Can high-risk HPV and having an abnormal pap smear impact your ability to have a baby? In this episode, I’m going to talk about the link between high-risk HPV and fertility issues. 

I’m Dr. Doni Wilson, a Naturopathic Doctor and Certified Professional Midwife, as well as a Clinical Nutritionist. I’ve helped thousands of women with abnormal pap smears and high-risk HPV virus to help them prevent progression of abnormal cells, prevent cancer, and help them clear high-risk HPV to negative and keep it negative throughout their lives.

I help a lot of women who are at the time in their life where they’re hoping for a pregnancy. In fact, sometimes women have gone in to see the gynecologist for a pap smear because they’re trying to get pregnant, and that’s when they find out they are testing positive for high-risk HPV. 

For some women, it’s once they are already pregnant and go in for a pap smear in early pregnancy, only to discover they’re testing positive for high-risk HPV. I also help women who are peri and postmenopausal and dealing with HPV at that point in their lives as well.

In this discussion, I want to focus on those of you who are thinking about pregnancy, or might already be pregnant, and are now dealing with high-risk HPV. I know that in the doctor’s office, they’re not likely to tell you that there is anything you can do. They’re likely to tell you to just come back and get retested to see if the cells progressed or got worse, but they’re not likely to tell you about any kind of diet changes, lifestyle changes, let alone nutrients, herbs, or other approaches that you can take to protect yourself from HPV and support your body’s ability to clear the virus to negative.

Your Body Can Clear HPV Naturally

What we know from the research and from clinical practice is that humans can clear high-risk HPV to negative and keep it negative. It’s not just about exposure to the virus—it’s about your body’s ability to protect you from the virus. So if you’re testing positive right now, that alone already tells me that we need to start being a detective and figure out why.

I encourage you to get out a piece of paper and start taking notes on some of the most common underlying causes that I find, especially in women who are childbearing age and wanting to conceive a pregnancy. Let’s figure out why the virus is positive. What is it trying to tell us? 

It can help to think of the HPV virus as a messenger telling us there’s something that needs attention. What I find is when I help women to figure out why—what is the root cause of high-risk HPV being positive—and we address those causes, it will also improve your fertility.

Using my HPV Protocol, women are able to clear HPV to negative, heal their cervix, and then I help them to conceive a pregnancy naturally and carry that pregnancy successfully to full term with a healthy baby. Because I see this over and over again, I’m feel it is my responsibility to let other women know that it is a possible for you as well. I truly believe that the sooner we can get started understanding what your body needs, the sooner you can benefit from this.

The Risks of Waiting: Procedures That Can Impact Fertility

The downside of the standard medical approach is that they are not trained to provide information about diet, lifestyle, nutrients, or herbs to help you. 

If you have low grade abnormal cells, your doctor is likely to tell you to just wait to see if it gets worse, and come back in 6 to 12 months, or to recheck after your pregnancy. There is a possibility that each time you go back to recheck your pap and/or biopsy, it could get worse. The cells could progress, and the HPV virus could start causing more and more abnormality.

When that happens, if it progresses to severely abnormal cells—which is also called CIN 2 or CIN 3—that’s when the doctor is going to recommend a procedure to remove the abnormal cells. They may recommend a LEEP procedure (or LLETZ procedure). If it recurs or progresses further, the doctor may talk about a surgery to remove part of your cervix, like a conization or cone biopsy. If it progresses even further, they might even start talking about a hysterectomy.

Even if you have a procedure, you could go back in six months to a year later, and abnormal cells could be back again, and then you will need another procedure. Depending on the severity and how many times this recurs, the more likely they will need to remove part of your cervix or all of your cervix, and the greater likelihood that it could impact your ability to carry a pregnancy.

From my perspective, our goal should be to prevent the need for procedures as much as possible. That is why I recommend taking action now. Let’s do everything we can to prevent the need for procedures. That’s your best way to protect your cervix and your uterus so that you can be most able to have a successful pregnancy.

