If you are one of the one -in -six or one-in-eight couples who want to be parents, but it’s not working for you, it’s time to get mad. There are two kinds of infertility, medical fertility – which is very treatable– and financial infertility which is a much more difficult problem. If you have a [...]

So today (May 3, 2013) marks 3 years since my first post  and the beginning of Fertility Lab Insider- my 3 year Blogaversary if you will   My blog started out slowly–I didn’t advertise or promote it– and for the longest time, I was sure that I was blogging only for myself. But at the [...]

What a week it has been.  This last week (beginning on April 15) we saw horrible events at the Boston Marathon, tearing apart the lives of many families. I am exhausted by the violence and carnage we must, it seems, expect in the modern world, but within the mayhem, I see hope. Each time we [...]

The FDA appears to be getting more serious about IVF program compliance with their regulations, specifically regarding whether a person is medically eligible to donate gametes. Used to be, you never or rarely found a warning letter to an IVF clinic but fairly recently, there were two issued, for a clinic in Florida  and one [...]

Here’s the thing. As an infertility patient, you have one thing going for you that other patients don’t have. Infertility clinics are required, by US law, to report their annual pregnancy outcomes to the CDC, either directly or via an intermediary, namely the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology (SART). What troubles me is that–at least [...]

The Affordable Care Act, also called “Obamacare” became the law of the land on March 23, 2010 and was upheld by a Supreme Court decision in June 2012. What impact, if any, will it have on the ability of infertility patients to pay for infertility treatments? It’s impact is not clear because it will affect [...]

IVF practitioners have long recognized that extremely high estrogen levels from ovarian stimulation cycles can result in a syndrome called ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome or (OHSS) which, if severe, can cause serious complications. Rarely, OHSS has caused patient deaths. In these high E2 cycles, the resulting embryos are often frozen and transferred in a later cycle [...]

Selecting the best sperm for ICSI is not a big deal if most of the sperm are normal.  Where it becomes more tricky is when you are hard pressed to find a normal appearing sperm in the sample. Some defects like sperm with two heads, huge heads, two tails, kinked tails are easy to detect [...]

Sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words, especially when you want to understand the microscopic world of embryology. The European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology (ESHRE) recently published the Atlas of Human Oocytes and Embryos and have made it available for free on-line in either HTML or PDF form. Click on the [...]

I have to let you know about a great on-line video I just saw  that has lots of tips and ideas for affording infertility treatments. It’s called Financial Planning for Family Building, and was recorded live at the Fertility Planit Show LA 2013 earlier this month.  (You can watch all the Fertility Planit videos for [...]