Overcoming Infertility: What You Should Know Before Choosing IVF
In the third of three installments on overcoming infertility, watch Dr. Rami Kaldas explain why IVF might be your least effective yet most expensive way to treat infertility.
IVF, or in vitro fertilization, involves retrieving eggs from a woman's ovaries and fertilizing them with sperm. This fertilized egg, known as an embryo, can be frozen for storage or transferred to a woman's uterus. IVF is invasive and expensive, so it's worth taking some time to get a correct diagnosis for your infertility before embarking on an IVF cycle. Because the fact is, often, you don't even need IVF.
Watch Dr. Rami Kaldas explain the life-long benefits of correctly diagnosing the cause of infertility before trying IVF. Those few minutes could save you years of pain and frustration in addition to a lot of money.
Explore more fertility topics here.
Video Transcript
Dr. Rami Kaldas: I read an article recently from an IVF, it was written in an IVF clinic, and they said that something like only one or two percent of their patients had endometriosis. Well, that defied common sense to me because we already know the background rate in the population for endometriosis is ten to fifteen percent. Now, at Northwestern in Chicago, they're saying it's more like thirty percent, up to thirty percent. All right. And finally, there was an article in the American Journal of OB-GYN recently saying that they thought the authors thought that over fifty percent of all fertility issues are related to endometriosis. So what, how can an article be, be written saying is only one or two percent. And the answer is because nobody ever looked. Nobody ever took the time and the effort to figure it out.
The person just wasn't getting pregnant. They got Clomid. Sorry, didn't work. You need IVF. Well, if you never investigate the situation, looking for the symptoms, doing the correct, you know, physical examination, asking the right questions about, oh, how were your periods when you were a teenager? And if you got oh my gosh, I always missed school for them and I got put on the pill because my periods are so bad at the age of fourteen, well, you already know that there's something there. But no, those questions are not being asked, and those exams are not being correctly done. And therefore, you end up ramping up this one size fits all. Sure, if you do IVF for everyone, whether they need it or not, most people probably get pregnant. But what I'm saying is they just don't need it.
And you can also, in the process, help figure out some things that are, you know, making for a bad quality of life for people. You can help fix those things along the way. So if they have a thyroid issue, man, they'll feel a whole lot better if you can get that thyroid straightened out. If they have, you know, an abnormality of the uterus, boy, it sure would make their life a lot better on a monthly basis if you corrected that. And a side effect of correcting that is that they get pregnant suddenly. Or if they have endometriosis, oh, my gosh. You know, you just - you fix a whole lot if you take care of endometriosis that has not yet been diagnosed. And it is simply not being diagnosed because the patient comes in, and she might say, oh, my periods are horrendous, you know, but I thought it was normal.
And, you know, I'll take ibuprofen. Six hundred milligrams every three hours for two days or whatever it is, or three days. And, you know, you can't touch me, you know, for about a week or whatever it is. And well, if you do IVF on that individual, they may get pregnant, but they're still going to feel horrible and dread their periods and live in fear of a natural process on a monthly basis. And so when we, for example, with endometriosis, when we remove it, when we diagnose it - and we're on the mark ninety-five percent of the time when we think someone has it - and we diagnose it, and we treat it, they feel a lot better - that individual does. We have improved their quality of life, and a side effect of that is that they get pregnant because they've been trying to get pregnant for a year, two, five, fifteen years. No one has made a correct diagnosis. No one has actually treated it appropriately, excised it, removed it. And suddenly, oh my gosh, I've been trying eleven years. Look at this. We have a baby. It works because endometriosis, we know, reduces fertility by over fifty percent. A lot of people can get pregnant with it. Most people can't. So that's the world that we live in, hearing these stories walk through our door day in, day out. You just really empathize with these individuals.