It’s great that IVF has been so successful in helping so many infertile couples to build their family and assisted reproductive technology ( ART) has changed the lives of many infertile couples. IVF allows us to do what wasn’t possible even 50 years ago, and this is something we can be proud of , because it’s a marriage of the application of medical science to helping people solve their personal problems.
It’s equally important that doctors educate IVF patients about what IVF can’t do for them. While IVF is a great way of being able to assist infertile couples when nature has let them down, part of the problem with IVF is that there’s been so much hype around it, as a result of which doctors over-promise , and fail to deliver. This is especially true , now that we have all these private VC-funded businesses entering the industry , because their goal is to maximize profits, and they know that the best way to maximize profits is to create a lot of hype around it.
The very fact that they call this the fertility industry bothers me , because medicine is all about serving the patient who has a problem. But the moment you start thinking of it as a business, you then start calculating a return on investment, and your focus is on maximizing revenue and profit , rather than providing quality patient care.
This is why many of the risks and complications of IVF are now being swept under the carpet – especially when the treatment is done by inexperienced doctors. And there is a lot of hoopla and hype about how modern technologies such as genetics and immunology will help to improve pregnancy rates, but a lot of this is very misleading . We have started using tools such as artificial intelligence and machine learning in order to study embryo development, and while this is useful for research because it allows us to learn more about how embryos grow in lab, the fact still remains that the amount which we don’t know about embryo implantation is still far more than what we do !
I think it’s important to be humble and share our ignorance with patients , instead of giving them false hope , because unfulfilled expectation cause them a lot of grief. Patients feel cheated when their IVF cycle fails, partly because they were given unrealistic expectations and unreal hopes, and all IVF clinics end up getting a bad reputation.
This is why it’s important that patients understand what is in their hands ; what is in the doctor’s hands; and finally, what is in God’s ( aka Mother Nature) hands. There is lots of stuff which we can control in the clinic , and good embryologists can nurture embryos with love and care , but the final hurdle in an IVF cycle is that of embryo implantation, and we have no control over what’s going to happen to the embryo after we transfer it into the uterus. This remains a stumbling block, and while technology will help us explore this area and give us additional answers, it’s still not a problem we’ve been able to solve.
I have realized that as long as patients have realistic expectations, they’re quite happy to live with this uncertainty , because they understand that the doctor is doing their best. But when patients are given false hopes, or are over-promised unrealistic success rate, they start being resentful that they weren’t told the truth completely by their doctor . And not only does this harm patients, it harms doctors as well, because once a patient has burned their fingers in an IVF clinic, they’re not willing to trust any other IVF doctor afterwards.
Still Confused ! You can get answers from Dr. Malpani instantly at https://www.drmalpani.com/chat-w-chatbot/index.html