Another possibility is the development of scar tissue on your cervix from repeat LEEP procedures. The more scar tissue, the more risk of a miscarriage because the cervix will be weaker and less able to support a pregnancy in the uterus. This situation is referred to as cervical insufficiency. There is a procedure that can be performed to hold the cervix together during pregnancy, called a cervical cerclage. Ask your doctor about this option if you have had multiple LEEP procedures. 

If the abnormal cells recur or progress further, a hysterectomy may be necessary in order to prevent cancer and protect your life. We want to do everything we can to prevent it from progressing to this point, and to protect your ability to have a pregnancy. 

This is why I encourage you to take action now. Don’t wait. If you know you’re testing positive for high-risk HPV, and definitely if it’s been testing positive for more than a year and if it’s progressed at all, I would say don’t wait another minute. The women who call me and work with me one-on-one or in my group program always say to me, “I wish I would have found you and reached out to you sooner, Dr. Doni.” 

So please don’t wait. The sooner you can take action, the better for maintaining your ability to have a healthy pregnancy.

Starting Early: Preparing for Future Pregnancy

Everything that I teach you about healing from HPV is going to help improve your overall health and your overall fertility. So even if you’re thinking, “Hey, I might not want a pregnancy for a couple of years,” I recommend that you start preparing now. 

In fact, so often as women go through the Dr. Doni’s HPV Protocol, they end up becoming more easily able to get pregnant. In fact, so often women end up calling me partway through the protocol and say, “I got a positive pregnant test, and I wasn’t even really trying yet!” 

As a naturopathic doctor, I think about the body as interconnected. What’s happening in your cervix and your uterus is not separate from what’s happening in your gut, in your nervous system, in the whole rest of your body. To help you heal, we need to look at your body as an interconnected system physically, and also mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. 

We need to look at all levels of your reality and your environment and your experience, and that’s how we start to get the clues to understand what your body has been trying to tell us. Ultimately, high-risk HPV virus is the messenger telling us, “Hey, something needs attention.” 

The tests that are being done in the regular doctor’s office are not going to be the types of tests that are going to give you that information. They may run a regular blood test, and that might tell you if you have anemia, which would be helpful to know. It might tell you if there are blood sugar issues, but a lot of the time the blood work is going to look normal. The doctor may say, “We don’t know why the HPV’s there,” or “We don’t know why you’re having trouble getting pregnant,” because the results are all in the reference range of normal.

Advanced Testing and Nutrient Analysis

When I look at blood work, as a naturopathic doctor and clinical nutritionist, I’m looking at it differently. I’m not just looking at the standard reference ranges, and I’m not just looking at the standard tests. 

I look at a whole different set of tests, including not only nutrient levels but nutrient metabolism that we can see in your standard blood work—and often covered by insurance, depending on your insurance company. There’s so much more information we can get from blood work that your doctor is probably not ordering because they’re not trained to order those tests. 

Even just today, I was working with a case where I gave my patient a list of blood tests to ask her doctor to order. The doctor said, “Wow, this is quite a different list of tests,” and was happy to order the tests for the patient. When the doctor looked at the results, she told the patient that she thought she had low iron and encouraged her to take a prescription form of iron. 

Then the patient called me, and I said, “Wait a minute!” It wasn’t that she was low in iron. It was that she was low in methylfolate, which is the active form of vitamin B9. I could see that because I could interpret the metabolism of the B vitamins in the test results, and that was the cause of the anemia—not the low iron.

Besides that, the iron the doctor recommended for her was iron sulfate, which is a very low absorption form of iron and is constipating. I’m telling that story to show you that talking to a medical doctor about nutrient deficiencies and nutrients is probably not going to get you very far because it’s just not in their training, and that’s just the way it is. They would likely agree with that.

When you talk to a practitioner like me—and especially in my case where I’ve been specializing in helping women with abnormal pap smears for over 25 years—I know exactly which tests will give us the information we need, and how to understand the results and then how to address the results using nutrients and herbs specific to your body. Because it’s not all one-size-fits-all.

