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When, in the mid-1990s, Dr Xiao-Ping Zhai began using traditional Chinese medicine to treat infertility, her Harley Street practice was confined to a couple of rooms, each no bigger than a stationery cupboard. Patients would climb the four flights of stairs to sit on a hard chair in the tiny hallway outside her room, like lost and frightened children waiting to see the headmistress.

Along with the usual complex and paradoxical emotions felt by those desperately trying for a baby, the swings from optimism (“Yes – this could be the pearl jewelry month it happens!”) to panic (“I’ll never have a child. Why me? Why me?”), there was also for many of them the feeling that Zhai was another guilty secret, in addition to their infertility. If these women revealed to friends and family, but especially to their mainstream gynaecology and fertility consultants, that they had resorted to acupuncture and brewing up bits of twig and moss to help them get pregnant, it would be the final proof that, in their quest to achieve what most women take for granted, they had lost the plot completely.

I first met Zhai more than six years ago, when Michael Dooley, a gynaecologist and fertility consultant, formerly at the Lister hospital in London and now running his own clinic in Dorset, told me about her success rate in getting women pregnant. Between 1995 and 2000 she had treated 224 patients (average age 37) with traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). After treatment for at least six months 76% of the women had become pregnant. Of these pregnancies, 77% resulted in a baby, and of the 23% who miscarried, 69% went on to have a baby later. In 2000 the fertility clinic at the very top of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority league table was claiming a success rate of up to 38.8%. Zhai’s success was in the 70s.

“I don’t know what she does,” Dooley told me. “I don’t understand it at all, but her results are amazing and I’m keeping an open mind.” He’d begun sending his most difficult patients to her, many of them poor candidates for IVF due to age or egg supply or FSH levels (a measure of the perimenopause); women who, by normal diagnosis, did not stand a hope in hell’s chance of conceiving naturally or through assisted treatment (many of them wouldn’t even qualify for treatment in some clinics). Zhai, with her herbs and her acupuncture and all the bizarre practices that go with a TCM consultation – more of which later – was Dooley’s last-chance saloon.

As it turns out, it was just the beginning. Today, as I sit across from Zhai, she is still the tiny, polished woman I first met, except that her once stiff, bowl-like bouffant has now grown into soft shoulder-length curls. If a hairdo can ever be a metaphor for the biwa pearl relaxing consequences of success and acceptance, hers would do perfectly.

“I’ve seen so many women,” she says smiling, “I know what I do works.”

That is putting it mildly. Her practice has more than doubled in size in the past five years. She sees between 50 and 80 women a week, some of whom fly in from other countries. She now has two clinical assistants and a PA; the rooms are five times bigger and there are more of them. Her patients still come to her by word of mouth, but an increasing number are referred by mainstream consultants such as Michael Dooley and Stuart Lavery, director of the IVF unit at Hammersmith hospital, who work in conjunction with Zhai to maximise women’s chances of success of conception.

It helps that Zhai trained in western medicine in China, working as a paediatrician in Guangzhou before coming to the UK, and consultants seem happy that she speaks their language in clinical terms. Lavery says: “We have had pregnancies occur in which her input has been critical. It is quite rare to come across somebody practising such therapies with a degree of credibility, but the thing about Zhai is that she doesn’t only embrace her own philosophy. She works with us, not against us, and that overlap with western medicine is what makes her unique. I don’t know if her success is to do with her acupuncture, her herbs or just her being a very, very good physician – which is an important part – but the feedback is remarkable. At our clinic, we think she brings something new to the table.”

Zhai’s success rate remains phenomenal. In 2005 alone, for example, she helped 61 women get pregnant – 80.3% of her patients that year; 45 of them carried the baby full term. News of her extraordinary talents is spreading. She regularly flies off to international conferences – proof that she has gained respect and acceptance beyond the UK. “I’ve seen her hold a room in front of fertility consultants from all over the world,” says Dooley. “I’ve seen her at medical conferences and presenting national meetings, and she is fantastic.”

It is for this reason that she has been nominated by Clare Lewis-Jones, CEO of Infertility Network UK, as a key speaker at the Fertility Show in London next month. This follows on the heels of another breakthrough: Zhai has secured an agreement with the London Fertility Centre that allows her to use its facilities to carry out natural-cycle IUI (intra-uterine insemination) without losing control of the akoya pearl patient’s care. With natural-cycle IUI there are no drugs, no invasive procedures – sperm is simply placed near the Fallopian tube at the start of ovulation. Zhai says she will use this on the patients for whom she feels IVF is not necessary, but for whom time might be running out.

