Self proclaimed “fertility planner” Angie Best-Boss, founder of My Fertility Plan, is quoted in the Washington Times (“Having a baby in the fertility maze: new specialty guides for parents“), regarding the value of her services:
“This is an industry that is not regulated at all. What you can’t get on Google is whether an agency is going to push you toward using an egg donor so that clinic can boost its stats.”
The misconception that the fertility industry is unregulated is so persistent, even so-called experts perpetuate it (out of ignorance and laziness). Fertility medicine is highly regulated by the FDA, and there are some firm ground rules set by the ASRM as well.*
On the second part of her statement: I do not know why an agency would have any interest in increasing a clinic’s statistics; I guess if the agency were affiliated with the clinic, this statement may make some kind of sense. But statistics are highly accessible to anyone, and you don’t need to hire a consultant for $125 an hour. I encourage all our clients to go to SART, click on For Patients, the Find a Clinic: plug in your zip code for a clinic near you or click on a state for all its registered clinics. There you can find the clinic’s CDC-reported statistics for the past few years, where they separate their cycles by donor and non-donor, and in the cases of non-donor, ages of their patients. If your clinic’s statistics seem less favorable than some others, discuss them with your doctor. Some fertility clinics take on more difficult cases, and this skews the results somewhat.
Fertility is stressful and painful; it can cause marital conflicts, financial distress, and a host of other problems. There are a number of psychologists who specialize in this field. We recommend them to our clients when the counseling offered by the IVF clinic is not enough. But paying yet another party (in addition to the clinic, psychologist, insurer, agency, lawyer, donor, etc.) seems just too much for most people.
* For more information on fertility regulation, see David Adamson, “Regulation of Assisted Reproductive Technologies in the United States,: 39 Family Law Quarterly 722 (2005), as well as the ASRM Web site.
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December 20th, 2009 at 1:06 am
[...] by admin on December 19, 2009 Recently the assisted fertilty blog wrote about the subject of regulation in the fertility industry. The writer says that there is a widespread notion that the ferility industry is a kind of “wild west” industry, but the author says this is not true at all. Read for yourself… [...]
December 21st, 2009 at 9:28 am
[...] out her blog entry ” More Myths About The Fertility Industry” Look, I have to be honest – Kathy’s blog really annoyed me. First off – it was nasty. [...]
December 21st, 2009 at 10:32 am
http://www.thefertilityadvocate.com/wpblog/?p=2366
December 21st, 2009 at 12:39 pm
I just read your latest blog, and felt that I had to respond to your personally. I am assuming you will not want to publish this in the comments section, but here is my response nonetheless.
First, upon looking at her credentials, Angie is a very experienced and professionally trained fertility educator. She is the author of several best-selling and award-winning consumer health books on infertility. In addition, she is a licensed mental health professional who has devoted her time in educating patients about their fertility options and assisting them with their decision-making. As a result, I am not sure where you got the “self-proclaimed” part. While fertility consultants are not for everyone, Angie has a very successful practice helping hundreds of patients. She even has a waiting list for her services, and this is with virtually no marketing on her part. If there was not a need for this (as you say in your blog), this would certainly not be the case. Over the past several years, Angie has worked tirelessly to make infertility treatments more accessible and affordable to patients, including her recent book Budgeting for Infertility.
Secondly, even if we have different ideas about how to best go about addressing the problems within the fertility field, I think we can all agree that there is room for improvement. In fact, the ASRM has been vocal about acknowledging this lately, including holding a conference last week about the adequacy of regulation in this area and how we can make improvements. In fact, Dr. David Adamson was one of the keynote speakers. Again, I’m not sure where you got the information that no changes are needed in terms of regulation, other than a document that was written several years ago. I can assure you that this is not the assumption now, including among the leadership of the ASRM. Nine states are currently considering drafting their own legislation regulating infertility treatments which would significantly restrict access to patients. If we as a field do not come up with a better way to prevent the types of catastrophes that have been evident over the past year, it will be out of our hands and into the hands of other government officials with no training or knowledge in the field. ASRM realizes this and is trying to address this more effectively right now.
Blogs like the one you wrote can only be considered as destructive. Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but by disparaging another colleague for wanting to improve the field and help patients build their families is uncalled for and highly unprofessional. This is exactly what gives the infertility field a bad name. We should be all working together to help patients.
And to show you that I am not alone in my thinking…here is the recent blog posting from Pamela Madsen, internationally known fertility advocate and former executive director of the American Fertility Association… http://www.thefertilityadvocate.com
Angie Best-Boss is another truth teller – and apparently, her truth telling is getting some people upset. You see Angie was interviewed in The Washington Times, “Having a Baby In The Fertility Maze”. The subject? Fertility Consultants. Oh, I have been done this path before. Is there a need for “Fertility Consultants?” or not? Is this just another service? Should they be licensed? In so many ways the patient groups that we have around the country are the precursor to “Fertility Consultants”. Do you think that any of the folks on the staff have licenses in fertility? As a prominent patient voice in the field of infertility – I can tell you that the only license I hold is in education – the certificate in patient advocacy that I hold, I earned by being and doing. And it is simply hubris that fertility center’s think that they can service all of the needs of a patient. They can’t. Patient’s also need a degree of separation from the center where they can say what they feel without worrying about getting punished by the center. That’s important. So,
Angie is saying what she believes to be true about the field in this article in The Washington Post – and she comments on regulation, or the lack there of in the field of reproductive medicine. In fact just last week the American Society of Reproductive Medicine held a meeting in Washington, DC to talk about the need for more oversight in the field.
But I guess that blogger, Kathy Bernado, of the Egg Donation and Surrogacy Blog didn’t hear about the meeting, because according to her, we have plenty of oversight and regulation in the field of reproductive medicine. No concerns at all where Kathy Bernado lives. Perhaps she should have made the trip to The Mandarin Hotel to talk to the fields industry leaders for at their big oversight meeting last week
Check out her blog entry ” More Myths About The Fertility Industry” Look, I have to be honest – Kathy’s blog really annoyed me. First off – it was nasty. Whenever someone start a blog be calling some “a self proclaimed ‘Fertility Planner’ – come on – pull your claws in! And second of all – it was uninformed.
But Angie didn’t need my help. Oh the dust was flying over the weekend in the blogosphere! Check out Angie’s response to the “dis”, in “The Fertility Industry’s Worst Kept Secret”.
I sincerely hope you will reconsider the comments you included in your blog. It certainly does not reflect well on you, your company, or the field as a whole. Instead, I hope you will join the rest of us in finding ways to work together with other professionals to improve the experience for the millions of patients out there who want to build their families.
December 21st, 2009 at 1:47 pm
The general public (not those who work in the field), has the impression and the fertility industry is unregulated. The “wild west” analogy gets tossed around quite a bit. This is indeed a misperception. I did not say not further regulation was not needed and that more still needs to be done.
I also think that patients have access to information on their own, without the need for consultants. Of course, if patients have the money to spend on consultants and find them helpful, that’s fine. I just don’t think that people should feel that there is yet another party to pay in this process. It’s optional.