There’s a specific kind of grief that comes with infertility that nobody really prepares you for. It’s not one loss — it’s the same loss, over and over, every single month. My husband and I had been trying to conceive for almost two years. We’d done the bloodwork, the ultrasounds, the timed cycles, the temperature charts. We’d seen a reproductive endocrinologist in Manchester who told us we were in the “unexplained” category — nothing identifiably wrong, which somehow felt worse than having an answer. We were heading toward IVF conversations and I wasn’t sure I had anything left to give.
We live in Bedford, NH. I’m 34, my husband is 37. We are not people who take things on faith — we both work in finance, we like data, we like reasons. So when a close friend suggested I try acupuncture, my first reaction was to change the subject. It felt like something people said when they didn’t know what else to say. I smiled and nodded and didn’t look it up for another three weeks.
| What Changed My Mind
What finally made me take it seriously wasn’t a testimonial. It was research. I started finding peer-reviewed studies on acupuncture and reproductive health — work on how it affects hormone regulation, blood flow to the uterus, and stress hormone levels that can interfere with ovulation. Our reproductive endocrinologist had actually mentioned, almost as an aside, that some of her patients found acupuncture useful as a complement to their fertility protocols. She hadn’t pushed it. But she hadn’t dismissed it either.
I asked my friend which clinic she’d heard about. She mentioned Trend Acupuncture in Concord, NH and a practitioner named Kristen Markwith. She said Kristen had a reputation for working with complex, chronic cases — the kind that didn’t fit neatly into a standard protocol. That phrase stayed with me. Unexplained infertility is, by definition, a complex case. I called the next morning.
| What Kristen Saw That Others Hadn’t
I want to be careful here, because I don’t want to oversimplify what Kristen does or imply there’s a magic answer. What I can tell you is that my first appointment with her was unlike any medical appointment I’d had in two years of fertility treatment. She spent close to an hour just taking my history — not just reproductive history, but everything. My sleep. My digestion. How I ran cold. The way my cycles had changed since I’d come off birth control years ago. The anxiety that had crept in as the months of trying stretched on. She looked at me as a whole system, not just a reproductive one.
“She looked at me as a whole system, not just a reproductive one — and after two years of being reduced to hormone panels and cycle day counts, that felt like something.”
After two years of being reduced to hormone panels and cycle day counts, that felt like something. She was direct about what acupuncture could and couldn’t do. She wasn’t selling miracles. She talked about supporting the body’s regulatory systems — circulation, hormonal balance, stress response — and creating better conditions. That framing felt honest to me, and it made me trust her.
My husband came to a session about a month in. He’d been quietly skeptical — supportive of me going, but not convinced it was doing much. Kristen talked to him too, asked about his health and stress levels. He left saying it was nothing like what he’d expected. He started making changes she’d suggested. We were in it together in a way that the clinical fertility appointments had never quite managed to create.
| Treatment, and What Came Next
My sessions with Kristen combined acupuncture with ATP Resonance BioTherapy® — a low-level electrical frequency treatment that helps reduce inflammation and improve circulation at the cellular level. She used it to support blood flow and tissue health in ways that complemented the acupuncture. I noticed my sleep improved significantly within the first few weeks. The anxiety that had been living in my chest — the constant low-grade dread of another negative test — started to loosen its grip.
People come to Trend from all over southern New Hampshire for this kind of care. I’ve spoken with women in the waiting room from Salem and Londonderry who were navigating similar paths. There’s something quietly grounding about that — knowing you’re not alone in trying every reasonable thing.
Four months after I started at Trend, we got a positive test. I sat on the bathroom floor for a long time before I called my husband in. We didn’t say much. We didn’t need to.
| What I’d Tell Someone Where We Were
I can’t tell you acupuncture is why it worked. I don’t know that, and Kristen would be the first to say the same. What I can tell you is that my cycles became more regular, my progesterone levels — which had been borderline low — came up on their own by my next bloodwork, and I felt more like myself than I had in two years. Whether that created the conditions or whether something else shifted, I genuinely don’t know.
What I know is that I wish I’d called Trend a year earlier. If you’re in southern New Hampshire — Bedford, Manchester, anywhere within reach of Concord — and you’re in the middle of this particular kind of waiting, it’s worth a conversation. You don’t have to believe in it completely. I didn’t. You just have to be willing to try.
