polycystic ovarian syndrome or any kind of trauma to the pelvis — whether a cyst has ever ruptured or there’s been a pelvic infection — there will inevitably be scar tissue there. Scar tissue glues everything down in its wake. And so when that happens, you’ve got poor mobility of organs and poor blood flow. Simply going in with my hands, or with someone who’s been trained to do Mercier Therapy — we do deep pelvic organ visceral manipulation. This is actually quite simple, if you think about it. Like we exercise to keep our body moving. Whether it’s just taking a walk every day or lifting weights or doing Pilates or yoga, whatever it happens to be, movement equals life equals blood flow. And if you don’t have adequate movement and blood flow, whatever part it is, is slowly losing its life and its ability to optimize its own functioning. So I think that with Mercier Therapy, if you’re going to use it preconceptually to monitor on cycles or go into a medically assisted cycle, it just makes everything better. I think that’s really the similar approach to what you take in the sense of, if your cycle is better, if your nutrition is better, if your partner’s sperm quality is better, then if you end up still having to go to assisted reproductive technology, it’s just improving the odds that it will work.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: And you had briefly mentioned — this is something I find to be a really interesting topic — which is that in many cases IVF is actually the solution to male factor infertility. And I don’t know if people see it that way. What I notice a lot is that men who kind of potentially fall into what I would call a subfertile sperm range, but may still hit the WHO criteria, are basically just given a free pass. And meanwhile, they’re not being told that there’s more optimal and not as optimal. And there’s this whole messy middle part. And there are a lot of things you could do to get from subfertile to more fertile. So I’m curious if you’d like to speak to that.

Dr. Jennifer Mercier: Sure. So for male factor fertility challenges, people tend to think that it’s just poor morphology or low counts or poor motility. And it really goes beyond that. I think we need to be addressing diet with men. And we definitely need to be looking at their hormones as well. And so from a functional endocrinology perspective, because that’s what I practice, I take a look at their hormones as well. And if I’m noticing that their testosterone is low, from a medical perspective, they may put this guy on testosterone, which wipes out his sperm count altogether. So what I do to help increase natural testosterone production is use a combination of DHEA, Pregnenolone, high-dose vitamin C and D. And this seems to be quite good on follow-up semen analysis. I’m also seeing a lot lately — and it’s very interesting to me — these guys that have elevated estradiol levels, which suppress the testosterone levels. So of course you’re going to see some really weird stuff in the semen analysis. So I am a proponent for using Clomid for men to decrease that excess estrogen burden. I had a patient who is a physician, and her husband was on testosterone, and I said, “Oops, you’re trying to get pregnant, that’s not the way for him to go about correcting the situation.” So I’d love to know what his estradiol levels are, and they were high. And I said, “Okay, off the testosterone, on to Clomid. Let’s get him on the DHEA and Pregnenolone protocol. And let’s see how he does on subsequent follow-up for semen analysis.” And they actually went to the urologist and they’re like, “Well, she’s right. So let’s get you off the testosterone and get you on to Clomid.”

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Well, you mentioned ICSI and I’m pretty sure that flew over some of the listeners’ heads. So just for the listeners who don’t know: with IVF, from my understanding, you basically put the embryo with the sperm and then it kind of self-fertilizes. But with ICSI, they actually inject the sperm directly into the embryo. And from my understanding, this is what is done when men have very few, or very few good quality sperm. This is how they kind of overcome that.

Dr. Jennifer Mercier: ICSI is done on almost every IVF case unless you ask for a natural IVF. The embryologist would have a frozen specimen fresh on standby the day of retrieval and would choose or hand-select the sperm to inject into the egg to create an embryo. So now your embryo is made at the hand of a human as opposed to being allowed to be exposed to the sperm in a dish where the egg actually talks to or communicates with the sperm and allows one of the millions that surrounds it to come in. The egg actually beckons to the sperm that it feels is the best qualified. And so now, or I shouldn’t say now but forever — since I worked for the reproductive center — the embryologist chooses and injects it directly through the zona into the egg to make the embryo. And not just for male fertility factor. And they briefly touch on it, because when I talk to patients, they’ll ask them, did you do ICSI? And they’ll say, well, probably — which means yes, because you have to ask for a natural IVF. You have to specifically ask for that.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Well, and I had one other question. Could you share with us — for anyone who doesn’t know — there is a direct relationship between a man’s testosterone production and his sperm. So if his testosterone is low, it just means that the sperm production will likely also not be that great. So then you shared that when they just give men testosterone, this just does not help. Could you just enlighten us as to why that makes it worse or doesn’t help?

