How to pick a fertility doctor: 5 Questions to ask

Been a topsy-turvy, crazy wild ride this morning. Lots of pivoting going on, things not going as expected, but here we are right on time for our noon talks, um, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. For those of you that don't know me, I'm Erica Hoke. I'm an infertility mentor and an empowerment coach, and my story is, is that a doctor told me that we would never be able to get pregnant and I did not receive that. And now we have 4 beautiful boys who are growing like weeds and eating me out of house and home. So that is a whole separate story after the baby, right? So today we're going to talk about 5 questions to ask your doctor or ask before you find a doctor when you're looking for a fertility specialist. Fertility specialists, for those of you new to the infertility world, are sometimes called REIs. So that stands for reproductive endocrinology and infertility. Yes, I have my notes right down here so that I can remember because that is a mouthful. So a lot of people will just, in their infertility store, in infertility journey, Um, I was the same, start off on personal recommendations or their local doctor in their, their city. Some cities, I live in a smaller city, don't have a ton of options. And I'm going to tell you why that's not necessarily the best way to go. Um, you can start there, but you might not get the best results there. Right? Okay. So what we're going to start with is we're going to not just ask for personal recommendations from friends and things like that, or just open, you know, do a Google search and search for the nearest fertility clinic. We're going to actually go online and we're going to do some research and we're going to look for It's called Dr. Success Rate Reports. So we don't want this to be a location-driven decision. What you want it to be is a decision based on the best success ratings, um, based on the criteria that I'm going to tell you about, and then look at location within an area of a driving distance, or you might have to get on a plane, you guys. So we're talking about thousands and thousands of dollars of investment. And, um, you don't want to do that without doing some research. You wouldn't go and buy a car just because your friend said that they really liked driving their car. You'd research safety ratings and gas mileage and anything else that would be important to you. But we don't know as consumers, and we are consuming, um, because most of the, uh, infertility world is out of pocket. We don't know where to start and how to be good consumers and pick a doctor that is going to have good outcome ratings and things like that. So number 1, success reports, and I'm gonna drop the link to that here below this video, and you can also find that on my blog at ericahoke.com, and no personal recommendations. So the 3rd thing that's important is to talk to the doctor ahead of time Um, so these are all before questions, and then we're going to get to the after questions after we pick, um, an infertility doctor. But you want to talk to them about their equipment and, um, what kind of equipment they, that they use for transfers, how state-of-the-art it is, that kind of thing. And also how the staff is trained in embryo transfer and handling. So that is super important as well. Alright, so now we have found a doctor and we're going to go in and we're going to talk to this doctor. But the questions don't stop with finding a doctor. You want to ask questions of your doctor when you're sitting there in front of them. This is a collaborative process. To be successful, you're going to have to be— you're going to have to advocate and be empowered with your questions and have some kind of an understanding and do some research and advocate for yourself along the process, right? That's what I had to do. I didn't just take no for an answer. We got second opinions and I made some lots of changes. So that's a whole separate story. I won't get off on a tangent. So you wanna talk to the doctor about a couple things while you're there. They're going to have their standard in-the-box testing protocol. So you want to understand what that is because it's different for every REI. It's different. So some will only do transfers, um, IVF transfers, um, on somebody who has an endometrial lining of such and such. Um, so that goes for IUI too. And they all have their protocol as to how many IUIs they will do, how many fresh embryo transfers they will do. So all these questions are really important to ask up up front, even before you go down any of those paths, because we want to know, um, how we align with those people, right? Um, we don't necessarily going in want to think about having to do IUI or having to do IVF, but if you should end up in that position, it's not someplace that you want to start over with a new doctor. So let's ask those questions up front, right? So what is their testing protocol? There's also, um, a, uh, scale, a window. What am I trying to say? There's a range— that's the word that I'm looking for— there's a range of how they will proceed. Again, in terms of your endometrium lining, um, your age, how many eggs you have, how many eggs, um, for retrieval that they have to see maturing, if they will do a retrieval, all those things. So those are great questions to ask up front so that you understand kind of their approach and their guidelines that they use. Again, those different from doctor to doctor. Okay, so the other thing that you want is you want to ask them for testimonials. So that was point 4, this is point 5. So you want to ask them for testimonials, not just from anybody, for— but from people that have similar reproductive makeup as yourself. You want to talk to them about somebody, if you have PCOS and endometriosis and uterine fibroids and you're over 35, you wanna talk to somebody who had a similar makeup and get a testimonial from them. They should be willing and capable of providing this to you. And it gives you a really good indication of, um, what to expect from the doctor from somebody from a patient standpoint, right? Not just what the doctor is telling you that they're going to be able to help you with, but this is when the recommendation, the testimonial comes into play. Not that your best friend had, um, a successful IVF or IUI transfer, had a successful experience with the doctor, because her, um, medical makeup might be really different than yours. So you You want to get a personal testimonial from somebody that is going to go— has been through a comparable procedure as what you're looking at going through. So the link that I told you about before for the Dr. Success Rates, I'm going to drop the link there. They recommend that you have a practice that you would go to a practice and look for a practice that has around 800 successful procedures a year and 4 doctors on staff. So that's not always possible. Those are pretty large offices. I know that that wasn't something that was possible where I am in my location. So I would have to have looked outside of my radius. Um, if you know my story, you know that we were not able to do IVF, um, or even chose not to do IUI. We chose not to do IUI because of the low success rate, but we weren't candidates to do IVF. Because I was already producing as many eggs. They couldn't stimulate me and do an egg retrieval. All right, so if you're looking for more information like this and you like what I talked about today, you can find more in a few different places. Go ahead, if you're watching on YouTube today, and hit that like and subscribe. I'm here live every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday with this kind of, um, content and more. And if you are looking for a more in-depth explanation, you can go to my blog and it's at ericahoke.com/blogs and you'll find it there. Health and blessings to you guys. Bye-bye.