A common IVF treatment marketed as a fertility booster and costing hundreds of dollars is useless and clinics should stop offering it, experts say.
The procedure known as ‘endometrial scratching’ does not offer women a better chance of taking home a baby after IVF, found the largest and most comprehensive trial of the treatment.
Professor Mol, who wrote an accompanying editorial, said it was “great news” to discover the procedure didn’t help.
“The concern is that there are many more of these add-on therapies that are offered without a sound scientific base, and many of these will turn out not to be effective once properly evaluated,” he said.
He pointed to a British evaluation of 38 IVF add-ons that found a lack of evidence for all but one treatment.
https://www.smh.com.au/national/snake-oil-the-popular-ivf-therapy-that-has-just-been-proven-useless-20190122-p50syu.html
[category global, reproductive rights]