Patient Satisfaction with which Infertility Treatment?

After a woman has tubal ligation, she may decide that she would in fact like to have more children of their own. In fact, thousands of women do make this decision each year. For these women, there are two forms of infertility treatment which can be used to help them achieve what they want. They can either undergo IVF or they can have their tubes untied. Both work. However which procedure has the best chance of ensuring patient satisfaction and giving these women a child once more?

The answer is that many women who have had tubal ligation surgery prefer to have the procedure reversed because it costs far less as an infertility treatment than IVF on average. Also, the chances of these women getting pregnant are far greater with a tubal reversal. When it comes to IVF, each cycle of treatment will cost about $10,000 to $12,000 whereas the surgery to reverse tubal ligation can be found from one leading tubal surgeon for $5,900. What a woman needs to be think about is that it usually takes more than one cycle of IVF (three on average) increasing what she will have to spend to actually achieve her goal of having a child. That doesn't do much to achieve patient satisfaction when compared to tubal reversals.

However, before the actual tubal ligation reversal procedure is carried out by the surgeon, he needs to determine if it will be successful for the patient or not. Remember patient satisfaction is uppermost for the surgeon and there are certain procedures and tests that the surgeon can carry out to help advance this. The surgeon begins by reviewing the operative reports from the original tubal ligation or they can carry out a diagnostic laparoscopy if obtaining the patient's reports proves to be a problem.

By having a copy of the woman's operative report, the surgeon can see which type of tubal ligation surgery was originally carried out. Furthermore, he can see how much of the woman's fallopian tubes remain and how much will most likely be left after the procedure is reversed. In those women where there remains a greater amount of fallopian tubes, then the chances of her conceiving a child naturally is increased. However, even for women with less than 2.5 cm left, a leading tubal surgeon found that 38% of his patients still became pregnant. Women even become pregnant with only one fallopian tube.

As for the laparoscopy procedure, with this the surgeon makes a small incision into the stomach to reach the woman's fallopian tubes to inspect them using a small camera. Again this procedure shows them the procedure originally carried out and so they can determine how successful reversal as an infertility treatment will be. In many cases, if the surgeon can see that carrying out a reversal of tubal ligation procedure will be successful, he will do it right away while the patient is still under anesthesia.

After the surgeon can confirm that patient satisfaction should be high following tubal ligation reversal, some pre-operative tests will need to be undertaken. There are several blood tests that the surgeon will need to carry out on these women such as a complete blood count, a Hepatitis B surface antigen blood test, a Hepatitis C antibody blood test and a HIV-1 antibody blood test. He may even suggest a sperm count be done on the woman's partner.

Should the tests indicate there are some medical issues, then the surgery may need to be delayed. Plus at the surgeons discretion, he may decide that further tests may need to be carried out especially after looking at the woman's medical history. These tests are carried out with this form of infertility treatment to ensure that patient satisfaction is high, which means the chances of the woman conceiving naturally following the procedure are high as well.

Check out the facts about tubal reversal or IVF as your infertility treatment at the Chapel Hill Tubal Reversal Center website. Review the resources available there as well as the study with the tubal reversal statistics proving Dr. Berger's patients receive top care and have very high patient satisfaction with their choice of tubal reversal to conceive naturally.