Iron is a good example. Iron deficiency is quite common for women, but to identify it, we don’t just test iron levels in the blood—we have to test ferritin levels. Iron is not just important for preventing abnormal cells caused by HPV, but it is also essential for pregnancy. 

Very often, the same nutrients are important for both preventing abnormal cells and preparing for pregnancy. Methylfolate is another example. It is essential for protecting you from HPV, and it is also essential for pregnancy.

In many cases, looking at the reference range is not going to be adequate when it comes to nutrients. With vitamin D, for example, we don’t just go by the basic reference range. We know that optimal levels are going to help protect you from high-risk HPV and support a healthy pregnancy.

With my patients, I guide them through each nutrient to be sure you have clinically safe and effective doses, whether before, during or after pregnancy so you can protect yourself from high-risk HPV and support a healthy pregnancy.

Comprehensive Hormone and Stress Testing

When looking to identify underlying causes (or root causes) as to what is making you susceptible to high risk HPV, there are additional testing methods that can be helpful. 

Hormone levels, such as estrogen and progesterone, can be measured in the blood, but again, the normal range is really broad. So it’s very easy to fall into normal, even if it’s not optimal. I recommend in addition (or instead) to measure your estrogen and progesterone in a urine panel that can also show us the metabolism of those hormones. Urine metabolites of hormones allow us to understand exactly what’s going on in your body and if your body needs help with the production and/or breakdown of hormones.

I also recommend testing cortisol levels—not just cortisol in the blood at the time you have your blood drawn, but cortisol throughout the day, or at least four different times: morning, midday, evening, bedtime. This is measured in either urine or saliva in a specialty lab test you can do from home. It’s not a test that your standard clinic is going to order for you. It tends to be an out-of-pocket test that a practitioner like me is going to order for you. 

I want to warn you that not all naturopathic doctors or functional practitioners will know which test to order or how to support your body based on your results. It just so happens that I specialize in understanding how stress has impacted your health. I have written several books on the topic, including the “Master Your Stress, Reset Your Health” book.

Stress and trauma exposure is the most common root cause of high-risk HPV and of having a hard time getting pregnant. Most all of us have had some adverse events in childhood, let alone in adulthood, and that puts us into a constant stress response. But stress is not one-size-fits-all. For some of us, cortisol remains too high, and for others, cortisol stays too low. Either way, if cortisol levels are not optimal throughout the day and into the night, that’s going to impact your immune system’s ability to protect you from high-risk HPV, and that’s going to impact your ovaries’ ability to ovulate and maintain a healthy pregnancy. You see, there’s another commonality.

We need to know exactly what’s happening with your cortisol level – whether it is too high or too low – Because the treatment is different. I’m going to recommend different herbs and different nutrients and different approaches depending on whether your cortisol is too high or too low at different times of day. But that’s absolutely something that we can address and rebalance. 

At the same time as helping you to optimize your cortisol levels, we help you to regulate your nervous system using different techniques and tools on a daily basis. The goal is to help you to be constantly in a state of recovering from stress and trauma.

The Healing Process: Individualized and Comprehensive

Healing the root causes of susceptibility to HPV is not something you do overnight. We’re not looking for a quick fix or something you become reliant on. What we’re doing is going through a step-by-step process through the phases of healing in a very intentional way. It’s not random. 

We start with the first phase of healing and then we move on to the next phase of healing and so on from there. It’s got to be individualized to you because one person may have one nutrient deficiency, and another person could have a completely different nutrient deficiency or completely different root cause.

We need to look at your gut health, your microbiome, any potential toxin exposure, hormone balance, and blood sugar imbalance. I need to guide you to consider each of the eight most common susceptibilities, identify is relevant for you, and then help you to address them based on the phases of healing. That’s a process that can happen over three months to sometimes twelve or eighteen months, depending on your case and your body and how you’re implementing your recovery plan.

For those of you who are thinking, “Oh gosh”—I was thinking that I was ready to get pregnant, and then I found out I have high-risk HPV and abnormal cells. What am I going to do now?” Well, what I would say is let’s take at least three months to do both. We can both help you recover from HPV and help you prepare for pregnancy at the same time. In three months, I’ve seen a lot of cases do a lot of healing, even from CIN 2 or CIN 3, which are severe cases.

