The great IVF rip-off

Clinics charging desperate couples thousands for ‘extras’ that don’t work

IVF CLINICS are profiteering from desperate couples by selling expensive treatments that do not improve the chances of conception, experts warned last night.

Fertility centres are pushing the techniques ‘whatever the level of evidence’ behind them, say critics.

Patients are paying for the extras – which can cost more than £1,000 a time – in their efforts to start a family.

Fertility pioneer Dr John Parsons said doctors were failing to tell their clients the whole truth about whether these treatments, designed to increase the chances of a woman becoming pregnant, really worked.

Couples should remember that clinics were businesses that existed to make money, he added.

Yacoub Khalaf, medical director of Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Assisted Conception Unit in London, warned that the evidence that such treatments helped women to become pregnant was ‘by no means robust’.

The two men were speaking at the Fertility Show in London, where dozens of clinics from the UK and abroad exhibited in the hope of attracting couples.

The experts believe the commercial nature of the industry, which is thought to be worth more than £1 billion a year in Britain alone, tempts some doctors to put profit before patients.

Dr Parsons said: ‘It’s an expensive business running an assisted conception unit… There’s a risk that market forces push practitioners to use treatments and techniques, whatever the level of evidence.’

UK clinics typically charge about £3,000 for a single treatment cycle of in-vitro fertilisation (IVF), where eggs are extracted from a woman, fertilised with sperm in a test tube, and resulting embryos implanted in the womb.

But they can boost their profits with a bewildering array of ‘add-ons’. They include immunology, where a woman is given drugs to stop her rejecting the ‘foreign’ embryo; an endometrial scratch, where the womb lining is nicked to help embryos implant; and pre-implantation genetic screening (PGS), where embryos are checked for major genetic abnormalities so that only ‘good’ ones are implanted in the womb.

All the treatments sound plausible, and individual studies indicate that they can boost pregnancy rates among some groups of women.

But Mr Khalaf said: ‘Although some fertility providers point to scientific research [of effectiveness] on all these “add-ons”, the evidence is by no means robust enough to be taken on by patients without careful consideration of their value.’

Mr Khalaf claimed that immunology, which is based on the unproven theory that some women ‘rejected’ healthy foetuses because of faulty immune cells, had been ‘over-hyped, exploited and exaggerated by some fertility specialists’.

He said the evidence behind an endometrial scratch, which costs £150 to £300 a time, was also weak.

Dr Parsons added that a review of studies published last year found it helped only a small number of women – those who had been implanted with embryos on at least three prior occasions.

Nonetheless, fertility clinics liked it because it was quick and profitable, he claimed. ‘The beauty of the scratch is it takes two seconds,’ said Dr Parsons. ‘It’s a really nice number, because you can charge £150 for it, or even more.’

Dr Parsons compared some fertility doctors to car mechanics: ‘They take your car, they fix the insides, they give you a whopping bill, and you’ve no idea what they have done to it,’ he said.

He was speaking as a trustee of the Progress Educational Trust, a charity which aims to advance public understanding of human genetics, fertility treatment and stem-cell research.

‘One treatment takes two seconds – and costs £150’