IVF failure: a bad process? or bad luck?

IVF patients are mature enough to understand that IVF does not have a 100% success rate. Most are well informed enough to understand that doctors can control the medical process but not the final outcome. Their biggest fear (which is usually not voiced) when starting an IVF cycle is the fact that it may fail because they chose the wrong doctor! This is one of the worries that they often cannot articulate or express because they think they are not good enough to be able to differentiate between good and bad doctors. Most of them just naively assume that all doctors are equally good, which is not true, but you cannot ask your doctor: Why are you better than everyone else? Why does this other doctor claim to have a higher success rate? After all, every doctor claims to have the highest success rate, so this number doesn't mean much; it’s usually fake, inflated, and designed to take patients for a ride.

This is why IVF patients get paralysed into inactivity. They know they need IVF, but they are not sure which IVF clinic to go to! And what's even worse is that when their cycle fails, they are not sure whether the cycle failed because there was something wrong with the quality of medical care they received.

Sadly, the commonest cause of IVF failure in India today is poor quality IVF clinics, either because the embryology lab is not good enough or because the doctor does not have enough experience or expertise to be able to superovulate the patient properly.

However, this is one of those dirty secrets that no IVF doctor is going to talk about in public, because of “professional courtesy,” even though they may agree privately that many IVF doctors shouldn't be in practice at all, because they don't know anything about IVF at all. They will never say this openly, because they don't want to get ostracized by their friends and colleagues!

Ultimately, it's the patients who suffer. And in the long run, unless doctors speak up and call out some of the malpractices that bad IVF clinics do on a regular basis, IVF doctors themselves are going to suffer because patients are not going to trust any other IVF doctor once they have had a bad experience with one bad IVF doctor.