Cherishing Sperm Like Life: 6 Fears of Sperm and Major Taboos in Male Infertility Treatment

**Cherishing Sperm Like Life: 6 Things Sperm Fears**

Sperm are delicate and easily damaged, so people should not be careless in their daily lives, and should especially guard against the "6 fears".

**First thing to fear: Cigarettes and alcohol**

Smoking and excessive alcohol consumption are major enemies of sperm. Sperm are highly sensitive to the toxins in cigarettes. Nicotine in cigarettes can reduce the secretion of sex hormones and kill sperm. If an adult male smokes 30 cigarettes a day, the sperm survival rate is only 40%, and the rate of sperm abnormalities increases. Long-term heavy drinking can cause chronic or acute alcohol poisoning, which can cause 70% of sperm to be underdeveloped or lose their vitality.

**Second fear: Hunger**

Some men have monotonous diets, are picky eaters, and dislike animal-based foods (such as meat, eggs, poultry, fish, and dairy products). Over time, this can lead to a decrease in zinc levels in their bodies. Zinc, a trace element, is known as the "harmony element for couples." Zinc deficiency in men can reduce libido and sexual function, decrease sperm count by 30% to 40%, and even cause infertility. Selenium, manganese, calcium, and copper are also essential trace elements for male fertility.

**Third fear: Heat**

The scrotum acts as a "temperature regulator" for the testicles, maintaining a temperature one or two degrees Celsius lower than body temperature for optimal sperm production. If a man has a habit of taking hot baths or saunas, it can raise the scrotum temperature, reduce sperm production, and lead to infertility. Wearing tight-fitting pants like jeans constricts the scrotum, hindering heat dissipation and causing a rise in testicular temperature. Furthermore, tight pants can impede venous blood flow in the scrotum, which is also detrimental to sperm production.

**Fourth fear: Frequent**

Frequent sexual activity can lead to impotence and reduce the sperm count in each ejaculation. If there are fewer than 20 million sperm per milliliter of semen, the chances of the wife getting pregnant are very small; fewer than 4 million sperm per milliliter makes conception almost impossible. Some men, in addition to regular marital sex, also engage in extramarital affairs, prostitution, or other irregular sexual activities, resulting in excessively frequent sexual activity.

**Fifth fear: Worry**

Some people, due to trivial family matters, marital discord, and mutual blame, live in constant depression and distress. Others experience years of infertility after marriage, with the husband suffering from depression and fearing the loss of his marriage and love. These negative mental states can directly affect the nervous and endocrine systems, disrupting testicular spermatogenesis and leading to marital infertility.

**Sixth fear: Medicine and "threads"**

Frequent use of sedatives, antitumor drugs, and chemical drugs such as busulfan, nitrofurans, and hormones by men can cause sperm growth disorders, sperm chromosome damage and breakage. Excessive radiation exposure can also cause sperm chromosome aberrations.

Conceiving life is a natural phenomenon. Only by respecting the laws of nature, understanding sex science, and valuing personal reproductive health can men fulfill their wish of having their beloved baby.

**Seeking treatment haphazardly when ill-a major taboo in treating male infertility**

For some, marriage and childbirth are effortless and easy; while for others, the journey to parenthood is fraught with countless twists and turns and hardships. During my consultations, I listened to the stories of those who had endured the long and arduous path to having children, and I deeply sympathized with their plight. I met a young couple at the hospital who had been married for four years without conceiving and were extremely eager to seek treatment. Their arduous journey was quite typical.

In the early stages of their medical journey, they found a doctor named Liu who claimed to specialize in treating infertility. After reviewing the lab results and taking their pulse, Dr. Liu confidently declared, "Your infertility is due to kidney deficiency. Kidney deficiency requires strong tonics, and my medicine is quite expensive." He then quickly wrote out a prescription, which the patient examined and found to be filled with expensive tonics such as cordyceps, dog kidney, and deer antler velvet. A month's supply would cost over a thousand yuan. After taking the medicine for a few days, the young man felt hot and dry all over, wishing he could jump into an ice cellar for comfort. The dryness made him unable to eat, caused nosebleeds, constipation, and even bloody stools. He went back to Dr. Liu for answers, who then said, "Your body is too weak to tolerate tonics, which further proves your deficiency is severe. You still need to take tonics. Once you can tolerate them, your illness should be cured." So he continued taking the medicine, but his internal heat worsened, he became increasingly irritable, suffered constant nosebleeds, and grew increasingly thin, forcing him to stop taking the medicine.

Later, through a colleague's introduction, they sought help from Dr. Sun, a doctor in his sixties at a factory's health center. According to the colleague, Dr. Sun had some special methods for treating infertility. He examined the young couple's pulses and said, "Both of you are ill; the woman has a cold uterus, and the man has kidney deficiency. You need medication, and you must take the herbal decoctions I prescribe. Furthermore, the reason you're not conceiving is because you don't know how to manage your sex life." "How should we manage it?" they asked. "You two need to be together every day. If you don't, you'll miss your ovulation period, and then how will you get pregnant?" As a result, they had sex every day, almost without fail. The young man had already weakened considerably due to loss of appetite and insomnia, and Dr. Sun's "advice" only made things worse. Two months passed, and the young man grew increasingly thin and weak, his energy and spirits deteriorated, and his wife still hadn't conceived.

Infertility is a complex condition, difficult to cure. Seeking treatment haphazardly can not only fail to cure infertility but may also damage one's health, resulting in more harm than good. In the case of Dr. Liu, who didn't understand the mechanisms of infertility, he insisted on tonifying the kidneys. As a result, the young man, who was already deficient in Yin, was given excessive Yang-tonifying medication, leading to increased internal heat. This internal heat further hindered sperm development and growth, resulting in no improvement despite taking many medications. Therefore, I advise infertile patients to be cautious when seeking treatment and choose a truly skilled doctor. Currently, there's a surge in "andrology fever," with many billboards and utility poles displaying advertisements for "andrology specialists offering evening consultations." These advertisements should not be trusted, as genuine expert doctors never advertise themselves through street ads. Only quacks and fraudulent practitioners plaster their advertisements on utility poles, bridges, and building facades.

Some quack doctors have only a superficial understanding of infertility and often spread seemingly plausible but actually harmful fallacies. For example, Dr. Sun told people suffering from infertility that they should have intercourse every day to block ovulation. In fact, this is pure pseudoscience and misleading information. A woman's ovulation cycle is regular and does not need to be blocked by daily intercourse. Furthermore, frequent intercourse will inevitably lead to immature and underdeveloped sperm, making conception impossible with poorly developed sperm.

The process of sperm production within the seminiferous tubules takes approximately 74 days, followed by about 16 days of further maturation in the epididymis, totaling about 90 days. Some people try various treatments for infertility, switching between different clinics for half a month here and 20 days there, without ever finding a cure. This is because they don't understand the process of sperm maturation. Treating infertility is not like treating a cold or gastroenteritis. Infertility is relatively stubborn and difficult to cure because many mysteries surrounding the mechanisms of human reproductive function remain unsolved. When reproductive function malfunctions, medication is needed. The active ingredients in the medication dissolve in the bloodstream, travel to the testes, repair damaged spermatogenic cells, and gradually restore their function, leading to the normal secretion of healthy sperm. This is the only way to achieve the desired result. This process is quite lengthy and cannot be resolved with just a few doses of medication, so patients need perseverance.