Despite the conferences and meetings, for Zhai the most important part of what she does remains getting her patients pregnant. She passes me a handwritten note across the table. It is from a woman called Susan Namkung-Torch, an American corporate lawyer approaching 40 and now living in London, who saw Zhai for secondary infertility (she now has a nine-and-a-half-month-old son as well as her first child, who is seven and a half): “Thank you so much for pearl jewelry bringing about the delivery of our long-awaited son after five long years, failed IVF attempts, two miscarriages and countless IUI attempts,” Namkung-Torch writes. “I will be forever grateful for not only your medical expertise and wisdom but for maintaining my hopes during the darkest days when even I could not imagine a positive outcome and had all but given up… you always stated that I could – and would – get pregnant.”

When I talk to Namkung-Torch she tells me that at first she and Zhai didn’t get along. “I fired questions at her,” she says. “I wanted answers, I wanted strategies. And some she could give, some she couldn’t – but she remained very, very calm and, crucially, absolutely confident of my body getting fit enough to conceive.

“You see, I’m a corporate lawyer, very proactive. I am a very positive person, and for five years of trying to get pregnant, I remained positive. I did everything, from skipping, because I read it increased the circulation, through to colonoscopies and three cycles of IVF. My husband and I enlisted the most prestigious IVF doctors in the world, in London, in LA, in New York. I’d either not get pregnant or when I did, I didn’t hold the pregnancies.

“By the end, I went to Dr Zhai. I saw her for 18 months, and still nothing happened. But never once did she give up hope. She just kept telling me that every month my body was getting stronger and stronger. Finally, I told her I was considering surrogacy. She just said: ‘Susan, that’s the right decision for your personality. You need to feel in control.’

“Having got her blessing, I think I relaxed. That month I conceived, and I now have a little boy. People say I would have got pregnant anyway, but that’s not true, otherwise why didn’t I get pregnant at the start? My hormones were all over the place, and she prepared my body, and because she is who she is, I finally relaxed. She was critical, and I’m going back to her again for our third child.”

”When I tell a couple they do not need to biwa pearl waste their time and money on IVF, I know what I’m talking about,” Zhai says. “Often it is a matter of clearing the system, increasing the blood supply to the ovaries, and restoring a level of general health in order to make pregnancy possible. Men are very easy to treat – sperm counts can improve very quickly – but I always treat the man and the woman to make sure there is optimum health.”

Zhai often hears what Namkung-Torch reported, that sceptics say to her patients: “You would have got pregnant anyway.”

This, understandably, angers her: “When a woman comes under my care, I am looking at the overall picture. I tell them that we will see the difference in their bodies. It is different from anything else. It is not about blood tests or scans – although I do use scans occasionally – but a scan is a scan; it is not going to tell you how your body is functioning. I see their temperature charts every month, and often women who think they have normal cycles actually show in temperature charts to have hormones all over the place. I regulate the body and I watch those charts change. It is not a matter of chance or luck, the evidence is there for me. You can measure it.”

With some women, she tries to steer them away from IVF, or at least delay it. Some take her advice, some don’t. Anne Spencer, an economics lecturer at London University, who conceived with Zhai when she was nearly 44, said: “We came to her in the middle of other treatments. Six months in, Zhai said: ‘Don’t do this scheduled IVF! Your body is not ready yet.’ I went ahead anyway, and it failed. She said: ‘Let’s carry on anyway.’ Four months later, she got me pregnant naturally. I have complete faith in her, complete faith. You are so pressured by clinics that time is running out, but she kept saying: ‘You have eggs; this can happen.’”

As we talk, Spencer begins to cry. I can hear her three-month-old daughter snuffling on her lap: “This is very emotional for me,” she says. “I had always wanted a family and spent my career competing with men and putting it off. She gave us the hope we needed.”

Zoë Evans, 39, spent two years on an NHS list for a free cycle of IVF/ICSI while she was seeing Zhai, who was also treating her husband for problems with his sperm. Then the call came that Evans had finally reached the top of the list. She began taking the contraceptive pill to shut down her system ready for the crash menopause that comes with IVF – and then she changed her mind: “My husband and I concluded that we were not prepared to pursue a baby at any cost. I had real ethical issues with ICSI, and so pulled out of the NHS treatment. Zhai had done wonders with my husband’s sperm count to such an extent that the fertility nurse at the clinic was gobsmacked at the akoya pearl improvements. We agreed to give TCM until Christmas. Last September I got pregnant, and in June I gave birth to our son.”

Stuart Lavery is right when he says Zhai is a first-class physician. Though far from touchy-feely, there is something extremely assured and calming about her bedside manner. She is very confident in the prognosis she gives. How can you possibly know for sure, I ask her. Does it not keep you up at night, telling older women to delay or cancel their IVF cycles?

