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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.

How to reduce the cost of IVF

 

Video Transcript:

So how do they reduce the costs of IVF.? Well you know I’m a strong advocate of that. I think there’s mini IVF is the best way to do it. Most women go on forty five hundred to seven thousand dollars worth of drugs because that’s what the pharmaceutical reps tell the doctors they need to maximally stimulate the ovary. The opposite is true. A study that was done by Baker at all a few years ago showed that, of the six hundred fifty thousand cycles in one year across the country showed that the live baby rate per cycle is inversely proportional to the total dose of drugs.

So the less the drugs, the higher the success rate.

With mini IVF we’ve shown we published this year and a half ago that the live baby rate per egg is five times greater. Not just a little bit greater but five times greater with minimal to no stimulation than with all the maximal stimulation. So you can reduce your drug costs from seven thousand dollars easily to about eight hundred dollars. That’s really important and we encourage all patients to do that.

And the next thing you can do is really not go through these stupid unnecessary tests like DNA sperm fragmentation. Most couples go through a 10 to 20 thousand dollars worth of testing before they even get to IVF and that’s because the clinic makes money on those tests. So we don’t advocate that at all. I think we can learn everything we need to know from one really properly performed ultrasound with three dimensions.

Another thing is some of these ridiculous treatments that don’t really accomplish anything. Most women go through three to ten cycles of what they call IUI before they do IVF. Now IUI is not even as good as intercourse because without you why the sperm goes into the uterus and then it’s out three hours later and it’s gone when the egg is only good for up to eight hours after ovulation.

And so you have to have perfect timing and the sperm have to be there when you every ovulate and you will get exactly perfect timing unless you do IVF. So if you have intercourse three times a week there’s always gonna be some sperm ready when you ovulate. So we showed this many years ago  –40 years ago intercourse is better than UI. And if you add a very simulation to it then that’s the only way IUI works at all in intercourse then it’s just as good. So I was always so so many of these treatments you go through before IVF are a huge waste of money.