How do doctors predict the success of IVF?

 Why are IVF doctors so bad at predicting the outcome of an IVF cycle, we all know that IVF doctors are experts we've been doing IVF for many years we do thousands of cycles and therefore one would expect that doctors would be pretty good at telling patients in advance what their chances of having a baby are. after all, that is what they do day in and day out and how hard can that be that's the most important question. to the question, "What are my chances of success?" that a patient needs to be answered.

However, the dirty little secret of IVF is that doctors are terrible at answering this question for individual patients, so we just can't tell you what your chances of success are going to be in one cycle. I'll try to explain how close we can get to tell you whether your prognosis is good or bad.

We can tell you our success rate for women less than 35 who are good ovarian responders where we transfer one top quality blastocyst is 40 but those are generic figures which apply to groups of women to the population so to say that's what statistics is all about after all but you don't care what happens to the other 99 patients in my clinic you only care about what's going to happen to you.

 The problem is that doctors aren't fortune tellers; they have no way of knowing what will happen to any given patient. This means that they still can't provide an answer to the most pressing concern of their patients. Knowing this helps us maintain a healthy sense of perspective and humility, but it's far more crucial that patients have reasonable expectations and know what to expect from their doctor. A silver lining is that we can accurately predict your chances of success over a period of three to four cycles, even though none of this will ever hold true in the real world.

We learn from each cycle what worked, what didn't, how good your embryos are, how well the cycle is progressing, and if it fails, we have valuable information as to perhaps. This is why we calculate a cumulative conception rate. We are not very good at telling one individual patient what her chances are in a single cycle, but we are much better at telling one individual patient what her overall chance of success is going to be in four cycles, and so the better the quality of question you ask your doctor, the better the quality of answer you will get.

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