Do yoga, have a baby -- maybe

This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

Today we got a pitch that began like this: ‘Brenda Strong, Mary Alice Young from Desperate Housewives, has created a new yoga method -- and it is getting women pregnant.’

All righty then. Reading further, we discovered that Strong, who we loved as the bra-baring Sue Ellen Mischke on ‘Seinfeld,’ has developed a method called Yoga4Fertility that purports to increase fertility with the help of her trademarked Fertility Ball, which has its debut next month. Combining yoga with something called ‘Tibetan finger pressure techniques’ allegedly helps women get pregnant.

Working with that ball, says the Yoga4Fertility website, ‘is a way for women to empower themselves to stimulate circulation/blood flow, massage internal organs, use acupressure points for fertility, help to regulate gynecological function, detoxify and cleanse, decrease stress, and open connective tissue/fascia.’ That seems like a lot of responsibility for a ball. And we’re not really sure we want our internal organs massaged anyway.

Doing a little checking on the connection between yoga and fertility, we ran across an oft-quoted study presented in October at a meeting of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine that showed participating in a stress management program may have helped increase fertility. The women were undergoing in vitro fertilization.

Although we’re not discounting alternative medicine, and yoga has shown to be effective in dealing with a number of health issues, including helping cancer patients cope with pain and treatment side effects, we caution anyone against believing that this is the sure road to pregnancy. Just because a celebrity says it’s possible, doesn’t mean it is. Om.

-Jeannine Stein