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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.

Treating Infertility – Our Philosophy

Our Program Philosophy

We work individually with each couple to determine what is the best choice of treatment for their personal situation. No fees are charged for such evaluation. We keep your own personal doctors well informed, and once you are pregnant, you can go back to them for your care.

We are happy to take the most difficult cases, which have lower prognosis, that other programs may refuse to treat or even cancel in mid-cycle (for fear it would lower their reportable pregnancy rate and thereby hurt their “marketing” efforts). We will give you an honest appraisal of your chance for pregnancy in any given treatment cycle and will not artificially “inflate” statistics by “patient selection.” We are happy to take patients over 35 with only small numbers of follicles [see video], couples with previous IVF failure, and men with severely low sperm counts or no sperm at all in the ejaculate (requiring microsurgical testicular sperm extraction). Nonetheless, by maintaining the highest possible quality of care and always being on the cutting edge of new technology, we will give even these difficult, lower prognosis patients their best possible chance. We have very high pregnancy rates despite taking on some of the most unfavorable cases. We have been ranked as one of the top 5 infertility centers in the country and the number one center in the entire midwest and south.


There are many treatment additives that are often enthusiastically endorsed by some programs, that we feel have no validity. This includes varicocele surgery for the husband, and aspirin, heparin, or immunoglobulin infusions, etc., for the wife. We do not recommend such additives. However, we do employ the most effective stimulation protocols, the most advance culture systems, and very refined micro-techniques in the lab (such as ICSI, assisted hatching, fragment removal, and even blastomere biopsy to maximize your chance for having a baby) with no add-on fees or gimmick payment plans.

We do specialize in the most difficult infertility problems, where there has been failure to fertilize or to achieve pregnancy in previous efforts, and our results are quite good even with such cases. Patients with difficult infertility problems fly to St. Louis regularly from all over the world. But we will also treat simpler cases as well. We always prefer to avoid needless and expensive conventional testing and treatment approaches that give low success rates and just add to the couple’s mounting frustration. Our policy is to recommend the most effective treatment that is likely to get you pregnant the soonest.

Infertility treatment can be emotionally wrenching and can place a great deal of stress on the patient. We insist on providing personal care and attention as we guide you through this difficult period of your life. You should please feel comfortable to call my office at any time regarding any questions, problems or worries.


Private-Equity & Profit-Based IVF Clinics 

There is a trend with IVF and fertility clinics that is very concerning and important for prospective parents to be aware of.  

In the last ten years, we have noticed an increasing number of IVF and fertility clinics that are not basing treatment on science, but rather on profit. This is happening due to private equity companies and venture capitalists seeing IVF as a way to make money rather than an avenue to provide quality patient care.  

These companies are buying up freestanding IVF clinics left and right, cutting costs and increasing pricing by adding a lot of unnecessary procedures that do not help and are sometimes even harmful.  

Tests like Preimplementation Genetic Testing (PGT-A) or Endometrial Receptivity Tests (ERA) have not been shown to be scientifically valid in controlled studies, yet many clinics promote these expensive tests.  

This leads to profitability, but not successful pregnancy. It’s understandable that investors want to get money back from their investment, but in many of these cases, it comes at a cost to the patient.  

The goal of these private equity companies or venture capitalists is to generate a profit and then sell to another private equity company in 3–7 years. There has been a strong uptick in advertising for these types of clinics, and it is driving a lot of unsuspecting patients into very difficult circumstances.  

For instance, if you are interested in having your frozen eggs stored at a facility, you might be dealing with a different owner or a different physician in 3 to 5 years when it comes to utilizing those eggs.  

We strongly recommend that new patients carefully evaluate your choice of IVF clinic, and to educate yourself on promotional advertising in the field of IVF. It is very easy to succumb to hostile advertising and ineffective tactics that will cost you more money and more time on your IVF journey.  

Dr. Silber and the Infertility Center of St. Louis are dedicated to patient health and success. The Infertility Center of St. Louis specializes in treating infertility, while avoiding needless and expensive testing and outmoded treatments.  

If you have any questions, or would like additional information, please contact Infertility Center of St. Louis.


The Infertility Epidemic

We are in the midst of a worldwide epidemic of infertility. Ironically, even in countries with severe overpopulation, one of the most common reasons for a visit to the doctor is the inability to have children. Twenty-five percent of modern couples in their mid-thirties everywhere in the world are infertile. From our teen years (when the last thing we really want is a child) to our mid thirties (when we finally feel emotionally and financially secure enough to start a family), there is a twenty-five-fold decline in our ability to get pregnant. Let me explain.

follicle_pool

Ironically, the incidence of infertility in teenagers is rare. For women in their early twenties, still only 1 to 2 percent are infertile. By their late twenties, however, 16 percent of women are infertile, and in their mid to late thirties, 25 percent are infertile. By age forty, more than half of women are infertile, and pregnancy beyond age forty-three is very uncommon. If you are in your thirties, have been working hard to establish yourself, and are now just casually thumbing through this booklet at your doctor’s office because you’re thinking maybe in a few years you might like to start a family, you should realize that there is a 25 percent chance you will not be able to do so without medical intervention. What accounts for this dramatic increase in infertility over the last forty years is just the woman’s biological clock, which correlates with her declining store of eggs. Even by the time you are just in your mid twenties, there is a 10 percent chance you will have become infertile, even though five years earlier you would have had no problem at all getting pregnant. The biology of fertility in humans has not changed in the last forty thousand years. What has changed in the last few centuries is our life span and the age at which we first try to conceive.

Men and women are now able to obtain fuller educations, develop themselves in their careers, and contribute dramatically to the intellectual and economic prosperity of the modern world. This would not occur so readily if we were saddled with children as teenagers or in our early twenties. But this change in society is also the reason for the epidemic rise in infertility.

Nonetheless, with dramatic new technology, virtually any couple now (with a few exceptions) can have a child. But you must understand the myriad complexities of your reproductive system in order to get the right help instead of the wrong help, and to deal with the emotional and financial costs the process might cause if you are not savvy. Most important, you need to understand your biological clock and how to manage it. Our intention is (1) to teach you how to manage your biological clock so that you won’t need technology to get pregnant, and (2) to explain how you can use technology safely to get pregnant if that is currently your only option.