Hope for Healing Dr. Mike Berkley

Hey, welcome to Hope and Healing. I have with me today my, uh, um, Mr. Mike Berkley. He is an acupuncturist and a traditional Chinese medicine practitioner. I'm going to tell— let him tell you exactly what he does here in a minute. But, uh, if you know anything about my story, you know that acupuncture played a huge part in being able to get pregnant after I was told that I couldn't. I was not a candidate for IVF and I needed donor eggs. So Mike shares a little bit of a similar story and it was a— it's a really compelling one. So I want you to listen today to what he has to say for your journey and he'll tell you a little bit about his own journey. Mike, thank you so much for joining us today.

It's such a pleasure to be here and thank you for inviting me. I'm grateful.

Yeah, so, um, I didn't want to get it wrong, so tell the viewers today what, what it is that you do. What is your scope of practice?

Okay, so, um, I'm a licensed and board-certified acupuncturist as well as a board-certified herbalist, and I've been specializing in the treatment of those with fertility challenges for 25 years. And in fact, I'm the, the first acupuncturist in the United States to specialize in treating those with fertility challenges. And at the Berkley Center for Reproductive Wellness, we don't treat back pain or neck pain or headaches. We only treat fertility issues. And if you just think about the name of the center, it's the Berkley Center for Reproductive Wellness.

Right.

So I made a very big commitment, even with the name of my practice, to indicate that that's what I'm committed to.

Yes, that's amazing. And so much— we could spend a long time talking. We only have 15 or 20 minutes today. But if you want to get a hold of Mike, you can contact him. We'll drop a link after the end of this video for both of us. So, Mike, Clearly, we do a different kind of story here normally on Hope for Healing. But your story is so compelling, I really wanted the viewers to hear it. Tell us about how you came about your career change and became an acupuncture practitioner.

So it's, it's a little bit of an interesting journey. I had been studying martial arts with one man for about 12 years. And one— he, he was and is an acupuncturist. And one day he said to me, you know, I've spent 12 years teaching you how to kill people. You should learn how to help people. And we both kind of laughed, you know.

Yeah.

And he was encouraging me to learn, you know, to go to acupuncture school. And of course I thought acupuncture was completely bogus. It was nonsensical. It was old. And Yeah.

And by the way, you were at no point in this time, you were, what were you doing for your career?

I was a computer salesman.

Right. So it's not like you were a massage therapist or something like that where you're working in a healing modality. You're a salesperson, you're a computer salesperson, and this friend of yours is encouraging you to be an acupuncturist. So exactly. That was quite a career.

Yeah, I had no relationship to the healthcare field at all.

Yeah.

So then what happens is quite interesting. Many of you may know of this newspaper called the Village Voice, which is a New York City newspaper. It's no longer in existence, but it's been around for many years. I never read it. It wasn't just— it wasn't a newspaper that I read. So one day I go to work and newspaper's on my desk. The Village Voice is on my desk. Somebody must have just dropped it there. And it was a slow day and I'm just going through the pages. And this was after my conversation with my martial arts guy telling me I should learn how to heal people. Flipping the pages and I see an ad that says Pacific College of Oriental Medicine. We've been in business for 18 years in San Diego and we're pleased to open, to announce that we're opening in New York and everybody's invited to an open house. And I said, wow, this is interesting. Tom was just telling me about acupuncture and now I see this open house. I know this is all stupid stuff. Acupuncture is all baloney. But you know what? I trust Tom. Let me go to this lecture, this presentation. So I went, and I must confess to you that I got chills running up and down my spine because the presenters were so legitimate and so intelligent and so educated, uh, that I was shaken. I, I was like, oh my God, this is fantastic. It's quite fascinating. It's quite interesting. So I decided to take one class and then I graduated 4 years later from acupuncture and then went back again for 2 more years to do herbs.

Mm-hmm.

And then I got outta school.

