Sunday, February 25, 2018

Why are you more expensive than other IVF clinics ?

A patient sent me this email

Why are you more expensive than other IVF clinics ?
This is a perfectly reasonable question, because IVF treatment is expensive, and patients need to keep an eye on their expenses. Because they naively believe that all IVF clinics are created equal, they often prefer going to the cheapest one - or the one nearest their house.

This is why so many IVF clinics have sprung up all over the country. Most of these don't have the requisite experience and expertise which established IVF clinics do, but they are able to lure patients in by extensive advertising - many of these clinics plaster small towns will full size bill-boards and take out full-page ads in local papers. They run "free camps" to get patients to sign up in the hundreds, to increase their sales funnel - and hundreds of poorly informed patients through their doors, to take advantage of this facility , which has now come to their doorstep.

The problem is that these are purely commercial enterprises, which are out to make the biggest bang for their buck. Their only metric is - how many IVF cycles can we do every month. They do IVF for anyone and everyone - whether they need it or not ! Ironically, this is the best way of improving IVF success rates - do it for young women who don't really need it in the first place. And once one of these couples gets pregnant, the word of mouth phenomenon starts kicking in, and sets up a positive virtuous cycle, which attracts even more patients.

Typically, these patients are not very educated or literate. They are in awe of the doctor, and accept whatever is suggested. In order to improve their success rates, these clinics use donor eggs and donor sperm indiscriminately - often without even informing the wife as to what they are doing !

We have no desire to compete with other clinics based on pricing - we think this is a mug's game, where the loser is the patient, because quality drops as  the doctor starts taking unethical shortcuts, in order to inflate success rates.

We try to educate our patients, so they are able to understand the differences between a good IVF clinic and a bad IVF clinic - and trust me, there is a world of a difference !

Sadly, most patients only find this out the hard way - but once they have burnt their money - and their fingers after failing an IVF cycle at these "bargain" IVF clinics, they no longer have any money left to do a proper IVF treatment cycle at a good clinic.

This is the biggest tragedy - and is a result of their ignorance, which can prove to be very expensive. We hope to immunise them against this with Information Therapy, but infertile patients are emotionally very vulnerable, and it's easy to take them for a ride !

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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