PATIENTS WITHOUT PATIENCE
We’re about to pin a lot of this on doctors and the infertility industry, but consumers of these services need to take a look at their own behavior as well. Most couples, their hearts set on having a baby and with an acute sense that time is of the essence, want the fastest solution possible. Many feel that technology is their only choice. People struggling with infertility may feel vulnerable and desperate enough to try anything that promises they’ll have a child, without doing any of the due diligence and critical thinking they’d apply to making a decision in any other area of their lives. Their doctors bear much of the responsibility, of course, but lots of couples accept IVF without examining other (and usually far better) options.
Ship sperm overnight! In certain populations, the culture downplays or ignores the reality of fertility diminishing with age, with an unspoken and maybe even unconscious reliance on technology to bail out those who simply wait until it is too late to conceive naturally. There are plenty of good reasons to delay child-bearing. But doing so is not without risks—the risk of never being able to conceive and/or the risks you expose yourself and your baby to in the use of technology. The plain fact is that many people who do wait (and wait, and wait) before trying to get pregnant don’t really do so for hard-and-fast reasons. For too many people, when they are faced with the reality of infertility, in hindsight their reasons for waiting no longer seem compelling.
Although it is true that fertility is not an area where you want to drag your feet in finding a solution, that does not mean that everyone should jump immediately to the most drastic measures. No one should do so without knowing his or her diagnosis and options, with the pros and cons of each. Some people have more time to work with than others, but everyone can confidently take three months to explore the possibility of conceiving as naturally as possible with the Making Babies program. We’ve devised the program to be as efficient as it is effective. And even if the program itself is not sufficient in your case, it will thoroughly prepare you for the next steps, physically and mentally, giving you the very best odds of success as you move forward.
DOCTORS WITHOUT PATIENCE
Lest
anyone think we are blaming the victim, we now want to give the medical
profession its due. We’ve watched from inside the industry as it has
experienced explosive growth over the past three decades. And we are sad to
report that too often the culture of modern fertility medicine harms more than
it helps.
Because
infertility patients are so often vulnerable and desperate, they are also easy
to persuade—and some doctors take advantage of this dynamic. Driven by patient
pressure for a quick fix, financial pressures, overenthusiasm, greed, or just
plain thoughtlessness, they are steering women immediately toward drastic
medical interventions and unnecessarily exposing patients to the expense,
stress, and risks of IVF. Doctors often fail to produce a working diagnosis for
their patients and often consider even an established diagnosis as irrelevant
in the face of technology. Many fail to identify, explain, explore, and
evaluate all options available to couples.
Money
has corrupted health care across the board, and nowhere is that plainer than in
fertility medicine. It’s become an industry more than a field of medicine, and
a highly commercialized one at that. Highly profitable tests and procedures are
performed at ridiculously high rates, at times with no proven benefit to the
patient (though the financial benefit to the doctor is high). As one patient
who is an advertising executive remarked to us, “Fertility doctors are masters
of marketing.” That’s definitely not the area of expertise you most want from
your health care professional.
Some
fertility doctors overmedicate patients, fail to tell patients about the
downsides of fertility treatments, neglect to offer other (less profitable)
treatments that may work just as well and/or be less invasive, turn away
candidates they perceive as more difficult cases (because they rely on their
success rates as a marketing tool), and, in the rare extreme case, perpetrate
outright fraud, such as the swapping of embryos.
There
are plenty of talented, well-intentioned practitioners out there, of course.
Yet even they reap enormous profits from the aggressive use of technology, and
it’s the rare one who stands against the current. Furthermore, the
irresponsible practitioners among them smear the whole profession. Even if all
infertility doctors were good ones, the industry itself is woefully underregulated.
Indeed, the way infertility treatment is carried out today is problematic in
many ways.
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