Meet the man who wants to make you pregnant

Kite’s claim to reproductive fame began by accident two decades ago, when he started practising as a Worsley Five Element acupuncturist (the Worsley school of acupuncture places particular emphasis on balancing the constitution of the individual). Kite was treating Maggie, a 40-year-old woman, for severe hay fever, and both practitioner and patient were startled when she fell pregnant. Kite had no idea that Maggie had spent a fruitless decade trying to conceive a second child. The newly expectant mother sent friends with similar quandaries and several swiftly became pregnant too.

Word-of-mouth recommendations burgeoned. I was dispatched to Kite by my friend Clare in 2003, aged 35, after my first pregnancy came to a brutal end when the baby was diagnosed with a fatal syndrome. I told Kite I was there to try and deal with paralysing grief, but the first acupuncture treatment had an unexpected side-effect. Quite apart from feeling as if a sluice-gate had been prised open, allowing hope to flow again, I noted signs of ovulation. This seemed crazy, as I’d already ovulated that month and my period was due that day. I told my husband I couldn’t possibly be fertile, but we might as well take advantage of the upturn in my mood. Nine months later my first son was born. 

So I duly started sending women who were desperate to have babies; then most of them fell pregnant too. My publisher friend Kate had a six-year-old son, but hadn’t been able to conceive a second child and no one could advise her why. Thinking back to her first appointment with Kite, she said: “He was magical. Simply talking to me started to calm my panicky body in to a reassured rhythm. His advice was so simple: eating more mindfully, drinking water, getting up at a regular time. None of which I had been doing in my ‘successful’ and, on paper, ‘happy’ life.” Kate went on to have two more children.

As Kite’s reputation grew, so did his string of high-flying patients. Melanie Chisholm and Fearne Cotton are amongst his celebrity endorsers and Chris Evans wrote a glowing encomium for his first book, Everything You Need You Have. Yet there’s nothing starry, complex, or even necessarily pricey about Kite’s core advice – if you glean it from the book, rather than a personal consultation (which costs £295 for the initial session and £195 thereafter, although other Kite Clinic practitioners are £90 a session). 

Kite believes the Five Element philosophy of creating physical, emotional and spiritual balance in your being is what’s crucial. While having a course of acupuncture enhances that process, he is very clear that his needles do not make you fertile, so much as promote the balance and health that are key conditions for fertility.

Kite strives to debunk the myths, fear and hysteria surrounding the topic of conception, pointing out the UK’s fertility industry is worth over £600 million a year, so it’s in many people’s interests to “funnel people down the conveyor belt” to IVF, or other invasive treatments, before simpler avenues have been tried. 

The new AMH (Anti-Mullerian Hormone) test, which supposedly predicts the number of eggs a woman has left in her ovaries, has ramped up the panic factor. Kite says no one warns women AMH levels may go down for many reasons – “because your thyroid, adrenal or pituitary gland are malfunctioning” – so a low recording doesn’t necessarily mean a drastic depletion of eggs.

He has seen couples who were told they’d need egg donors go on to enjoy fruitful pregnancies using their own supply and gives a refreshingly calm riposte to the doom-mongers who scold working women for not getting knocked up in their twenties: “If you’re over the age of 35, just start with the expectation it will take a year and a half to fall pregnant, not six months. Nothing wrong with that. Just be realistic.”

What really bugs Kite is the constant message that, “There’s something wrong with you that has to be fixed.” His aim with the book is to strip away the mystique and needless costs that have been built up round conception. He wants couples “to realise it’s a normal function to conceive and make a baby – no different to digesting food. Lots of people have problems with digestion, but they don’t freak out about it. The simply make changes to their lifestyle.” Kite is at pains to explain there’s no specific one-size-fits-all course of action. He dislikes “over-prescriptive” tomes, or advice that concentrates on women to the exclusion of men. He’s not claiming to wave a magic needle over anyone’s ovaries. Instead, his core advice is to do everything you can to get your health in balance, which includes the way you think, the way you look after your body, your choice of activities, your juggling of work and leisure and the people you choose to hang out with. “When you’re conscious of these things, all areas of your health improve – including fertility.”

He’s keenly aware sceptics speak of “mumbo jumbo” whenever they hear alternative health practitioners bandy around terms like spirituality and balance. But he points out an ever-increasing number of rational, questioning people are re-engaging with traditions that pre-date modern medicine. One of the most popular current classes at Harvard is Professor Michael Puett’s course on ancient Chinese philosophy, which led to the bestselling book The Path. Kite’s own take on Taoist thinking is laid out in The Art of Baby-Making, alongside detailed case histories and a dollop of  robust common sense (breakfast like a king, drink more water, bank more sleep, do more exercise, sort out your true priorities). Kite admits, “The message is simple – but you really have to drum it into people before they’ll change a thing.”

I tell Kite that I’ve found my treatments with him have influenced the way I view people who are struggling to conceive. I’m now keenly observant of professionals living lives that are too frenetic for regular sex, or women who live on coffee and cigarettes, or couples who struggle with unresolved conflicts. Kite nods his head: “If it’s a physical problem that can only be cured with medicine or surgery, fair enough. But that’s not what most people are experiencing.” His core group of patients are in their thirties, frantically trying to build their careers while conducting busy social lives. He says they don’t understand the message is “Be yourself. Be well. Be at peace.” 

The Art of Baby-Making by Gerad Kite is published by Short Books (£8.99). To order your copy call 0844 871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk