Lower cost. Better results. Financing available. No wait for consultation. World famous IVF doctor. Patients come from all over the world. Call us at (314) 576-1400

Infertile patients cannot afford to wait for treatment while their eggs get older.

Dr. Sherman Silber, Infertility Center of St. Louis, is offering video consultations for patients who need to plan now for their treatment while stay-at-home orders are in place. He is talking to and evaluating patients in their home to comply with social distancing measures.

Dr. Silber is discovering that patients actually prefer this method of telemedicine consultation over the conventional office visit. Patients have conveyed that “it is so much more convenient and less stressful” to have a telemedicine personal consultation than to take a day off from work to travel to the doctor’s office and sit with other nervous patients in the waiting room.

The COVID-19 pandemic is thus changing much of the way we will do things in the future, and for the better. “Our patients are surprisingly much happier with this approach. Of course, at some point we need to perform hands on treatment. But with this new manner of seeing patients, we can come to the right diagnosis and treatment plan for most patients more efficiently, quickly, and painlessly, with no loss of personal one-on-one communication.” This is a very welcome new era of telemedicine that has been forced on us by the current difficult times.

Sperm Aspiration Treatment

Sperm Aspiration for ICSI

Men with no sperm at all in their ejaculate can now have their own child, because sperm can be retrieved from their testicle or epididymis and injected into their wives’ eggs. The highest pregnancy rates with this approach and the least pain and discomfort to the male require that these sperm retrieval procedures be performed microsurgically, and not with either crude needlesticks or gross surgical techniques.

Even when there is no sperm whatsoever in the man’s ejaculate (azoospermia), there is now a very good chance for pregnancy using our sperm retrieval and ICSI procedures. The techniques of sperm retrieval and ICSI were originally developed by us in Brussels, Belgium, and in St. Louis, Missouri.

spasp

There are two types of azoospermia, obstructive and non-obstructive. Obstructive azoospermia can be caused by vasectomy, congenital absence of vas, poorly performed hernia type surgery, or epididymal scarring from prior infections. We have been able to reverse vasectomy for many years with over 90% success using microsurgery. However, when the obstruction is irreparable, the man’s sterility, until recently, had been considered hopeless.

In cases of obstructive azoospermia, sperm aspiration with ICSI will give the same chance for getting pregnant as any couple with a normal sperm count undergoing IVF. We can micro-inject a single retrieved sperm directly into the substance of the egg and get normal fertilization. Virtually all (with some rare exceptions) of the couples in whom epididymal sperm are present have transfers of good embryos. 46% per each treatment cycle get pregnant and have a baby. Those who don’t carry a baby still have a 46% chance if they try a second time. Virtually all couples have enough sperm to be frozen and stored. This frozen sperm can then be used at a later time in conjunction with another IVF/ICSI procedure for the wife. Thus, the husband does not need to undergo any more sperm aspiration procedures after the first one. The babies from ICSI are healthy and genetically normal.

If you have any questions, you may call us at (314) 576-1400.

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