This new test not only identifies whether you have an overall generally low sperm count to begin with and that may be why it’s difficult for you and your partner to get pregnant, but it also helps to identify which sperm are actually functional and which are not. So it separates the marines from the grunt soldiers when it comes to your spermies, basically! 

The reason that this is important when it comes to fertility is that it’s often not the sperm count that only affects the odds of a woman getting pregnant, but it’s also the quality of the sperm of her partner, because if a sperm who is not capable of getting the job done, fully penetrating the egg and resulting in a healthy pregnancy that doesn’t end in spontaneous abortion reaches the egg, then you can kiss a full term, healthy pregnancy goodbye.

Doctors actually use a naturally occuring acid that is found in both the woman’s egg and the skin, called hyaluronic acid, to separate the good sperm from the damaged sperm. This quite possibly may be how the egg determines which sperm it will allow to penetrate it correctly and fully so that the female can become successfully impregnated. 

You see, the genetic issues that a sperm with defective DNA has, can actually lead to a pregancy that may not go full term or that does not result in a healthy, disease or disability or deformity free baby. This way, fertility doctors can also boost the chances of a full term pregnancy by making sure the sperm side of the equation is fully addressed.

Because sperm are drawn to bind with the hyaluronic acid, this is used as a sort of bait to see which sperm are best suited to fertilize the egg, and which ones can get the job done, and get it done right.  This is bound to be a more requested method of testing in fertility clinics so docs and their patients can make sure they are being efficient and aren’t just “shooting blanks” when trying to fertilize the woman’s eggs.

If the correct breathing weren’t so important, then tantric sex teachers wouldn’t focus so much on this one aspect of your sexual prowess now, would they?  Let’s talk about why proper breathing is so important for great sex.

First off, it is vital to your oxygen supplies. With each breath, you are inhaling precious oxygen into your lungs, where it is processed, sent to the blood, and lends itself to your energy and endurance levels, both totally essential for going for a long time, and being able to perform the task in the first place.

Breathing techniques such as those used in relaxation exercises like yoga and tai chi and meditation are also key to calming the mind and basically forcing it to focus and be “quiet”. When you can focus all of your thoughts and energy “in the moment”, guess how much better you experience is going to be?

Men tend to have a very hard time with breathing properly, and this can really encumber your chances of having both great orgasms, frequent orgasms, and having long, drawn out, satisfying sexual interludes.

If you want to learn the proper breathing techniques, try deep breathing exercises or enroll yourself in a yoga class. Yoga is not just for women any more. Have you seen the bodies on some of the guys who are seriously into yoga? Try Sting, David Duchovny, Ricky Martin, and lots more stars who have great bodies and you know they’re out there having great sex too….

Men are very much more driven to have sex, on a basic level, it’s as nature designed us, to want to “spread our seed” or however you want to put it. It’s not that men can’t be faithful, it’s just that men can definitely be faithful as long as they are feeling satisfied and in love with their partner. Of course, there are one offs like genuine sexual addictions, but I’m just speaking generally.

Other than being a sign of some sort of obsessive compulsive disorder if you engage in self pleasure more than a couple times a week, it can also have some physical effects that you won’t like as well apparently.

Of course, just the aspect of you spending as much time and energy on it as you do if engage that often is not healthy, and can preoccupy your life with thoughts and actions that have no purpose, and that may be the main concern, but are there some other additional health aspects you may want to consider before hitting the bathroom to do the deed too?

Honestly, I could fine no actual physiological issues that result directly from masturbating more than a couple times a week. Believe it or not, some men do it several times a day, and that I think is extremely overdoing it. It’s not socially acceptable, it’s socially isolating, and it focuses your mind on too much of a simply nonproductive activity, which just isn’t good for your psyche.

It may not have any directly bad health effects, besides maybe straining the heart too much, several times a day, or perhaps this may lead to a problem with your ejaculate being expelled too often from your body, but other than that the main concern is that you are focusing too much energy and time on a wasteful activity.