If you have CIN2 or 3 and would like to avoid a LEEP or other procedure, I can help you with an alternative approach called escharotic treatments. If you have CIN 1, you don’t need to have escharotics or a LEEP procedure, but we are going to want to use vaginal suppositories to help heal the CIN 1 and at the same time address the HPV and at the same time support your fertility.

By the time we’ve now helped your cervix to heal, you’re also ready to try for a healthy pregnancy. From there, what I do is help you to prevent a miscarriage because this is also an area in medicine where there’s not a lot of help. When women find out they’re pregnant and call the gynecology office, oftentimes they say to you, “We’ll meet with you once you get to eight or ten weeks of pregnancy.” But the most common time of a miscarriage is at five or six weeks, in which case you’re on your own.

What I do, as a naturopathic doctor and certified professional midwife, is I help women in those early weeks to prevent a miscarriage. I can guide you on which nutrients are safe for you to take in early pregnancy. 

In fact, many women have called me and said, “I found out that I have HPV, and two days later I found out I’m pregnant. Now what do I do?” What I do in that case is I say, “Come, let’s get you in as a new patient as soon as possible so that I can help you do both—help you address the HPV and help you prevent a miscarriage at the same time.”

Some of the most rewarding cases I work with are those cases where I’m able to help women to prevent a miscarriage, and to get all the way through pregnancy, have their healthy baby, and then find out that we were also able to completely get HPV negative and heal her cervix at the same time. We see that case after case, time and time again. I just want you to know that it’s possible.

Getting the Help You Need with High-Risk HPV

I know that what I’ve covered here is not what you’re going to hear about from your standard doctor’s office because it’s not something they’re trained in or specialize in. That is what I do. I originally trained to work in a standard gynecology and midwifery office, and then I saw that this is an area that women need help with and it’s not getting addressed in standard care. So I decided to find a way to offer this to women.

If you’d like more help with dealing with an abnormal pap and high-risk HPV, please don’t hesitate to reach out. 

You can always just call my office. You can just call 855-316-2114. You can also go right to my website at doctordoni.com. You can also schedule a call with my team to talk about your case and your situation so we can help you understand what your options are, whether you may want to work with me one-on-one, or in a group program. Click here to set up a call with my team.

I also train practitioners, so you could also decide to work with a practitioner who I’ve trained to use my HPV protocol—that’s an option as well. 

In all of these ways, I work with women to implement Dr. Doni’s HPV Protocol from wherever you are in the world. You do not have to be limited by time and space. We help women from Europe, from Australia, from Dubai, from India, from Africa, from Asia. You name it, we’ve been able to help women all around the world to successfully address HPV, abnormal cells on the cervix, and help them to achieve a healthy pregnancy and a healthy baby.

If you’d like to get a better sense of my approach, I welcome you to join my next free How to Get Rid of HPV online workshop where I help you to create a plan to get HPV out of your life for good.

Sign Up Now (Free!)

From there, you might choose to join the Heal HPV Kickstart Program, for the initial steps of my protocol, including diet changes and supplements, over the next 30 days

Register Now

Or you can begin with the comprehensive Say Goodbye to HPV Program, which is 3 months and includes everything you need to implement my full protocol and address all 8 susceptibilities with live, group support, and access to testing and vaginal suppositories.

Visit my website at clearhpvnow.com to see testimonials – video after video and story after story of women who have healed from HPV – to help you know that it is possible for you too.

My team can also help coordinate supplement shipping worldwide, and we can work within your budget to find the right starting point. You don’t have to figure it out on your own. My team and I are here to help guide you step by step. Click here to set up a call with my team.

Thank you so much for joining me for this video on helping you support your body to clear HPV and have a healthy pregnancy. I’d love to hear from you – please like, comment, share, and subscribe, if you haven’t already. I look forward to having you join me for the next episode of How Humans Heal.

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