Dr. Jennifer Mercier: Using synthetic testosterone — because that’s what they’re using, they’re not using a bioidentical — using synthetic testosterone is going to shut off production in the testes from making its own testosterone. Just like giving a woman a birth control pill — a hormonal contraceptive is a synthetic hormone. It’s going to then conduct the show. Most guys these days, due to hormonal chaos and disruptors in our environment, are presenting with depression, anxiety, aggression, fatigue, not able to sleep well, weight gain in the middle, gynecomastia which is breast tissue. They’re presenting to doctors with erectile dysfunction, ejaculate dysfunction. They’re going to their doctor saying, “I have a problem,” and then they test their testosterone — they just do the testosterone, find that it’s low, and then put them on something like androgel or some sort of injectable or even pellets under the skin. And most guys aren’t going to say, “My wife and I are trying to conceive right now.” They leave that big piece out of there.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: I mean, it’s so interesting how knee-jerk these reactions are for these issues. So from my perspective, I don’t have medicine in my toolbox. I don’t have the ability to prescribe things. So from just that basic nutritional perspective, I usually suggest improving the intake of a number of nutrients that support sperm production. And I remember a long time ago I did an interview with Sally Fallon Morrell and she mentioned eating butter and adding more animal fat and protein because that’s what we make hormones from. So I feel like there are a lot of approaches that can help with this issue, but I’m glad we touched on that a little bit because I do think that even though there’s this huge problem with male factor, and even though it’s 50 percent of the time that it’s a contributing factor, we’re still at the point where we barely generally speaking acknowledge that as a possibility for why the conception isn’t happening.

Right, it’s very important to look at both partners. I can’t stress that enough. And to also speak the language of hormones and what they all do. I mean, I always use this example — if you are watching a symphony play and you take out the strings, it still sounds okay. You take out the horns, it still sounds good. But you put them both back and it’s beautiful. So you can’t take out the strings and replace them with a piano, you’ve got to replace them with the strings. And so that’s what bioidentical hormones are — you’re replacing a like with a like, something human-identical to what your own body would make. And to use synthetic hormones — it’s just not the way to go, especially while trying to conceive.

Well, and just one more point. You mentioned Clomid, and I think many of the listeners would be familiar with that, obviously, as the drug that triggers ovulation. And so it’s kind of like, well, how would a drug that triggers ovulation help a man? But again, my understanding is that it desensitizes the body to estrogen — it quashes some of those estrogenic effects. So in men, it would obviously be doing something a bit different.

Dr. Jennifer Mercier: So Clomid is an estradiol inhibitor. It’s used for artificial ovulation induction in women, but it’s used for men with prostate cancer to reduce excess estrogen burden. So I never liked Clomid. I’ve never been a fan of Clomid. I don’t like Letrozole. I don’t like any of those drugs that are estradiol-inhibiting for women. I mean, Letrozole was put on the market to treat women post-breast cancer. It decreases estradiol as well, and you need estradiol in the formation of a good healthy follicle and then also in the embryo for the vital organs — the heart, the brain, and the spinal cord. And if you’re starting out at a deficit, you better be able to climb your way out of that. I use only bioidentical hormones to support the cycle. And it works quite nicely.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Yeah, and it’s such a basic concept that the hormones that are biologically identical to the ones that you make would have — I think it’s part of just language, how even just the word estrogen, when in our body there are several estrogens. And when it’s thrown around with birth control, when it’s thrown around with hormone replacement, we all kind of assume it’s the same thing. The practitioners are trying to simplify to help us understand. But then in that process, we literally don’t understand what we’re getting. So to switch gears a little bit — we were touching on Mercier Therapy and the natural approach, and then combining them, and how even if a woman chose to still go ahead with artificial reproductive technology, the therapy could help her IVF to be more successful. And so there was one thing that I wanted to ask about, which is diminished ovarian reserve. Maybe share with us some of the other kinds of benefits that you wouldn’t think of. Like if you don’t have that type of pain, are you still going to benefit from Mercier?