“I do know,” she says, “because I’m treating the whole body, man and woman, and I can see the improvements. The only thing I don’t know is which bit of the treatment helps a pregnancy to happen.” She stresses, too, that she will also be the first to refer on if she believes surgery or western treatment – say for blocked tubes – is needed. Lavery tells me of an experimental treatment they worked on together in which a patient was given a drug used for diabetes mixed with TCM. The patient conceived: “That’s what makes her so unique,” Michael Dooley says. “It is a proper integrated approach.”

It is estimated that between 10% and 15% of all British couples have trouble conceiving and will, at some point, look for specialist fertility treatment. The latest statistics from the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority show that in 2007 alone, 36,861 women received some kind of IVF treatment in UK clinics, an increase of 5.8% on 2006. Women aged 35 and below were successful in 32.3% of cases. Only 3.1% of 44-year-old women ended up with a baby.

Given that only 18% of all IVF is NHS-funded, Zhai’s treatment presents an attractive alternative – not cheap, but cheaper than IVF. An initial consultation with her costs £190, and then there are the twice-a-month appointments, including acupuncture at pearl jewelry £85. The herbs cost roughly £180-£200 each month. And as she is the first to point out, even if a couple is prepared to pay £5,000 for a cycle of IVF, clinics do not pay attention to the state of the woman’s body. In other words, you wouldn’t dream of running a marathon with a broken leg.

Watching a Zhai consultation is bizarre. She will check the tongue, the pulse, sleep patterns, whether a patient is thirsty, peeing a lot and their bowel movements. Often changes are made to the diet – no sugar, coffee, alcohol, dairy, wheat, spicy foods – and every month a woman is asked to keep a temperature chart.

Slowly, through the use of herbs and acupuncture, Zhai begins to regulate the vital energy, or Qi, that flows through the body. According to this ancient practice, good health and metabolism depend on Qi. As it flows, it provides warmth and distributes body fluids.

Each organ has its own pattern of Qi and each organ is represented on the tongue, which presents Zhai with a kind of map of the body’s health. If one organ is not functioning properly, it affects the rest of the body: “It only takes one thing to be wrong to throw the whole system out,” she explains.

Common diagnoses seem to be too much liver heat and blood stagnation, damp-heat obstruction in the abdomen, slow blood circulation to the biwa pearl ovaries – you get the picture.

Zhai says she can start seeing changes within three months but will not put a time frame on treatment: “Every woman is different.”

The herbs she uses are mostly shipped in from China and made up to her prescriptions, although she is currently looking at manufacturing them in the UK. They include carthamus flower (huang hua) for regulating the flow of Qi to alleviate pain, glossy privet fruit (nu zhen zi) for nourishing the kidney and liver, as well as peach kernel, angelica root and codonopsis root.

It is easy to see why many western clinicians distrust TCM. To them it seems so random, so weird, although acupuncture is slowly gaining more credibility for fertility. (Last year a Dutch and US research project published in the British Medical Journal revealed that for every 10 cycles of IVF with acupuncture there would be one extra pregnancy compared with cycles performed without acupuncture.)

Zhai is aware of the scepticism: “I wish TCM could be regulated,” she says, “I really do.”

She tells me about a recent collaboration with Darren Griffin, professor of genetics at the University of Kent. Zhai entered into a trial in which the university’s biosciences department tested some of her male patients to measure the effectiveness of her herbs on their sperm count. All six men had severe genetic abnormalities in their sperm, and by the end of the trial on Zhai’s treatment, all had “levels not distinguishable from normally fertile males”.

“What you don’t know is how much of that was determined by her lifestyle advice,” says Griffin, “but we were very, very surprised by the findings.” A man’s sperm quality is closely linked to his lifestyle and varies greatly from month to month. In other words, a period of no booze, no cigarettes and healthy eating could have just as good an effect: “I suspect it was a combination of both,” says Griffin. “Also, six is a tiny study.”

But then this study was followed up by a second last year, which tested the properties in the herbs Zhai had used to treat the men. The herbs contained every ingredient the scientists were looking for in order to explain such a positive causal effect. Could TCM be working on correcting genetic abnormalities?

Griffin says it would be necessary to take the akoya pearl study further. “I’d like to do double-blinded trials with placebos in which even the doctors don’t know if they are giving the medicine. I want three groups of 20 to 50 men in each group, with men getting changing herbs every time, men getting the same herbs and men getting a placebo. But a trial like that will cost up to £1m.”

He has already approached the Medical Research Council, the NHS and the Wellcome Trust charity, but so far there have been no takers. “It is very hard to establish the veracity of non-standard medicine,” Griffin says, “precisely because it is not controlled. Every treatment is different.”

