A recent piece on the website of Seattle's King 5 News talks with a hypnotherapist and her satisfied patient about the use of hypnosis for infertility. The therapist has just authored a related book titled It's Conceivable. According to the reported comments, the mechanism for how hypnotherapy can resolve infertility is via reducing the stress that goes along with trying to conceive unsuccessfully. The patient, who used the therapist's assistance to eventually conceive, refers to her own previous "three and a half years of infertility..."
While there's a growing body of research that indeed points to a connection between reducing stress and enhanced reproductive function, people who are struggling to conceive should bear in mind the importance of word usage here. Quite simply, there's a difference between reduced or sub fertility and infertility.
There are numerous non-medical things that can be done to boost an individual's or couple's fertile potential. That's not always the case with physical conditions that result in infertility.
Word needs to be spread that fertility is not a lightswitch. It's not an either-or condition of human physicality. Fertility occurs over a spectrum of incidence and variables.
A man and woman of "average" fertility take an average of nearly two years to conceive, if all goes optimally. Yet in our hurried, fix-it-now, want-it-all world, we've taken to viewing that length of time as too long. While, yes, women who begin trying to get pregnant in their mid-30's or later need not tarry too long in old-fashioned TTC mode, the truth for women who are younger and of relative good health is that time is still on their side.
Hypnosis and other stress-reduction techniques can certainly enhance the quality of life for virtually anyone, regardless of whether they're trying to get pregnant or not. Before more well-done studies indicate otherwise, however, it is risky to link the many conditions that cause infertility to stress. The thing that could be risked is valuable time to the truly infertile patients.