Bad IVF Clinic

You need to protect yourself from badly run IVF clinics . This guide can help you identify a bad IVF Clinic so you do not get taken for a ride !

How to Identify a Bad IVF Clinic - A guide for patients going through IVF treatment

IVF has become a big business today.

How can you protect yourself from poorly equipped inexperienced doctors, who set up IVF clinics just to make money ?

It can be very hard for patients to differentiate between a good IVF clinic and a bad IVF clinic because they all seem to be the same - and patients are not sophisticated enough to be able to make out which offers a better service.

For example, many IVF clinics will tom-tom they have bought the newest machine and have the latest technology . However, these are often marketing gimmicks to get media publicity - they do not really help the patient or improve success rates in any way. In fact, many of these "high tech wonders" often end up collecting dust in the lab, because they are never used after the first flush of excitement over their novelty value dies down.

Unfortunately, there is no simple answer to this question. Just going by a clinic's reputation does not help ( some big name clinics are just money making mills) - and neither does checking its "success rates", because it's so easy to game these.

I feel the only effective solution is to be well-informed about what an IVF treatment cycle involves, so that you know the clinic you select provides state of the art technology.

Do they cryopreserve embryos ? Do they offer vitrification ?
Do they offer blastocyst transfer ?
Do they provide photographic documentation of your embryos ?
Do they offer PGD ( preimplantation genetic diagnosis)

Here are some of the red flags which should warn you the clinic may not be very good.

They depend upon a doctor who travels to the clinic for a few days every month to do the clinical procedures
They perform less than 100 IVF cycles every year
They do not have a full-time embryologist
They "batch patients" because they don't have the required expertise in-house and need to "import" qualified people for the treatment
They do not document their medical treatment protocols
They do not provide you with a medical treatment summary
They do not answer your questions
They do not provide you with photographs of your embryos

I feel the last is critically important. While the clinical outcome of an IVF cycle is always uncertain, since doctors cannot control embryo implantation, producing good quality embryos is a function of the IVF clinic, and correlates directly with the skill and expertise of the IVF lab Good IVF clinics take pride in their skills - and by documenting the embryos they produce in their lab, they can show their patients that they are transparent and skilled !