Another vital step is to always get a second opinion from another physician when there is very bad news. As as Healthcare professional, I can tell you with certainty that doctor’s make mistakes, as do labs, x-ray techs, and everyone in entire industry.

It’s difficult for many people, especially women who are given the diagnosis of infertility and who are extremely vulnerable to take this step. I think it’s such a daunting task because there is time pressure..but doesn’t it make more sense then turning to accupunture, aroma therapy, and the dousing of various herbal supplements over the hands (by the way Jeff, I actually had someone convince me to agree to this), and in the middle of it all, I just started laughing. My situation was different, of course…but even health care rationalists look for alternative treatment options when all else has failed.

I know that many have probably gone to several doctors, and gotten several opions….but many don’t, and that’s tragic.

I was fortunate to have a perinatologist with a love of his work and the arrogance to think that even if there wasn’t an obvious cause for my miscarriages that eventually we would figure it out. I owe my children to the hubris of this man who declared “there’s always a reason”, who used every new test that came out, who monitored my uterus and placenta weekly and who finally was able to diagnose a then virtually unknown (but actually fairly common) genetic thrombophilia called MTHFR. I went on, with the help of Lovenox and baby aspirin, to have two relatively normal pregnancies.

When I hear women request help with fertiltiy that is “non medical” I think of all the time I wasted and the additional child I might have had if I’d gone to a doctor in the first place. I’m not sure why women don’t go, but I think it could have something to do with fear, that is, being afraid of what you might learn.

I didn’t name my child Prometheus but I was tempted. If infertility taught me anything, it’s that the truth really does set you free, even if it’s bad news and that hubris, and arrogance in the face of nature is something to celebrate.

I think it’s a very good point, and one I didn’t cover, that it’s that need to feel like you’re doing *something* that drives some of us to woo. I remember feeling like I had just been diagnosed with this horrible problem, and I didn’t want to waste any time. I wanted to do everything I could do and not miss a single opportunity to help myself.

I remember when I became more skeptical of acupuncture, yet another friend recommended it to me. I said that I was just trying medical treatments. My friend said brightly, “Try everything!” Again, she said it with that spirit of positive energy and open mindedness, implying that somehow being open to the cure would bring the cure. This attitude of being open and non critical of alternative medicine is pervasive among my friends, and it takes too long to counter it in normal conversation. So…Jessie and I started a blog instead!

My wife and I are both self-identifying skeptics, and struggled with infertility ourselves a few years back. We are both stronger skeptics today than we were then, but she’s a PhD in molecular biology and I’ve been a closet science geek since high school, so we’re both fairly up on the scientific method. Nevertheless, the difficult challenge of infertility eventually found us in the living room of a new-age acquaintance and woo-woo practitioner, beating drums and dousing over herbal supplements in our hands to determine what our bodies “needed”. We both privately thought it was a little weird, and even discussed afterwards what additional control tests she could have added to the magical dousing efforts. Despite this, we continued to pay for this magic every week for a few months, and neither of us actually raised the question with the other that we might be wasting our time and money.

Eventually, we decided that this was silly and we should end our “treatments”. Being ripped off by a friend adds another layer of complexity as you risk offending the person and causing problems among your shared group of friends, but fortunately for us this problem solved itself the week before we were going to confront her and terminate our sessions. She flaked on us and her family, moved to the Pacific coast (it was “calling to her” or some such thing) and vanished. Problem solved.

So why would two educated, rational and science-savvy people engage in what was clearly pseudoscience nonsense? For us, being fairly type-A people with a strong need to feel in control of situations, I think this gave us a small measure of comfort that at least we were doing *something* about it. Also, we might have ended it much sooner, but I think neither of us wanted to call it quits if our partner was getting even a small psychological benefit out of it.

Flash forward a few years, and we have recently adopted the worlds most perfect baby (sorry, Julie) and look back on the experience with an embarrassed chuckle.

The problem with acupuncture is that it’s not sufficiently regulated – any old hack can claim proficiency, and that strikes me as dangerous.