Dr. Jennifer Mercier: Yeah, you will. There’s always a benefit from having pelvic work done, but specifically diminished ovarian reserve — I’ve been seeing that a lot in younger women these days. It’s a lot for a woman to take in to notice that she has less than half a point of AMH and we had a lady traveling before the pandemic from Boston and she had an undetectable AMH. She was being told by two REI clinics in the area that she’d need an egg donor — hands down, she will never have a biological child. And so she came to see me and we did the four-day shared journey fertility program and she now has — she and her husband now have a son, which is a beautiful thing, and he’s a biological child. But for diminished ovarian reserve, getting the blood flow back to the ovaries is imperative. And then also supporting with a bioidentical hormone regimen is imperative as well, because we’re going to move in next to what she’s making and just improve upon what she’s making instead of squashing what she’s making and sending in the big guns, which are the synthetic hormones.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: I mean, the whole topic of AMH is very interesting to me because when I dig into the research about that, it seems as though many of these health practitioners are using that as this barometer for a woman’s fertility, regardless of whether that’s her ability to conceive naturally or through artificial reproductive technology. So I’ve seen a number of studies that show this very strong connection between the AMH numbers and the success of IVF and egg retrieval, but not necessarily with natural conception. So these women are basically being told like you won’t be able to have a baby, but the AMH literally isn’t correlated with the chance of natural conception. So I’d be curious — it’s really irritating me because I speak to so many women who are terrified because of this number, knowing full well that it doesn’t necessarily correlate to their chance of actually having a baby naturally.

Dr. Jennifer Mercier: Right. It is something that is used as leverage, I believe, in the reproductive endocrinology world. You’re running out of time. You don’t have very many good eggs left. But isn’t it so interesting that all the literature points to these women are not going to stim well, they’re not going to get good quality eggs from an IVF cycle, because guess what? Their body’s already making top amounts of FSH. So they literally can’t give them enough FSH to even get one or two good eggs to retrieve. And so if they retrieve one or two good eggs, you may end up with a couple of day-three embryos that start to disintegrate and break down. And these clinics will call these women and say, “We need to transfer you today. Today is day three. We need to transfer you today. These embryos need to be transferred.” And just for sake of completing the cycle — because a completed cycle ends with a transfer — they’ll go ahead and transfer day-three embryos because they can observe that they’re not doing well, they’re not gonna make it to day five to freeze. And so I see this all the time. It’s such a travesty. They’re using up an entire cycle for poor quality embryos. Again, this is an ethically charged issue for me. I think it’s wrong. I mean, if you’ve got a day-three FSH in the high 20s and a very low AMH, you are not a candidate for IVF. You’re not gonna do well. I’ll be honest. There are no smoke and mirrors here. I’m gonna tell you exactly if IVF is right for you. I will say, listen, I think IVF is something that you should consider — let’s talk about why. Or, IVF is definitely off the table for you and let me tell you why. I just had a sweet young girl — she’s like 30 and she consulted with me over the late summer. And she said, “You know, I really love what you’re doing here, but my doctor can fit me in for IVF.” And I’m like, “Okay, no problem. I wish you all the best.” She did three failed IVF cycles, called my office, said, “I want to schedule. I want to come and do the shared journey fertility program.” And so she did and she came in. I’m like, “Listen, I will not judge you, you did what you felt was right. I’m sorry that it didn’t work out for you, but let’s get to work.” Now she’s got puncture wounds on her ovaries — multiple puncture wounds — so we’ve got some scar tissue to work through, we’ve got some blood flow to restore, and we’re doing that. But I think rushing to the end, when your numbers aren’t really good and you’re doing that because a doctor tells you, “Hey, this isn’t going to happen” — it’s like, wow. How presumptuous.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: I realize now that it’s been a while since I’ve done an episode kind of going through the IVF stats. I did an episode years ago with a local medical doctor in Toronto, Dr. Marjorie Dixon, and she went through those stats and shared a couple of things that were really interesting. One of the things she shared was that from her perspective, the IVF cycles go in three — that’s how she described it. So collecting the eggs, turning them into embryos, and not necessarily expecting the first try to work. And it’s terrifying that most women don’t know that the stats are basically directly related to the age of the woman, the age of the egg that is being used. And especially because so many women — just because of our culture, society, and the way things are — are waiting until mid to late 30s to start thinking about having babies. We kind of think IVF is going to be there for us, but the stats when we get into our early 40s are just — I mean, they’re much better than IUI, certainly, but people don’t know.