Was this some strange attempt at having a love child with someone he was in love with and couldn’t have?  Let me state again, I’m a woman, and I tend to blow these things out of proportion from a relationship angle.  Oh, and the fact that I just read about Jennifer Aniston’s new movie with Jason Bateman where Bateman is in love with her and switches out her artificial insemination sperm with his own because he wants her to have his love child.  I know, crazy!

More likely than that slightly more emotional reason, I thought maybe it also had something to do with the fact that he knew his sperm were more viable than the patients husband?

At any rate, the woman actually did become pregnant from the implantation of the supposed Dr’s sperm, and she became pregnant with twins nonetheless.  I also wondered how she found out the sperm that was used was not her husband’s as it was supposed to be?  Read on for more details…this is an interesting one for sure.

The couple who tried to sue the Dr., who by the way denies the allegations, are a mixed race couple, the husband is African American and the wife is caucasian.  So, when their babies came out fairly complected they were a little shocked, and at the suggestion of a doctor, got a DNA test which suggested that the husband was not the biological father of the twins.

So, either the Dr. may have used his own sperm to artificially inseminate the woman, although it is not clear what the motive would have been, or he may have purposely or accidentally used the wrong man’s sperm to impregnate the wife.  At any rate, it’s a sad story that this woman carried these children thinking they were her husbands and they weren’t, however, at least she had two healthy babies, that’s the bright side.  The investigation is supposedly still ongoing.

What’s the lesson here, my friend?  Well, to have sex often!  Sex is therapeutic, it lowers blood pressure in the long term, and the more you have, the better your mood generally is.  Have you ever known people who just don’t have sex?  Well quite frankly, they act like they have sticks up their butt or something, for a good reason.  Sexual anxiety builds easily, and when you don’t have that release often enough, not only do you get anxious, but you also have those moments increasingly where you can only get a hard on for a few minutes.  Having sex often is not only great exercise and good for the heart, mind, soul and relationship, but it also can actually improve your sexual performance overall as well.

There are some things you can do in between your sexual interludes with your wife or partner though that will help you last longer the next time you make love.  For one, autoeroticism, aka masturbation, will help you last lots longer the next time you get in bed with your honey. Also, there are some penis exercises that may help you to not only last longer and have better sexual performance, but they also can help you attain a larger penis when erect by encouraging muscle lengthening of the penis when it is in a flacid state. These exercises must only be done in a flacid state so that the risk of injury to the penis is lower.

Speaking of masturbation, I think we might talk a little about that in the next update.  My partner and I were just talking about how we don’t know when eachother indulges in self stimulation, and we don’t really want to know.  After all, there are some things that should always be sacred, no?  Masturbation to me is still a very private affair, and should remain that way, unless you get into sharing that with your partner.  That’s all a totally individual thing, like everything else sexual!

It used to be debated that men should wait a few days before having sex again when they and their partner are trying to get pregnant, sort of due to this notion that the sperm “get stronger and replenish” when the reproduction system is given a break of a few days, but now evidence shows the opposite, that in fact having sex every day helps to improve the sperm, and therefore the chances of impregnation.

They go further to say that couples trying to have a baby should have sex every day leading up to the woman’s ovulation period, so that they can be sure those sperm are nice and healthy good swimmers to get to the egg and fertilize it, creating an embryo, and then a bouncin’ baby boy or girl.  This is good news for those guys with huge sexual appetites – and lots of time on their hands to boot, but what about guys who need help with their libido, and don’t think that they have the time or energy to devote to sex daily?

Well, there are of course prescription meds like Cialis, Viagra and Levitra that can help get a guy in the mood in a jiffy and on demand, but who wants to pop these medications every day?  The logic here is that the guy will get used to it and build endurance, and actually having more sex leads to more sexual desire, when you would think it might be the other way around, the abstinence creates more desire.  Abstinence is in fact, not the answer if you’re trying to conceive.

Here’s the theory behind frequent sex and sperm health.  And it actually makes sense!  The idea is that if you have sex every day and ejaculate every day, then your sperm are less exposed to damaging elements, and therefore are able to remain healthier. When you go even a few days without sex and without ejaculating, then your sperm is exposed to cell damage and they die off and are weakened.

So, basically you’re dealing with brand new, ready to swim sperm when you ejaculate every day, and those are the kind of sperm that are going to be willing, ready and eager to impregnate your partner when they do finally reach her egg!

