How to find out why your IVF cycle failed

 

As an IVF specialist, I review the medical records of many patients who have failed IVF cycles in other clinics.

The tragedy of Indian IVF is that the quality of care that most IVF clinics provide isn't good.

This is because gynaecologists get zero exposure to the practise of IVF during their postgraduate MD medical training. When they pass out of medical college, they attend a one-week IVF course and then set themselves up as IVF specialists because IVF treatment is remunerative, and it's considered prestigious to be an "IVF specialist".

The reason they continue getting away with this is because patients aren't sophisticated enough to be able to differentiate between a well-trained IVF doctor and one who has no idea about what they are doing .

There are multiple red flags which an IVF  specialist can easily detect when going through IVF medical records which suggest the quality of care was suboptimal, but I understand that patients aren't medical experts .

This is why they need to use this simple rule of thumb to decide whether the clinic you select for your IVF treatment is capable of providing quality care.

The beauty is that this is a simple question, and you can easily get an answer, even from the nurse or the receptionist in the clinic, by phone or by email, before actually visiting the clinic.

There is absolutely no excuse for IVF patients not to ask this question when choosing a clinic, and if patients don't do this, they only have themselves to blame if they end up going to a bad IVF clinic, which causes their IVF cycle to fail.

Here is the question:

Do you only do blastocyst transfers for all your patients and do you provide photos of the blastocysts routinely to all your patients?

Remember that the only tangible deliverable that an IVF clinic can provide is an embryo. This is the core expertise of an IVF clinic. After all, once the embryo has been transferred into the uterus, we have no control over whether it will implant or not, because embryo implantation is still a black box.

However, if the clinic has produced good quality embryos, this confirms that the clinician has superovulated you well and done the egg retrieval properly, and that the embryologist has nurtured your embryos safely in the IVF lab.

This is why all good IVF clinics all over the world routinely and proactively provide embryo photos to all their patients. Patients don't even need to ask for this-this is part of their medical record.

If your cycle has failed, the first step is to review your medical records and ask for a second opinion. If the clinic hasn't provided you with photos of your embryos, this clearly means you are in a bad clinic, and your best option would be to find a better clinic !

On the other hand, if your clinic doesn't give you photos of your blastocyst, this suggests that there is a problem with the quality of care they are providing, because there is absolutely no reason for a good clinic to hide this information. The photos document that they have provided good quality care—something that all good IVF clinics are proud of doing, because it bolsters their reputation and gives patients confidence that they are on the right track.

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 !