Dr. Jennifer Mercier: Yeah, I mean, the numbers are real and you can look at them at SART.org. The egg quality means everything in IVF. And so most clinics now are doing multiple retrieval cycles and then making the embryos and banking them. Banking them. So for most women they’re doing this across the age group. It used to be more predominantly for women that were a bit aged and like time is of the essence. So we’re going to go ahead and make as many embryos and bank them and then we’re going to do frozen embryo transfer cycles. I had my daughter when I was 37. I had my son when I was 41. So yes, 47 with a seven-year-old and feel that every day.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Before we wrap up today, I did want to ask you a different question, because one of — certainly in my field, everything’s about the menstrual cycle. The last two years have been very interesting. There’s been a lot of changes, obviously. And I think one of the most common questions that I’m getting like in my DMs and from many of my clients is if I’m seeing any changes in women’s cycles due to the shots that people are getting. I’m curious if you’ve seen anything in your practice. I’ll just share briefly. So for anyone who’s curious, what I’ve seen so far are kind of like those short-term cycle-to-cycle kind of changes. So I’ve had clients have their shots and nothing really changes that much. I’ve certainly seen several cycles that are very, very different in one way or another — so not all have the same kind of difference. So like short luteal phase, maybe a delayed ovulation, maybe some spotting or just kind of like this cycle that’s kind of strange. And we have to kind of like, okay, we’ll just call that a one-off and move on to the next. So that’s kind of what I’ve been seeing so far with my clients. But I’m curious to see what you’ve seen.

Dr. Jennifer Mercier: Oh, the ever-evolving conversation of the jabs and the menstrual irregularities. I would say yes to everything you just said. I mean, I’m seeing all sorts of different things and especially in myself. I mean, I am not yet — and I have had the virus back in, let’s see, it’s got to be May this year. I am like clockwork. I am an every-28-day kind of girl. The only time that I was a little bit late was when I was pregnant. But I didn’t have a period in all of June at all. Like, I didn’t even have an inkling that it was starting. And I use bioidentical progesterone in my luteal phase every cycle, to keep it nice and regular, to keep my belly from lighting up with the endo. So for me personally, I saw something that was really interesting. So I don’t know if there’s a transmission of some sort from these jabs that are causing menstrual irregularity, but it’s not just me. I’ve seen women with decidual casting where they’re losing the entire lining of the uterus at one time. I’d never seen that in my practice.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Pause on that for a second, because that was a word that I had never heard before the year 2020. Like I had never heard of a decidual cast. And then all of a sudden I was hearing about that. And so like you said, that’s when your whole endometrium — basically like the whole period comes out in like one shot.

Dr. Jennifer Mercier: That’s right. Yeah. And it’s like labor. It’s very painful. I was talking to Dr. Christiane Northrup about it and she’s like, I have been an OB/GYN in practice for 40 years and I have seen it maybe one time. So she and I together were very interested in collecting data. So I have my own data collection, she has her own data collection. We are still collecting. But I definitely am seeing an influx of menstrual irregularities, whether it be menorrhagia or amenorrhea — just things I’ve never seen before. And who the heck knows? Who the heck knows?

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Interesting. Because when this topic was first brought out, it was certainly just like slammed immediately — no, it’s not causing any problems. And I mean, this is one of the reasons I love charting. And I always go back to the charting because if you have a woman who’s been charting her cycles for six months or more, by then she kind of knows what is typical for her. And so if something happens out of the ordinary, we can’t go straight and say, okay, it’s definitely this, but ultimately I’m the type of person where if everything else is pretty similar and there’s only one thing that’s different, I have this conversation with most of my clients at least once or twice — where it’s like everything was fine, but then you flew to wherever and so-and-so got married and you were, everything was kind of busy. I’m likely to say, well, that was the thing that was different. My biggest issue I think is just with that knee-jerk reaction to kind of not believe women. If someone tells me that they had something and then they see this reaction, I’m just gonna believe them, support them, and see if I can help them figure out what’s going on. And you know, when you have a rash on your body and you’re trying to discern what might be the cause, you probably think about — well, did I use a new soap? Did I use a new lotion? Like what is it? Did I eat something different? Usually there’s a correlation somewhere in what you’ve been exposed to, and that’s pretty solid, I would say. So when you inject something into the body that only had eight months of preparation and very, very little data available, you have to ask yourself the deeper question of where’s my safety and efficacy data here? And guess what, there was none. There was none up until someone started bothering to do studies on women, infertility challenges, and menstrual irregularities this last June. And so June 2021 — we’d already had the jab introduced to the human population for six months already.

