So you finally had the tests run and here is the verdict: his swimmers are slow, they are few, and oh, they also look funny. It can be a crushing experience for a man to hear that he is unlikely to get his wife pregnant. The worst may just be though, that usually not much treatment can be offered because the underlying cause is not clear. Well, let me tell you, there definitely are some clear root causes of poor sperm quality and you absolutely CAN improve it naturally and quickly. In this post I’m helping you figure out what may be going on so that you can get a clue about what may be going on for you and how it can be fixed. The 7 secret and not so secret sperm killers!

Sperm killer 1: Stress

Let’s kick this off with one of the most well known & obvious ones: Stress. I am almost starting to feel like a broken record with this increasingly generic term. Everything is stress this stress that. The thing is, I can’t stress (haha) enough how stress majorly affects your hormone balance. Yes, both for men and women! Chronic stress makes your body produce stress hormones at the expense of sex hormones.

You may know FSH as the Follicle Stimulating Hormone that is needed to mature eggs in an ovary and LH (luteinising homorne) to trigger ovulation, but those very same hormones in a guy are needed to produce sperm!

Another important male hormone is testosterone. This one too drops when the body needs to produce more stress hormones.

To address stress with my male patients, I therefore work with remedies to support the:

• Adrenal glands – the ones that produce either stress or sex hormones
• Hypothalamus – I call this the hormone boss because he/she is the one that translates stress to the hormone system and decides what and how much of hormones the other glands produce
• Anterior pituitary gland – which produces FSH &LH
• Testes – the ones producing the sperm

Quite a few studies have shown how stress drastically reduces sperm count. Stress however also causes what is called “oxidative stress” which can affect the quality of sperm. Oxidative stress is basically a disruption in a body’s metabolism to effectively detox. Stress can therefore be an extra problem if there is already toxicity in the body.

Sperm killer 2: History of malaria or malaria medication

I’d range this one under the secret sperm killers as this is a nasty one that you may not have connected to sperm quality! Unfortunately in the third world it is a lot more known and common that malaria affects sperm quality. The good news is that you can absolutely recover from it! The thing is though…. you actually need to  recover from it and not have it slumber away in the background.

That malaria drugs affects male fertility is also a known fact that is unfortunately not always communicated.

Homeopathy can both help you recover if you’ve never been really well since having malaria, and detox malaria medication.

Sperm killer 3: Infections (candida & STD’s)

Have you gotten tested for an STD yet? If either of you have had other bed partners than each other, then you’re going to want to have this checked out. Too often are STD’s not picked up on because couples don’t get tested and don’t have symptoms. The fact is, however, even old untreated STD’s can completely ruin your fertility. It will kill sperm before it manages to leave a guy’s body and it can cause mucus buildup in a woman’s Fallopian tubes, making it imposible for sperm to even travel up or an egg to travel down. So do yourselves a favor, be open and honest with each other and get screened.

Another big problem is candida. We all have this in our bodies all the time, but when it overgrows it can cause problems. You may then know it as a yeast or fungal infection or thrush. The tricky thing is that especially for guys, this can be a problem without him experiencing symptoms! If you have any or several of the following apply to you:

• Sugar / carbohydrate rich diet
• You drink a lot of caffeine and / or alcohol
• Have a history of smoking cannabis
• Have digestive issues such as bloating, gas and / or recurring loose stools
• Frequently battle problems like athletes foot, fungal toenails, ringworm or get circular discolorations on your torso

…then you likely have a candida overgrowth! Check out the suggestions at the bottom of this post for women on treating thrush. The same tips apply to guys wanting to resolve candida overgrowth.

Sperm killer 4: (Past) use of steroids

There is another not so well-known one: the use of steroids. Because steroids are synthetic hormones, they disrupt the natural hormone balance and that disruption can linger even after you’ve stopped taking the steroids. This is the case again both for women and men! So whether it was in the cortisone cream for eczema or in the form of asthma inhalers, or just for an infection that would not shift, consider a homeopathic detox for sure if you have been taking steroids.

Detoxing steroids is often part of the fertility treatment that I provide but I also teach how to detox steroids homeopathically yourself on my program the Fertility Reclaim.