Monday, March 28, 2016

Does yoga improve IVF pregnancy rates


This is an important question but it's a difficult one to answer.

Some doctors will swear that it helps to improve fertility, and so will lots of patients. However, this is what we call anecdotal evidence - I did yoga and I got pregnant , which means that yoga improves pregnancy rate.  The problem is that we are then confusing correlation with causation, and it's very hard to document a cause and effect relationship when there are so many confounding variables.

There will be other doctors who'll say, "No, this is not evidence based medicine. No one has ever proven this , because no randomised controlled clinical trial has been done," . In their mind, this proves that yoga doesn't improve pregnancy rates.

The truth is that we still don't know whether the answer is yes, or whether it is no. Perhaps, the answer is - Maybe , and that in some patients, it's possible that yoga improves clinical pregnancy rates but we don't have proof as yet.

The reality is that no one's going to do a clinical trial to answer this question, because it can be so expensive to do so .

This is where empirical therapy comes in. Yoga is a low cost, low risk intervention, and it's well worth trying . There are no downsides to doing it, and while we don't have any proof that it improves fertility, the fact that it may help means there's little downside in doing it to see if it helps you.

Need help in getting pregnant ? Please send me your medical details by filling in the form at www.drmalpani.com/free-second-opinion so that I can guide you !





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