I would say that would be very logical. We need more logic in this day and age.

As we bring this conversation to a close, I feel like we covered a lot of different topics, but I just want to ask you one last question, which would be for the listener who is trying to conceive, who tuned into this episode specifically because she’s been having some challenges. What if anything would you want her to know?

Dr. Jennifer Mercier: Yeah, I would want her to know that she needs to use her own intuition and discern what feels best to her and really think about what might be going on, and then work with a holistic provider — someone who speaks our language, Lisa, someone that doesn’t just hang their shingle out and say that they’re a fertility specialist because they use progesterone in the luteal phase. They really need to talk to an educated provider, someone who’s seasoned clinically as well, on which way to go. Because not only am I a provider but I’m a liaison. And I really want to partner up and walk hand in hand with that woman down her journey and be there for her. So that’s really important for me. I would say, hey, grab my book and check it out and see if you like it. It was number two in the fertility category when it came out, November 19th. But if you just put my name in Amazon — Jennifer Mercier — it’s gonna come up right away.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Awesome. Well, tell the listeners where they can go to learn more about you, your website, your socials, and also of course Amazon.

Dr. Jennifer Mercier: Sure. Currently it’s just Amazon. We’re working on an Audible, but it’s a brand new baby so it’s going to just take a little bit of time. My practice website is expectamiracle.life — expectamiracle.life. And then if you wanted to do Mercier Therapy training or learn more about it, it’s just merciertherapy.com. If you want to follow me on Instagram, it’s jennifer.mercier.nd.phd.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Well, I will make sure to list all of those places in the show notes. Jennifer, thank you so much for coming back on the show. Such a treat to be able to chat with you again.

Dr. Jennifer Mercier: Thank you, Lisa. It’s my pleasure and I appreciate you having me back on.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed today’s show, please share it with a friend. You’ll find the show notes page for today’s episode over at fertilityfriday.com/418.

I hope that you enjoyed today’s episode with Jennifer Mercier. It’s always such a treat to talk to Dr. Mercier. And as I mentioned at the top of the episode, if you didn’t hear our first episode together, definitely go back and take a listen — fertilityfriday.com/257. The Mercier Therapy modality has such incredible implications for women with endometriosis, pelvic pain as well as infertility, and it applies to so many different situations. For many women it does offer not only the possibility of rectifying fertility challenges but also the possibility of improving pelvic pain and symptoms. It’s certainly one of the modalities that I think we should be thinking about when we have certain issues with period pain, especially for those who’ve expressed to me that surgery isn’t their first option. So again, it doesn’t mean that surgery isn’t right at certain periods of time or shouldn’t be a consideration, but I just know from years of working with women who are experiencing some of these challenges, it’s often not the first thing that you want to consider. And so I think it’s always helpful to expand the conversation about what options we may have available to us and what modalities may be able to help us. And I always go back to my boardroom analogy when it comes to fertility challenges and menstrual cycle issues, hormonal imbalances, and basically women’s reproductive health, which is that often we need to broaden the scope of who we’re seeing — so that we have our medical doctors, but if we do have an issue with pelvic pain that we do consider working with someone potentially who works from that pelvic, from that abdominal therapy modality, and if you have issues with your thyroid that you consider working with a functional practitioner who specializes in thyroid as well as your fertility specialist and/or reproductive endocrinologist. I really enjoyed this conversation with Dr. Mercier. I felt like we touched on so many different topics — even the topic of male fertility and the negative effect of exogenous testosterone on male fertility. That is something that’s not well known necessarily — that if your partner’s taking steroids to help him bulk up and work out, that it could be having a negative impact on his hormones. And even the seemingly logical strategy of supplementing low testosterone with exogenous testosterone, how that could basically render a man temporarily sterile. So these are all very important topics that we should be aware of that have a deep impact potentially on fertility. So with that said, I hope you have a wonderful weekend whenever you’re tuning into the show. And of course, as always, until next time, be well, and happy charting.