All right. So for those of the, you, you that don't know how acupuncture helps fertility, um, Mike can tell me if I'm wrong here, but you can regulate your cycles, right? You can help regulate your cycles with acupuncture. If you're not having a cycle at all, you can regulate your cycle that way, like produce a cycle, right? And regulate it. 3,000 years of Chinese medicine, right? So, so 3,000 years of history. So what were some of the things that stood out to you of that lecture? What were a couple of like the main points that were most intriguing? The main points of the, the lecture that you were so intrigued by.

Oh yeah, so it wasn't really, you know, a lecture specifically on acupuncture. It was more about acupuncture as a career and what you can do with it and this kind of thing. So I mean, the thing that most stimulated me and most motivated me was not really anything to do with the acupuncture. It was that the presenters were so confident and so intelligent and so well-spoken that in my mind at the time, they lent credibility to acupuncture. And I said, wow, if these super intelligent, articulate people are doing this, there must be something to this. So that's what kind of facilitated me to go and take my first class.

Okay. And so are you connected with your now wife at that time? Were you dating or were you married at that time?

Yeah, I was, I was married to her at that time.

Okay.

I no longer am, though we do remain, you know, the best of friends and we, we did have a son together. So when I was married, my wife, my ex-wife and I were trying to have a baby. And we couldn't. And I think, I think, you know, I must have been like 34 or something. And she was like 32 or 33. So we were pretty young.

Right? Right.

We couldn't, we couldn't get pregnant. I mean, we tried for like 6 months, and right, which is not considered infertility, but you figured a young couple in 6 months, she should get pregnant.

Right.

We knew nothing at all about this field. Nothing. And so she went to a gynecologist who happens to be a specialist in reproductive disorders, even though he's not a reproductive endocrinologist. And he discovers 2 things. He discovers that I think I had, um, poor motility, which means sperm does not swim either quickly enough or in a straight line. And my, my ex-wife had anti-sperm antibodies, which means that every time her body encountered sperm, it would kill the sperm. And And I remember I was an acupuncturist, I was a computer salesperson at this time. I didn't know any of this stuff.

So, and let me just pause for a second. That test that Mike is talking about, I'm pretty sure it's the post-coital test.

That's exactly right.

That you can find that out. And this is a very overlooked test. So if you're having infertility issues and especially if you're in the process of an IVF cycle, and this test hasn't been done, I strongly recommend that you talk to your practitioner about it.

Absolutely. I agree.

Yeah.

So then subsequently, Karen went to, uh, an acupuncturist and an herbalist. Uh, and just a funny little side, side note. So we used to go to this Greek restaurant. I'm in Manhattan. There was a Greek restaurant on 113th Street off of Broadway. And of course, you know how people are. Every time we'd go in there, the Greek waiter, who was a very sweet, you know, they were all lovely people, but they would inevitably be, so when are you guys gonna have a baby? What's, what's the matter with you? What's going on?

You know? Yeah.

And we're like, hey bro, we're trying.

You wanna stab 'em with your fork?

Yeah, exactly. But I understood. I wasn't upset about it.

Yeah.

Right. People mean well.

People do. It, it's just really challenging.

So listen, this is a great story. So he says, okay, listen, after dinner, I'm gonna read the tea leaves for you. So I'm thinking, here we go, another nut job. So he comes to the table and he does this thing with the tea and he spills the tea out and there's tea leaves in the cup and he's looking at them and he says, in 3 to 6 months, you're going to have a baby boy. And we said, great. Tikhanis kalá. You know, we're speaking, I'm speaking a little Greek to him. I'm not Greek, but thank you very much. You know, blah, blah, blah. And I don't know, about, you know, a few months later, she got pregnant. So she had gone to an acupuncturist herbalist who gave acupuncture and herbs, didn't treat me. But I had motility issues, but I didn't have severe motility issues.

Right.

So he, this acupuncturist herbalist treated Karen for, I don't know how long, 3 months, whatever, you know, we were tracking her ovulation. We had sex at the right time and she got pregnant. And, uh, I don't have a picture here, but now I have a 28-year-old son who's, uh, doing a master's degree in political science.

