When it comes to the struggle to have a baby, we feel upset when we are told all of the tests are normal. We want to know what is wrong.
We want answers. This is normal.
After having been a patient and after having been a fertility doctor for over 20 years, I would like to provide a positive spin on the word “normal”.
When I started practicing infertility in 1994, if a person was told that everything was normal, that meant they had about a 15% chance per month of getting pregnant with “low tech” treatment (typically called IUI). They had about a 25% chance of getting pregnant with In vitro Fertilization (IVF).
Neither approach made people feel very hopeful.
Over the 20+ years I have been in practice, I have seen incredible improvements in our technology and medical treatments for IVF.
This has been so impressive at ARMS that our ongoing success rate for normal patients varies between 60 and 70 percent overall!
With numbers like this, patients whose fertility tests come back normal really have something to celebrate. They can now choose to move directly to IVF as a fast, safe, and highly effective way to have a baby, bypassing low tech treatments.
The reason to bypass low tech treatments is that nothing has really improved in low tech treatment’s success rates after all of these years – still just around 15% or less per month.
For many people, this chance is just not high enough to commit the time, money and emotional energy to. They would rather rely on the power of normal, which, at least at ARMS, truly can give them a remarkable pregnancy rate at a uniquely discounted cost.