What can you do to improve your chances of IVF success ?

 

A question patients commonly ask me is - What can I do to improve my chances of IVF success?

The truth is IVF success in an individual cycle is uncertain and unpredictable . There are certain things which we can control , and many variables which we can't .

Thus, you can control selecting a good doctor , who transfers top quality blasts into a receptive endometrium , but after the blastocyst has been replaced inside the uterus , we have no control over whether that embryo will implant or not.

The fact we have no control over embryo implantation is frustrating both for patients and for doctors as well . When we transfer a top quality blastocyst and it doesn't implant , this can be heartbreaking for us as well, because we are human too, and we want all our patients to get pregnant quickly. After all, this is the reason we became IVF specialists - to help them to complete their family .

At some point ,we need to acknowledge our frailties , and the limitations of our Technology.

There is little point in losing sleep over stuff which he can't do anything about it, because this just results in anxiety and unhappiness , and doesn't help anyone .

While this is an area on which a lot of research is being done , an IVF clinic cannot use patients as guinea pigs !

Patients will often demand the doctor do things differently in the next cycle, and doctors are happy to oblige by doing additional tests , like ERA and PGT , but they don’t help at all, because they are riddled with false positives, and are very unreliable.

 The fact that doctors don’t use these tests routinely for all IVF patients itself suggests they are of limited value. After all, why wait for the cycle to fail before doing them if they really are so useful ? After all, we want patients to get pregnant, because when they get pregnant , they refer even more patients to us, and we would much rather have happy patients with babies , rather than unhappy patients with failed IVF cycles

Finally, also remember that changing your diet , or taking bed rest , or “ relaxing”,  will not improve your chances of getting pregnant . None of these things affect embryo implantation, which is a biological process over which we have no control, and we need to be humble enough to accept this.