Why IVF patients are treated as guinea pigs

I am very critical about the overtesting which is so rampant in IVF today. This leads to overtreatment , and ends up wasting a lot of time and money , because no one really knows how clinically useful a lot of these test results are. Just because tests make logical sense on paper doesn't mean that this logic always translates into clinical benefits. The sad fact is that real life can be quite messy , and what sounds very sensible in theory often does not work out well in practice .I recently saw a patient who had failed multiple ICSI cycles. His doctor had told him that this was because of his high sperm DNA fragmentation, and that we would need to use donor sperm.I have a very low opinion of these sperm DNA fragmentation tests . They are of very limited utility , and have not been validated in clinic practice, because of the huge problem with false positives they suffer from.He challenged me. Doctor, if you are so skeptical about these latest and newest cutting-edge tests, then how will medicine possibly advance ? Don’t we need to run tests to find the “root cause” of the problem ? Don’t we need to know the answer to the question – Why did the cycle fail, so we can improve our chances with the next attempt ?I have nothing against new tests. Our IVF clinic is state of the art and we offer all the latest technology, including blastocyst transfer, vitrification, laser hatching,  and PGD using CGH. However, we don’t offer tests simply because of their novelty va...
Source: The Patient's Doctor - Category: Obstetricians and Gynecologists Tags: Assisted reproductive technology DNA fragmentation Egg donation Embryo transfer In vitro fertilisation Intracytoplasmic sperm injection patient Preimplantation genetic diagnosis Source Type: blogs