Articles

Daily Mail · 4 May 2017

This week I feel ashamed. This newspaper has published evidence of widespread bad practice in my own speciality of medicine, infertility treatment. And I feel angry because the Government’s regulatory body, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, has been inadequate. It has not prevented the disgraceful exploitation of patients, mostly women.

One of the latest scandals concerns so-called egg sharing. Clinics argue it makes treatment available to women who cannot afford IVF. Women agree to have their ovaries stimulated to produce eggs; some are fertilised for their own treatment, others donated to patients who pay for their own treatment and the donor’s. But drug treatments usually release at least ten eggs, so from a single donor a clinic can supply several paying patients. The Mail’s investigation suggests as many as ten recipients could benefit from one donor’s eggs.

Another concern is egg freezing, sold as a way for career women to put fertility on hold. But HFEA figures are disconcerting: between 2008 and 2014, 3,489 frozen eggs were thawed, producing about 77 pregnancies and roughly 55 live births – a live birth rate per egg of 1.5%. Yet one consultant is caught on camera asserting a 65% chance of pregnancy.

I believe many women undergo IVF unnecessarily. Like chest pain, infertility is just a symptom with dozens of causes, each possibly requiring different treatment – yet patients are often shunted straight to an expensive IVF clinic with little investigation. Women seeking fertility treatment are deeply vulnerable. It is our privilege as doctors to treat them properly and with respect. The avarice of just a few in this burgeoning industry is something all of us should be more ready to condemn.

Daily Mail · 3 September 2015

Babies are noisy, smelly, highly inconvenient, cause sleeplessness and are extremely expensive. Yet we feel like melting when we see them. This is not rational – it is in our genes. The urge to reproduce is deeply burnt into human consciousness.

But what if you are infertile? For a very large number of people there is real pain – loss of self-esteem, deep anxiety, a corrosive sense of failure, disruption of relationships and frequent depression. I have spent nearly 40 years talking and listening to people at their most vulnerable.

We have made considerable strides in fertility treatment, and that is wonderful. But more and more infertile British couples are getting inadequate treatment or being exploited by an increasingly grasping industry that frequently ignores ethical standards. Each IVF treatment is, on average, only successful in under one third of cases, yet people are led to believe it is almost the only treatment. There is excellent evidence that over half of those referred to IVF could be treated as successfully by far cheaper alternatives. To fail to discover the cause of any symptom is bad, irresponsible medicine.

Of course, there are very scrupulous, honest, kind and ethical doctors in this field operating in excellent clinics, who do their best to keep prices down and avoid using IVF where it is not needed.