Excellent.

So I must confess that acupuncture and herbs were responsible, uh, for my son in large part.

Yeah. And, uh, how many women and couples at this point would you estimate that you've helped over the course of your practice? 25 years. Do you have— can you ballpark that?

Thousands.

Yeah.

You know, figure it, 25 years.

Right, right.

So seeing 80 patients a week, 70 patients a week for 25 years. Of course, not all of my patients succeed. Yeah. But, you know, the typical patient that I have is a patient who's done 3 or 4 failed IUIs and 3 or 4 failed IVFs, and they come to me last. You know, which is fine. We're Westerners. Um, and that's when I get the patient and that's when I can affect a change sometimes, not all the time.

Right. Yeah. And so I think that the thing that's so compelling about this story is that it's not giant, uh, it's not a huge amount of change. Like in my case, um, I would have told you that I had really good, uh, diet and lifestyle practices. That I ate healthy. But the, the shifts that you can make, the things that are in your control, such as diet and lifestyle, these vaginal inconsistencies, for lack of a better word, things like ureaplasma, this post-coital test like this antiphospholipid syndrome or, or whatever these are, these are things that are easily and readily treatable, but they're often ignored. Okay, so You know, I often liken— and Mike and I are on the same page here. We could talk hours, couldn't we, Mike? But you can't— you know, we're so far removed from our food growing cycle that we forget that you can't plant a seed in a bad soil. And I don't mean that as an insult to anybody. But when you're going for IVF, when you're going for IUI, these practices are complementary. And if you don't have any other choices, like I had no other choice, but to pursue traditional Chinese medicine and acupuncture. And it made a difference because there was some dysregulation in my body that that was able to address. So I think that very often, and Mike, you can weigh in on this and then we'll have to wrap it up, but very often diet is dismissed, food choices are dismissed, even things like sleep. Okay, so sleep is hugely important to your hormones. Okay. So all of those things, if you're having a hard time getting pregnant, it might literally be the missing link to help your body regulate itself. So what do you have to say?

Um, so I, first of all, everything you said, I agree with, and I love that you talked about ureaplasma, urolithica. Nobody, nobody ever tests for that except my patients because I tell them to take the test. The men tested for sperm DNA fragmentation. This is a million people are way, way underdiagnosed. But that's a whole different story, right?

That's all maybe a whole separate interview, right?

A whole separate interview. But look, I want to just address what you said, I think, and say this to the listeners. Acupuncture and herbal medicine are not the answer, and in vitro fertilization is not the answer. Do you want to know why? Because there's been 5 million babies born as a result of IVF, but there might have been 20 million transfers to affect those 5 million births. My feeling is do everything that works. Integrative medicine is the way to go. East meets West in reproductive medicine should be the new gold standard, and one day it will be. In the traditional Western reproductive medicine milieu, there is no answer to poor egg quality or poor sperm quality. When a, when a couple does an IVF, there's a retrieval of the egg, uh, fertilization with the sperm, and now you have the embryo. It's either good or bad. That's it.

Mm-hmm.

Acupuncture and herbal medicine have the potential to do frequently, though not always, is to improve egg quality, improve sperm quality, and improve lining quality. So then if you need to do IVF or IUI, you're using the best material that you can possibly have.

Right. And to use my analogy, improving the soil, right? Improve— improving the environment of your body. Right.

Indeed.

Yeah, in the areas that you can control.

That's right.

Right. Okay. So, Mike, if someone wants to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to reach out to you?

So may I leave my website and phone number?

Yeah. So we'll drop that in the comments below. And if you're watching on YouTube, go ahead and hit that like, hit that subscribe. If you're watching on Facebook, come over and follow us on the YouTube channel. We have talks here with practitioners and women who have had Infertility Success. Thanks for joining us, joining us today on Hope for Healing. Bye-bye.

Thank you so much.