Dr Yu Jin has only one grandson but the thousands of grateful patients she has treated for infertility with traditional Chinese medicine call her mom and their "miracle" children call her grandma.

Every Christmas and Chinese Spring Festival, Yu receives dozens of cards from around the world, including pictures of chubby babies of different nationalities and skin colors, sent by their parents.

"My patients home and abroad call me 'mom' when calling me to report how they're doing and how their children are, even years after treatment," Yu said in an interview with Shanghai Daily.

For more than 50 years, the 79-year-old fertility specialist has treated more than 200,000 patients, including thousands with infertility problems that patients and many doctors had considered incurable.

The treatment she developed, and for which she became famous, combines TCM as the primary treatment with Western medicine, which is mainly used for diagnosis and to enhance the TCM therapy.

Despite her years, Dr Yu is still seeing patients and demonstrating to her students how to treat each case.

Yu was trained and certified in Western medicne and worked for many years at the Obstetrics and Gynecology Hospital of Fudan University. She later worked at Shanghai Taikuntang Traditional Chinese Medicine Hospital, where she developed her treatments and taught.

She uses acupuncture, herbal soups and herbal teas to reduce secretion of androgens, strengthen the system and increase secretion of estrogen and progesterone that trigger ovulation. Sometimes hormone therapy is used to enhance the effect.

Her techniques have been tested in laboratories on young rabbits, which do not ovulate until they are sexually active. But her rabbits began to ovulate.

The techniques also worked on elderly rats whose fertility was fading. In one study of 30 rats, 10 were given heavy doses, two got pregnant and each had seven babies; their ovulation increased 33 percent. One rat that received a low dose and had three offspring; ovulation increased 30 percent. None that received hormones alone had any offspring.

The acupuncture was found to influence the hypothalamus to stimulate production of hormones and induce ovarian follicles to ovulate.

Every patient's condition is different, so treatments and herbal prescriptions vary.

To patients who had all but given up hope, Dr Yu is a miracle worker.

In 2002 Cecilia from Sweden was suffering from insufficient hormone production and in-vitro fertilization had failed. That year she came to Shanghai for Dr Yu's treatment, consisting of two months of acupuncture. Then she ovulated; the eggs were healthy. She returned to Sweden with herbs for herbal soup. Two months later she was pregnant naturally. Her healthy baby Ebba was born in 2003 in Sweden.

In 2004, a Chinese patient Siwen, who was living in the United States, had low ovarian function and other gynecological problems. She visited Dr Yu's clinic in Shanghai and had one course of treatment for two months, then returned to the US with herbal medicine. She was pregnant six months later, naturally. The baby was named Joy Charlotte.

Manping from Japan was a particularly difficult case. She had four failed IVF treatments and four failed embryo transfers before seeing Dr Yu in 2008. She continued the treatment in Japan and became pregnant through IVF. In 2010, the 49-year-old woman gave birth to a healthy son in Tokyo.

Of the thousands of infertility cases, patients overwhelmingly became pregnant naturally after treatment and bore health children. Some had twins. In four especially difficult cases, patients became pregnant after IVF therapy.

Of course, not every treatment was successful, but the numbers were small.

Dr Yu, the daughter of a pediatrician and midwife in Suzhou City, Jiangsu Province, regards her work as a mission.

"I told myself and teach my students that we must take care of a patient's every egg as if we are caring for our own eyes. Remember, all patients coming to us have spent many years chasing after therapies to have a baby and have tried every measure they can. We are actually the last chance and the last hope for the families who are so desperate to have a baby," Dr Yu said.

In an especially difficult case, a virtual lost cause, a Chinese woman with a shrunken uterus and blocked Fallopian tubes due to severe gynecological disease came to Dr Yu. The uterus was one-fourth the normal size and she had spent fruitless 10 years seeking therapy.

"She said I was her last chance," Dr Yu recalled. "I told her I wasn't sure if I could help her since her physical condition was extremely poor. She begged me to try."

The woman, from Wenzhou in Zhejiang Province, was pregnant in six months and now has a three-year-old son.

"The patient told me that I should never say 'no' to a patient because I don't know how much power I have," the doctor said, spreading out thank-you cards and baby pictures.

"Nothing makes me happier than seeing so many baby pictures and knowing that I helped," she said.

Sometimes both husband and wife receive TCM therapy.

"TCM treats the patient as whole, not one particular organ or disease, and having a baby relates to both husband and wife," she said.

She views the human body as a big network with close relationships among smaller networks of each system, organ and cell as well as the outside environment.

"Infertility is not just a reproductive disease or a gynecological syndrome," she said. "It is caused by disturbance of the special part in the life network that also influences other systems and organs."

Many of Dr Yu's patients have polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), a common hormonal problem that causes cessation or irregular menstruation; it also causes obesity and excessive air growth. In documents her physician father left her, she found a description of similar symptoms in the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) and a picture of a woman with a big belly. There was no treatment.

But Dr Yu developed an herbal therapy and used it on her first PCOS patient in 1964. The Chinese patient got pregnant and bore children.

