If you need help getting pregnant these days, there’s an array of advanced techniques available to both diagnose and treat infertility in men and women. If you needed medical assistance thirty years ago, you had few treatment options — basic surgery or limited hormonal therapy for women and varicocoele http://www.urologyhealth.org/urologic-conditions/varicoceles repair for men.
The first major medical breakthrough for infertility treatment was the birth of Louise Brown, the world’s first test tube baby. Initially, In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) https://www.arcfertility.com/patient-resources/infertility-tutorial/what-is-ivf/ was used only to treat fallopian tube damage. Since then, a variety of additional technologies have made an enormous difference for male infertility, older patients, optimal use of extra embryos, genetic diseases and more. These approaches – including Intra-Cytoplasmic Sperm Injection (ICSI) https://www.arcfertility.com/gallery-item/intra-cytoplasmic-sperm-injection-icsi-recommended-patients/, Embryo Cryopreservation, egg freezing, blastocyst culture, Assisted Hatching, Egg Donation, Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis (PGD) http://www.ucsfhealth.org/treatments/pre-implantation_genetic_diagnosis/ – are collectively known as Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ART) http://www.sart.org/SART_Assisted_Reproductive_Technologies/.
ARC and its physician network have been leaders in much of the research and clinical progress bringing hope to hundreds of thousands of patients. Though our work and advances in ART, our physicians are raising the success rate of live births, reducing complications such as multiple pregnancy through techniques such as Single Embryo Transfer (SET) http://www.cdc.gov/art/patientResources/transfer.html and treating the most extreme cases of male infertility.
While clinical advances in fertility diagnosis and treatment technologies continue to help create new families, major barriers remain. Many people who could benefit are not aware of new procedures or prepared emotionally to try them. And, many patients can simply not afford advanced treatment as it may not be covered under their health insurance plans.
Given the barriers to treatment, we have a goal beyond providing the latest in fertility procedures. We also teach the public about the future of fertility treatment through the media and our physicians’ offices. We also created The ARC Fertility Program™ offering innovative financial solutions to make reproductive technologies affordable and available.
We are proud of our achievements in clinical medicine, public education and financial services. By applying our expertise to each, we help bring more babies to more families – the best measure of success for all of us.
