We tell IVF patients that they need to become experts on their problems. This doesn’t mean that we want to make them IVF experts or that we need to teach them how to do an egg retrieval or how to grade an embryo. All it means is they need to know enough about IVF so they can differentiate between a bad IVF doctor and a good IVF doctor. Because if you get stuck in the clutches of a bad IVF doctor, then even God won’t be able to help you have a baby. Whereas if you go to a good IVF doctor, irrespective of the final outcome, at least you have plenty of peace of mind that you’ve received high-quality medical care, you’ve done your best, and you’ve not left any stone unturned in your quest for a baby. The problem is that patients can be surprisingly naive and immature, and they tend to assume that all IVF doctors are equally good. And they get carried away by advertisements, brand ambassadors, websites, and all kinds of success rates that are quoted on these websites, all of which are just lies. Unfortunately, patients aren’t sophisticated enough to differentiate between the truth and a lie, and they underestimate their ability to understand what happens during an IVF cycle, because they pretty much take on faith whatever the IVF doctor tells them. This is partly because this is what our schooling system tells us to do: that you defer to authority, doctors know what’s best, and patients shouldn’t challenge doctors because half knowledge is dangerous and the doctor knows what to do and therefore should not be questioned. And of course, doctors also contribute to this problem because doctors are extremely paternalistic and take offense when the patient asks them questions or challenges their decisions. This is not a very healthy trend either for the doctor or for the patient, because good doctors will actually encourage questions because they know that the outcome of an IVF cycle is uncertain, no matter how good a doctor they are or how well they treat the patient, which is why they want to share some of the uncertainty involved in an IVF cycle, and they do this proactively so that the patient has realistic expectations and knows exactly what’s going to happen so that the patient is in control. This actually helps to reduce the patient’s anxiety and, more importantly, increases the patient’s trust in the doctor. Bad IVF doctors use a completely different approach. They act holier than thou, they act high and mighty, the brand name doctor is never available, they make patients wait for hours on end, they don’t respect the patient’s time, they refuse to answer questions, they cause the patient to shuttle from one clinic to another or from one specialist to another, they don’t give straightforward answers, there is only an assistant available to answer questions and even the assistant changes every time and often the only answer is – the doctor will tell you ! However , the senior doctor is never available, which means lots of patients routinely end up wasting two to three hours and still have no idea about what’s happening next. This is a problem with an assembly line approach which is typical of all these corporate chains of IVF clinics which concentrate on maximizing throughput and maximizing the revenue rather than on helping each patient to have a baby . This is true with a lot of clinics that are run by gynecologists who are not IVF specialists , because they don’t have the experience or the expertise to do IVF. They try to borrow it, which means they refer their patients to some other clinic for the actual egg pickup or for the actual embryo transfer because they don’t have their own IVF lab , and you can imagine that this obviously reduces IVF success rates dramatically , because IVF requires extremely close coordination between the clinic and the laboratory and any clinic which doesn’t have its own full-time IVF lab with its own full-time IVF embryologist can never provide good results . Unfortunately doctors are not upfront with patients, they hide this information, they don’t tell the patient what the truth is and the patient only learns this the hard way after the IVF cycle fails . This is why it’s so important that you be proactive and ask all these questions ! Where is your IVF lab? Is it on the premises? Does it work 24/7? Do you have a full-time embryologist? Do you provide photographs of embryos to all your patients? Do you only do blastocyst transfers ? The good news is that you can ask all these questions even before paying the consultation fee, because the receptionist on the phone should be happy to answer them . You can get answers by email as well , and if they refuse to answer these basic questions , or if the answer to any of these questions is No, or if the answer is – Please come to the clinic and talk to our doctor, that’s a red flag because that clearly means you’re in a bad IVF clinic ! You need to leave as soon as possible and keep on looking for better clinics until you find the right one , because it doesn’t matter if there are 10 bad clinics, you only need to find one good clinic to have the deeply loved baby that you desire !
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