Choosing Wisely: Your Essential Guide to Selecting the Best IVF Clinic
If the world were perfect then every IVF clinic would be as good as any other IVF clinic, and any patient could take IVF treatment in the nearby local clinic and be confident that they would get equally good medical care, irrespective of whether they chose to do it locally, or traveled to Mumbai, India’s medical capital.
The sad truth is that not all IVF clinics are created the same, and this is true for many reasons. Not all IVF laboratories are well equipped, and many doctors who call themselves IVF specialists are not equally qualified. Many doctors who run IVF clinics are actually just regular gynecologists and need the training, experience, or expertise to do IVF treatment. These doctors are general gynecologists, who wear multiple hats and do numerous other things, such as laparoscopies, hysterectomies and cesarean sections.
Their skills are much less than a full-time IVF specialist who does nothing else other than IVF. But patients aren't sophisticated enough to understand this difference, and naively accept whatever the doctor claims. This becomes even more of a problem in the IVF laboratory because most of these IVF labs are not manned by full-time, experienced expert IVF embryologists.
The truth is that the success rate of an IVF clinic is determined by how good its embryologist is. While a good embryologist will nurture your embryos with a lot of care and create top-quality blastocysts which have a much better chance of implanting and becoming a baby, a bad one can kill them with as much ease. However patients don't know how to differentiate between the two, and the irony is that patients only learn the difference between a good clinic and a bad clinic after they've failed an IVF cycle.
This is a tragedy, and they learn the truth the hard way. It’s only after the IVF cycle has failed that they start doing their research to learn what they can do differently the next time, and they then realize that a lot of critical medical information about their IVF treatment wasn't shared with them.
The problem is when you start an IVF cycle and are signing up for treatment, the doctor is on her best behavior, and everyone is very welcoming. The staff keeps on smiling and promising high success rates, so they are very sure that they're in good hands – especially when they read the ads, the photos of the smiling babies, and all the celebrities who the clinic has treated.
However, it's only when the treatment starts that they realize that information is being hidden from them. They have no idea how many follicles are growing; or what their E2 levels are; and after a pickup, they don't even know basic stuff like how many eggs were retrieved; or what their quality was. These clinics don't even bother to share embryo photographs, which means patients are kept completely in the dark and have to rely purely on what the doctor says. Most doctors are extremely paternalistic and discourage questions. Most patients are very compliant and are happy to believe what the doctor tells them – or fail to. It’s when the cycle fails that they finally wake up - especially when the doctor starts adding insult to injury and blames them for the cycle failure! Doctors claim - your eggs were bad, or your sperm were poor quality, which is why the cycle failed. They then tell the patient they should use donor eggs or donor sperm – which cost even more money!
They finally realize they are being taken for a ride, and go on the internet and look for information as to what a good IVF clinic should do. It finally dawns on them that they selected a poor-quality clinic, but by that time the harm had already been done. Not only do they feel that they've been cheated, they refuse to trust any other IVF doctor!
The good news is you can learn the easy way, without burning your fingers, by doing your homework and research, by learning everything about IVF before paying a single naya paisa to an IVF clinic. The right way to do this is to arm yourself with information therapy, and the good news is there's plenty of reliable trusted content on IVF which is available free on our website at www.drmalpani.com. This includes comic books as well as videos, and because this is content that I have produced, I can assure you that it's authentic, updated, accurate, and reliable!
Armed with this, you will be able to choose a good clinic for yourself! The purpose of the information we provide is not to tell you to come to us, but to help you to identify a good clinic! A good clinic is one which will share a treatment plan with you in advance; will keep you informed about how the cycle is progressing; and will share photographs of your embryos with you. Good clinics are open and transparent and will transfer only one single blastocyst for you at a time.
I hope that this information, which we're happy to provide free as a labor of love, will help you become a parent, and get the baby you so deeply love and desire.