Your Fertility Doctor
If you read my last blog post, you learned about the long process of becoming a board-certified fertility doctor. It’s important to verify who your providers are and what their credentials are before you choose a doctor. Now I’m going to discuss other details that I think are important to know when it comes to your physician as well as the clinic.
What to know about your doctor
When you are choosing a fertility physician it is important to know whether or not they are who you think they are. Verifying who you providers are is number one when selecting a fertility doctor. Next, this is not the time for convenience. I love taking care of my patients. I will cry when things don’t go right and celebrate when they do. Choosing your doctor is a personal decision. The best practice for you is about the doctor that fits best with you and your needs. This may not be the doctor that is closest to you or where you can get in the soonest. I understand why convenience drives a lot of people. I also think this is why people change clinics.
You need to trust your doctor. The truth is nobody wants to have to see a fertility doctor. There are so many questions and so many unknowns. It’s so hard, and I understand. If you don’t feel comfortable talking to your doctor about your goals or asking them questions, then that is not the right doctor for you. I want you to ask me questions, and I don’t want you to have google your them or ask a friend. I worked hard to be an expert in this field. We have to do CMEs and actively participate in research. Our field is always changing which means I am reading and analyzing studies and articles all the time. If you are going to someone who is protocol driven and does the same thing for every patient, that is not right. If you do not agree with your doctor’s decision or they are telling you what needs to be done without giving you statistics or studies, that is not right. Look for someone else.
You need a doctor who understand you and where you are coming from. You need a doctor who empowers you. I talk about supplements, diet, and environment with my patients. But if you don’t feel comfortable telling your doctor that you are taking a fertility supplement recommended by someone online and it has something that will mess with your labs, you are harming your own care. You have to feel comfortable telling your doctor what you are doing and asking what you can do to positively impact your fertility. If your doctor says you can’t do anything to improve your chances of getting pregnant, that’s probably not true. You should do things that studies suggest may have an improvement. Should you only do these things and expect to get pregnant? Not if the most probable outcome is that you won’t. However, if you do these things along with something that does have a probable outcome of you getting pregnant, you are loading the deck in your favor. You want to do everything you can to take charge of this journey. Making sure your doctor understands your goals, explains the treatments, and empowers you to take charge of your own health are all things you should expect.
Other components of the fertility clinic
When choosing your doctor, you are tied to the clinic. One important factor that you can’t evaluate beforehand is the lab. The lab is the most important place if you are going to do IVF. That is where your babies go. It is the embryologists who biopsy them, freeze them, or load them in the catheter. You have no way to know if certain things have happened in the lab unless you ask. Have there been any embryos errors? What are the success rates with egg freezing and thawing? What are the embryo success rates? You can get CDC or SART data online and it will compile success rates from a clinic. The only problem is that the data can be way behind and tough to understand and often penalizes clinics who take “poor prognosis” patients - this leads to many clinics cherry picking “best” cases and turning others away. So always ask a clinic about their own data.
You can gauge a lot by asking questions in person. What are you doing to protect my embryos? Where are the embryos stored? What are your success rates? How long has the lab personnel been there? How many embryologists are in the lab? Know the answers to these questions. There are also nurses, medical assistants, front desk staff, office managers who play a huge role in your journey. As a doctor, I will say this. I have had patients not love the front office or back office and I have no idea. My job is not up there. I don’t typically call you about lab results. If people aren’t treating you right, please tell your doctor. Very often we don’t have an idea. If you go and leave a nasty review online and say something like “Love my doctor, but her office sucks,” my team and I will no longer be able to take care of you. My policy is that if you leave a negative review about me, my staff, or my clinic - I will no longer be your doctor. At this point, the patient and doctor trust has been broken. I would much rather you come to me and talk to me before you leave a negative review or jump ship to another doctor.
Choose the doctor that you feel fits best with your goals and needs. Who have your friends gone to? What is the doctor’s online presence? Are they board certified or board eligible? Who are you trusting in this most vulnerable part of your journey? This journey is so important, and if your clinic or your fertility does not feel right to you, it’s okay to leave. However, I always recommend letting your doctor know why you are leaving. Give them the opportunity to see if it’s something that can be changed for people in the future.