Whether or not you buy into Zhai’s clinic, there can be no doubt about one thing: her patients get pregnant when previously they did not. I’d bet £1m that if you asked any woman who had faced infertility whether, in the event of finally becoming a mother, she cared how or why it had happened, she would not give a hoot. Just having a baby is enough. And if what Zhai offers is choice and hope – another way of making a pregnancy happen – then what could be better?

In a week’s time my eldest son, Baxter, will be 21. I’m not sure what his plans are, but then I don’t expect to be involved in them these days, at least not in a non-pecuniary way.

In any case he is now safely back at university in Southampton after spending the summer here in “boring” Hertfordshire, eating us out of house and home in pearl jewelry between roaring off to festivals and whooping it up in Brighton and London and elsewhere, with the vast diaspora of friends that young people have on their computers these days.

But has he earned the key of the door now that he doesn’t need it so often? There are faint signs of him growing up. He did manage to get to Amsterdam and back this year without incident (in contrast to his first trip abroad in 2007 when he rang us from a Greek police cell requesting €200 to pay a “fine” for not leaving his hotel bed as intact as he found it), and I’m delighted that he has worked so hard in his first year at university that he has been invited back for a second. He can cook, in a scattergun kind of way, and can play a number of Johnny Cash songs on the ukulele. When not being a drain on one’s emotional and financial resources, he is excellent company. Our youngest two boys are attracted to his natural daring and untameable sense of inappropriate fun, though Ryan – almost 19 and less given to displays of unnecessary jabber – has learnt to regard him with a wary eye.

A few Sundays ago, we all went out to lunch en famille – to mark our last time all together for a while and to raise a glass to our evolving circumstances: Ryan, too, was about to go off (and has now gone) to university, at Warwick; Jackson, 16, has started in the Lower Sixth, and Cameron, 12, is safely into Year 8. Everything is changing.

With the house a little emptier, it seems like the beginning of an end. Not a real end, of course – I didn’t get my perma-frown by not realising that fatherhood is a job you can only get out of by going into a care home – but things have assumed a less frenzied rhythm. Having two children at home is easier than four, if not quite as easy as none. Recent holidays with our younger pair have been relaxed to the point of fun. It has always been a slight source of disappointment to my wife that I couldn’t “enjoy” the children as much as she does and now, admittedly rather late in the game (and with no disrespect to our eldest two, who should by no means take this personally), I’m beginning to see how that might be possible.

It does help that they are all old enough to biwa pearl make their own fun. Even though I have almost done my first 21 years, I regret never having quite got the hang of being the father I would have ideally wanted for the little chaps. It goes without saying that I love them and cherish them and would happily jump into a lake of burning lava to protect them (though I can’t imagine the exact circumstances in which this might be necessary), but watching other dads building sandcastles or Lego spaceships or putting up tents or being the life and soul of children’s birthday parties or whipping up excitement on theme park rides, I always felt the sting of inauthenticity in my own paltry efforts.

But what grown man could actually enjoy Lego? Or children’s books? I hated Harry Potter. I played Buckaroo through clenched teeth. I’m not one for getting wet or being turned upside down on a rollercoaster. The truth is, I have no inner child – a tragedy, you might say, for a man with so many outer ones.

But I don’t think I’ve been a complete failure. It’s not as if I haven’t been any fun ever since 1988. I could always manage the more passive activities – encouraging the children to watch football on TV with me or taking them to the cinema, with its reliable promise of a short nap. And never let it be said that any of them has ever gone short of hugs (father-and-son hugging is, of course, the new wrestling).

It’s easy to forget, too – with today’s lifestyle supplements packed with gurning fathers in striped aprons teaching their tousled kids how to ice cakes – that the male parent has not always been so fully alive to the pleasures of child-rearing.

At least I was up there with the “new” men of 1988, attending antenatal classes and helping to choose a buggy (the new word for pushchair) at Mothercare. We found ourselves bandying terms like “amniocentesis” and “dilation”. We learnt that a akoya pearl pregnant woman might dine on liver and Guinness (I’m not sure if this is still the advice of doctors) and worked at the secrets of controlled breathing and lumbar massage. We were given our lists of things to take to the hospital – sandwiches, a drink, a crossword – to help pass the hours while our wives or girlfriends rehearsed the primal groaning that would grow more and more unearthly towards the final push.

Baxter was born after 14 hours of labour followed by a frantic emergency caesarean that forged a lasting sense of what he thinks parents are for – waiting, worrying, cleaning up the mess. I got the first look at him – his mallet head and tuft of hair, his indented jaw where his foot had been, his little crispy-bacon ears – and took him in my arms, wandering up and down the hospital corridor, cooing at him like the happiest fool, until my wife woke up and took over. Walking back home down a deserted Tottenham High Road as that bright October dawn broke seemed just the best thing.