One of the first questions that every patient asks an IVF doctor is, What are my chances of success? They naively believe that because the doctor has so much experience and expertise , they will be able to provide them with a reliable and accurate answer.
Yes, it’s a critically important question, and the answer is also critically important, but the problem is that it’s a simple question that does not have a simple answer. And this is true for multiple reasons.
While it’s possible for a clinic to quote their overall success rates, you need to remember that these apply to groups of women. Statistics are important when you’re comparing how good one clinic is to another, but they’re not very useful as far as you’re concerned as an individual because you don’t care about what happens to the other 99 women in the clinic; you only care about what happens to you. And it’s well known that clinics can manipulate their success rates, and they do this all the time. In India, they do it by just inflating their figures, and it seems that every clinic has a success rate of 80%, and there’s really no one to check whether that number is correct or wrong. Obviously, once one clinic puts an 80% success rate on their website, then the other clinics, in order to go one up, will claim a success rate of 85%! But all these are clear lies, and patients have no way of determining what the real figures are because they are not audited. Clinics lie because they can get away with lying!
And it’s not as if clinics abroad don’t lie. Because they know that “league tables,” which rank clinics according to success rate, are so important to attracting patients (patients are innumerate and only look for headline figures), they will manipulate them. The easiest way to manipulate it is by refusing to treat poor-prognosis patients, so they will not treat older patients, for example, which is why they will have a higher success rate as compared to a clinic that treats every patient who comes to them. So if you are an older patient, then your chances of success are going to be much less as compared to the average chance of success in that clinic, and they’re not going to tell you that!
Also, remember that, as far as you’re concerned, your success rate is not going to be 40% or 60%—you don’t get a 50%, baby! The outcome is binary, which means it’s either going to be 0% or 100%, so these percentages are meaningless. What you should also be thinking about is: if you choose to do nothing, what are your chances of success? This is a far more relevant question, because if your tubes are blocked and you do nothing, that means your chances of success are 0%. And since anything is better than 0%, it’s better to do IVF than not do anything.
Of course, the question is: how do you choose which clinic to do IVF at? Obviously, you want to go to the clinic that has a higher success rate because you want to get pregnant as soon as possible! But since you really can’t trust the success rates that clinics quote on their websites, you need to drill down and ask better questions to get better answers. Remember that doctors are not fortune tellers, but a lot of doctors are in sell mode when you come for the first consultation, which is why they overpromise and tell you that our success rates are 80%. They use all kinds of testimonials to convince you: We just treated another patient like you, and she has a baby now! But this is all hype, which doesn’t really mean anything; the number is just guesswork!
You must understand that, as far as your individual chance of success goes, the doctor can answer this question much more accurately after you’ve done the IVF cycle. After all, an IVF cycle is not just a treatment cycle but also gives us valuable diagnostic, prognostic, and predictive information. How many eggs did you grow? How many embryos formed? Were the embryos of top quality? If you get many good-quality blastocysts in your IVF cycle, then obviously your chances of success are going to be much better, but the only way to find out is by actually doing the IVF treatment.
Finally, remember that the chances of success in a single cycle are not what you should be focused on. Instead, you should be asking about the cumulative conception rate—the chances of getting pregnant over two or three cycles. In our clinic, we usually pool embryos for patients and then transfer them one at a time, so that they should be thinking about their chance of success over three or four embryo transfers, where they obviously become much higher than they would in a single transfer.
Remember that it’s easy to ask a simple question, and it’s easy for the doctor to give you a simple answer, but that simple answer is the wrong answer! And unless you understand that, many doctors will continue taking you for a ride.
Please get your doubts resolved free using our chatbot which is powered by AI based on Dr Malpani’s 40 years of clinical expertise and experience at https://www.drmalpani.com/chat-w-chatbot/index.html. This will ensure you’re on the right path and potentially save significant costs in the long run.