To stimulate ovulation in such cases, Dr Yu uses various herbal soups with many ingredients.

These include herba epimedii (xian ling pi or yin yang huo, also known as horny goat weed); radix rehmanniae (shu di huang, also known as Chinese foxglove); radix angelica sinensis (dang gui, also known as Chinese angelica root); radix paeoniae alba (baishao, also known as white peony root); peach seeds and other herbs.

Acupuncture is used on various points such as san yin jiao (middle outer side of calf), guan yuan (roughly middle of lower abdomen), zhong ji and zi gong (also in the lower abdomen).

Daily acupuncture is given for three or four days and begins when the estrogen level is elevated or when more vaginal discharge is found during non ovulation periods.

Infertile women usually have high levels of androgens or male hormones. Yu first uses treatments to lower the androgen level. In one observation, ovulation rose to 90 percent in 169 PCOS patients who had tried other therapies without success.

Such a high rate of ovulation is seldom achieved with Western medicine, usually in the form of hormone injections, she said.

High androgen levels not on inhibit production of estrogen but also adversely affect the central nervous system, pancreas, fat cells, platelets and various organs. That's why patients with PCOS usually have other complications such as obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

"After receiving infertility treatment, my patients not only start to ovulate but also see a drop in blood insulin levels. This is further demonstration that hormone levels can influence the whole body, not only the reproductive system," Dr Yu said.

Using a similar theory, Yu adapted TCM treatment to delay the apparent ageing process and reduce symptoms of menopause.

"I cherish every type of Chinese herb. Each herb has its special life network and I use dozens of lives (herbs) to create new lives (babies)," she said of her treatment.

Early life

The doctor had plenty of opportunity to collect and study herbs.

During the "cultural revolution" (1966-76), Dr Yu, like other young urban men and women, was sent to rural areas to work with farmers. She went to Yunnan Province and the Tibet Autonomous Region to teach rural doctors and provide reproductive health education and services, including deliveries and contraceptive surgeries.

She learned that some local herbs could treat painful menstruation. She went in search of those and other indigenous herbs, but in collecting them she fell and injured her spine.

"The only person I felt sorry for is my son, because I didn't spend much time with him during his childhood because of my busy job," Dr Yu said.

Yu's interest in babies and fertility came naturally. Her father was the founder of pediatrics in Suzhou, Jiangsu Province, and her mother was a midwife.

"My father saved many children from infectious diseases," she said. "I was so proud when people recognized my father on the street and thanked him for saving their children. They inspired me and from my childhood, I decided to learn study medicine." Her two sisters are also doctors.

"My father always said that a doctor isn't a good doctor if he fails to cure patients," Dr Yu said.

Graduating from Shanghai Medical University, she was recruited by the Obstetrics and Gynecology Hospital of Fudan University.

In 1958, in a wave of enthusiasm for traditional Chinese medicine, she was sent to study TCM. While taking a TCM course she met her future husband, a military doctor who worked in another province for a long time after their marriage.

"I was confused by TCM at first, since everything was so different from Western medicine," she said. "But after trying TCM therapy in clinical practice, I was convinced by its benefits and fell in love with it."

While studying TCM, Yu was diagnosed with colon cancer in 1985; it spread, causing lung cancer in 1989. Surgeries were successful but today she always wears a mask while treating patients.

"My father gave me all his documents and a thread-bound book with ancient prescriptions after I determined to use TCM to treat infertility," she recalled.

In 1975, Yu used herbal tea to treat an infertile pianist with two large ovarian endometrial cysts. With three months of treatment, the two cysts shrank visibly. The pianist became pregnant and delivered a boy in 1976. Her cysts disappeared after delivery.

The boy, Qin Liwei, became a world-renowned cellist and now lives in Singapore.

"I was invited to be a witness at Qin's wedding three years ago," said the doctor who made his birth possible. "I am so proud and happy."

What others say on TCM therapy

Dr Yu Jin has seen more than 20,000 patients, 60 percent of them infertility patients. And 60-70 percent of them were finally able to have babies, she said.

Acupuncture is more effective in triggering hormone secretion and increasing chances of pregnancy, said Dr Shen Weidong, director of the acupuncture department of Shanghai Shuguang TCM Hospital.

Combining acupuncture and herbal therapy is more effective than only using Western medicine, such as IVF and hormone therapy, he said.

"But medical treatment is not magic," said Shen, who cooperated with Yu in research and practice.

The IVF success rate is 30-40 percent, while TCM therapy can raise that by 20 to 30 percentage points on average, he said. "Many patients fail to have a baby through TCM therapy, which varies with individuals," he added.

Duan Tao, president of Shanghai No. 1 Maternity & Child Health Hospital, agrees TCM can raise the IVF success rate but adds that TCM lacks extensive clinical trial data.

TCM doctors may select patients better suited to TCM therapy and this can be a reason for its high success rate, he said.

In 2009, TCM master Yan Dexin, said of Yu's work, "It's the most successful research on a combination of TCM and Western medicine that I have ever heard." He spoke after a symposium in which Yu explained her animal testing and PCOS therapy using acupuncture and herbs.