Alice Domar, PhD
// Executive Director of the Domar Center for Mind/Body Health
// Director of Mind/Body Services at Boston IVF
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“The Fertility Goddess”
Alice Domar is a leader on women’s health issues specializing in stress, infertility, and self-nurture. She’s also the first researcher to apply mind body medicine to women with infertility.
We filmed with Alice Domar in Boston where she’s the Executive Director of the Domar Center for Mind Body Health, Assistant Professor of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Biology at Harvard Medical School, and Senior Psychologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
Her groundbreaking research looks at the relationship between stress and women’s health conditions such as PMS, infertility, endometriosis, high-risk pregnancy, gynecological cancer, and eating disorders.
“Actually being in a group and integrating those skills into your life is associated with nearly tripling a pregnancy rate, so why wouldn’t everyone be doing it?”
Dr. Domar gained international recognition for her research into the effectiveness of adding mind body medicine in the treatment of infertility. In a 2011 study published in the journal Fertility and Sterility, she found that infertile women undergoing in vitro fertilisation (IVF), using mind body techniques have a 55% conception rate, compared with 20% not using the techniques.
Dr. Domar is the best selling author of Healing Mind, Healthy Woman: Using the Mind/Body Connection to Manage Stress and Take Control of Your Life, Self-Nurture: Learning to Care for Yourself as Effectively as You Care for Everyone Else and co-author of Six Steps to Increased Fertility. She has appeared on The Today Show, Good Morning America, CBS This Morning, Dateline, CNN, CBS Evening News, and NBC Evening News, and featured in numerous publications including the New York Times, The Guardian, People and Vogue.
“I see mind body medicine in practice every day and I wouldn’t be doing it if it wasn’t working. It wouldn’t be ethical for me to be doing it if it wasn’t working. But I also do research and so I know it works.”
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Additional Links
Domar Center for Mind Body Health
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
Lowering Stress Improves Fertility TreatmentTaking the IVF out of IVF