Following Pamela Tsigdinos’s Avalanche Book Tour, and reading Julia Leigh’s incisive comments about the IVF industry, has led me to ponder again on how the whole experience of fertility treatment is still so shady and confusing from the very outset.
I was a patient at “Ireland’s number one fertility clinic”. I wrote about my experience with Sims IVF in Dublin here. I’ve been thinking about the lack of transparency in the industry – still unregulated here in 2016 – and how uneasily it sits with the blind faith and thousands of euro that patients pour into it. I was wondering if anything had improved in six years.
How does one justify being Ireland’s self-proclaimed “most advanced fertility clinic“?
Their website says:
“We achieve world-class success rates – which we are happy to publish and compare”.
And:
“Thousands of babies have been born to Sims Clinic patients since our inception in 1997”.
OK, so that would not stand up on Dragon’s Den. Where are the figures? I scour the site for success rates.
But still I find only biochemical and clinical pregnancy rates for 2013 and 2014. No live-birth rates anywhere.
You don’t need a PhD to know that completed biochemical pregnancies are nothing to write home about: they are essentially early miscarriages. A clinical pregnancy can simply mean that clinical signs of a fetus were present at around six weeks, whatever the outcome.
Maybe their live-birth rates are lower than average because they take on too many poor-prognosis patients like me, or lots of over-40s. I know this is a real conundrum for well-meaning clinics in a competitive industry.
To muddy the waters further, “decent” clinics that willingly take on older and poor-prognosis patients can tend to nuke their women with high-dose meds and add-ons, in order to boost the odds.
So how do you make an informed decision, when you are starting out? In Ireland, you hit up the online message boards, ask around and hope for the best.
I do know that in this information-savvy age there is absolutely no excuse for a long-established fertility clinic to insult the intelligence of its punters by publishing only biochemical and clinical pregnancy rates.
Do those just starting out know that “world-class success rates” do not translate into actual babies?
When many more fail (70%) than succeed at standard IVF, this should be reflected more straightforwardly at the outset before clinics mess with women’s minds and bodies.
But if there were more transparency, there’d be fewer profits, right?
Here, here! It is so great to have your voice in this important discussion. Thank you for raising these questions. I have long pondered them myself. Like you, I am very aware that the easy response is to sidestep and dismiss those of us who don’t fulfill the one-dimensional ‘success’ profile. It is easier to discredit critics than to address the issues we raise. We’re long past due for an honest portrayal of facts and data — and what they translate to in human terms. No more hiding behind dry, scientific or academic conclusions.
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Thanks Pamela, I get so annoyed that profits stand in the way of facts, truths and health
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IVF only has a 70% success rate ? I didn’t know that
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Not quite right IVF in the best of cycles (age, etc.) has a25% success rate. 70%+ of all IVF cycles fail…the fertility industry does a GREAT job of obfuscating and keeping the focus on the minority outcome
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I think it’s up to each patient to do their own research and seek second opinions no matter what the condition. And yes doctors need to be transparent. But no matter what we think we should be the reality is we are consumers not patients and we need to be informed consumers.
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Wow, those are shady statistics. The first clinic we went to published their full statistics, from pregnancies versus live birth, and they broke them down by age category so that you could clearly see how it declined with age, even with IVF. They were fairly realistic in many ways. The other clinic we ended up at also had their SART numbers readily available, but I wasn’t really listening to actual statistics, just the ones that I was given for our possible success each individual cycle. I think that’s a hard statistic to be given, because it’s so individual that you can be told, “oh, this has a 60% chance of working this time with your embryo quality and blah blah blah,” but WHAT DOES THAT ACTUALLY MEAN? For me I felt like I fell on the wrong side of the statistics every time. I dislike a local clinic here that actively advertises and overpromises all the time, lots of extras, lots of peddled hope and fuzzy statistics. Initially I was mad at the first clinic we went to for being less experimental and more conservative and not giving statistics that didn’t necessarily mean anything, but now I see that they were the best of all of them when it came to that sort of thing. They were also the only clinic that insisted I get a mammogram before continuing onto more cycles because of all the estrogen boosts. Sigh.
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Hi Jess I think every clinic should publish their full statistics, pregnancies versus live births, and break them down by age category so you can see how it declines with age, like that first one you went to. On another note it’s a bit scary that some clinics are acknowledging that mammograms might be necessary whilst others dismiss the subject completely (like mine) – I wonder what the real lowdown is with that
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It seems like these clinics make an already stressful, emotional, and challenging experience just that much harder.
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