The research on reasons and frequency of herbal product usage as complementary and alternative medicine among women receiving i̇nfertility treatment

The Research on Reasons and Frequency of Herbal Product Usage as Complementary and Alternative Medicine Among Women Receiving İnfertility Treatment INTRODUCTİON AND PURPOSE: In this dissertation, it is aimed to determine that how often women diagnosed as infertility use herbal products, what type of plants they prefer, in what method they use those herbal products, and what type of effects observed on these women. TOOLS AND METHOD: This dissertation was conducted on women that come infertility polyclinic of the Sakarya University Education and Research Hospital and that are taking or will take the infertility treatment. The participants filled a form that questions the sociodemographic attributes like age and sex, the causes of infertility, the treatments taken for infertility and herbal products they used to cure infertility. For the statistical analysis, SPSS 20.0 program was used. Statistical accuracy was considered as p<0.05. RESULTS: It was observed that 63.89% of the 108 women diagnosed as infertility have used herbal products. 62 different plant types that participants used as a cure of infertility were determined. The 5 most commonly used plants were assigned as onion, fig, carob, yarrow and walnut respectively. 15.94% of the women who have used herbal products declared that some side effects develop due to the products. The most commonly observed side effects were detected as nausea, dizziness, and weakness. Any considerable relation between the herbal product usage and the sociodemographic attributes could not find. CONCLUSION: Nowadays, most of the people try to find alternative treatments, and generally, we observe that they tend to use herbal products. On the other hand, there is not sufficiently proved research conducted on the positive and negative effects of herbal products. Because of that, more extensive researches on herbal products are needed to be conducted. Keywords: Infertility, Herbal Products, Phytotherapy, Assisted Reproductive Techniques, Complementary and Alternative Medicine.