Maybe this explains why most women are inherently attracted more to intelligent men?  The tests that were run that appear to provide somewhat conclusive evidence of the relationship between intelligence and sperm quality were performed on about four thousands male veterans who submitted sperm samples to be evaluated, while also taking IQ tests.

Only a small portion of those men, about 12% or so though, actually submitted sperm samples.  They were also tested on their fitness as part of the quotient for healthy sperm.  What the researchers found however, was that even with this smaller sample from the test population, they were able to conclude that the higher the IQ of the men who submitted the sperm samples, the higher and healthier their sperm count was.

They don’t know of an exact reason for the correlation, however they came to the same conclusion that I did when I first read of this study. That conclusion is that intelligence correlates usually highly with fitness, and men who take care of themselves, eat the right foods and get proper exercise and nutrition tend to be more intelligent on average, and so the better sperm quality and higher sperm count appear to be related indirectly to intelligence through the fitness aspect of intelligence. 

The British Fertility society has reported that there is actually a shortage in willing men to give their donations of sperm lately, for reasons not totally known.  Well, actually a big potential problem, and something that may need to be repealed if they are going to have any success in the future collecting sperm samples from donors, is that Britain has passed a law that does not allow totally anonymous sperm donations.  This means a man’s privacy is not completely protected if he chooses to donate his sperm. 

That fact could definitely be offputting for thousands of men who want to give their sperm.  Men who wish to not be identified as a sperm donor by children who were fathered by their sperm sample through insemination cannot any longer be guaranteed that they will never be contacted because the knowledge is available to the kids when they become eighteen years old.

To put perspective on the sperm donor shortage, the number of women needing artificial insemination to get pregnant in the UK per year is in the thousands, and the number of male sperm donors is only in the low hundreds.  I’d say that’s a pretty bad ratio, wouldn’t you.  Maybe they’d take US men if they get desperate.  Heck, maybe they’ll start offering some cash for it! 

IVF is sort of a “test tube baby” sort of process.  What happens is that eggs are taken from a woman, and the sperm is taken from the man, and  those are cultivated in a petrie dish (or however else they do this, there may be some other mechanism used for all I know).  Currently, the doctor takes the most viable of the bunch and implants them into a woman’s uterus, and the hope is that one of some of them take off and start to develop into little bundles of joy. 

The newer process, and researchers are hoping a soon to be very viable and cost effective process, is that the doctors would take the most viable cells via DNA tests to determine which are the strongest and most able to develop into these blastocysts, which are the precursor to a full blown fetus, and therefore cut down on the need to cultivate multiples of babies since this is essentially what leads to multiple births – the needs to implant multiples for maximum likelihood that one or some will take and the women will be pregnant. 

Newer DNA testing and application techniques are going to make for some very exciting advances in modern day science. Already, there are several DNA tests on the horizon or at least in research and development, that may help determine serious illness before it occurs by determining likelihood of development via DNA structure and background. 

These genetic weaknesses may be able to be exploited to help find cures and tests to prevent degenerative diseases such as cancers and other things that can be prevented if caught early or put into preventive mode before they are even a problem. 

Like you probably are, I was wondering how ethical or socially acceptable this was, but apparently the couple and the grandfather mulled this over with ethics committees and standards committees and all that good stuff before getting the go ahead to do this, which will probably be a landmark occurrence, as there are no other grandfathers who’ve knowingly donated their sperm for artificial insemination of their son or daughters offspring. 

This reminds me of a another story in this same vein that came up a couple weeks back, where a grandmother gave birth to her own grandchildren.  Talk about motherly love, this woman was not only old enough to be a grandmother, but also carried her own grandchildren in her womb for nine months all for the love of her son or daughter (not sure which it was now, I read it a while ago). 

We’re also hearing a lot about women having children at much later ages than what used to be considered non-risky, and they seem to be doing it with fairly minimal complications, as compared to years ago when getting pregnant after a certain age (40 I believe) was basically almost advised against as potentially health complicating and even life threatening for certain women.  Guess we’ve come a long way as a species, eh?