Overcoming Infertility: The Importance of Understanding Why

In the first of three installments on overcoming infertility, watch Dr. Rami Kaldas delve into why it’s so important to discover the root cause of infertility before pursuing any kind of treatment whether it be Clomid, IVF, or a surgical solution.

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Video Transcript

Dr. Rami Kaldas: When a couple comes to us and they're having fertility challenges one of the things that we really insist on is to actually figure out why. A lot of the time when people have been trying to become pregnant and they've not been successful they'll end up getting medications from doctors without ever having a diagnosis. There has to be a reason.

We always say, at the Kaldas Center, there has to be a reason for those irregular periods, or there has to be a reason for those terribly painful periods that may be related to your inability to have achieved pregnancy. There has to be a reason that you've had five miscarriages in a row. And an answer is not just to keep trying, right, because that's very frustrating and it's not appropriate to just throw drugs at people without knowing why. We try to have very targeted evaluation first and then targeted treatments. It is not one-size-fits-all.

So, very frequently, someone who hasn't been able to have become pregnant, they've already had the experience where the prior doctor or doctors have given them, for example, Clomid and they just say, "Take Clomid for six months and then let's just see if it works," type of thing. And so it usually doesn't, of course, because there are other things that cause fertility issues. Then usually after they've been given Clomid and it hasn't worked, then they're, more often than not, they're told that they need IVF. And IVF, obviously, in vitro fertilization, certainly has a role to play for fertility therapies. Most of the time you just don't need IVF, okay? But if no one takes the time and the effort to understand why someone isn't getting pregnant, a couple is not getting pregnant, then they may very well end up with IVF which is a costly, invasive type of thing.

We don't do IVF at the Kaldas Center. However, most of the time we don't need to do IVF. We have some very good IVF doctors that we work with if that is required but we like taking a more targeted approach to figure out what it is. So just like Clomid is not one-size-that-fits-all, IVF is not one-size-that-fits-all.

And, boy, it'll be frustrating if you end up having to spend tens of thousands of dollars to become pregnant and the miscarriage rate is no less when you do that. And frequently you may end up with a situation where it doesn't work because no one ever figured out what was going on in the first place. And that's where we just really try to cross the t's and dot the i's, ask the right questions, and insist on the correct answers. And then the appropriate therapy.