Dr. Piriton: Infertility can be treated

“Infertility is two-way whereby it can be on a man’s side or it can be on the woman’s side. Infertility, according to the World Health Organization, occurs in two ways: below 35 and above 35 years of age. If you are above 35, infertility is when you have unprotected regular sex without Family Planning and you cannot conceive for a period of twelve months. Then if a couple is below 35 years, it is when you have continued unprotected regular sex without any Family Planning method for a period of six months without conceiving. It broadly happens in men and women. It can be either the man or the woman who is infertile,” says Dr. Piriton.

“It [infertility] has various treatment options depending on the cause, they are several causes. If the cause is blocked tubes, the woman’s egg cannot be reached by sperms. So there is a barrier between the sperm and the woman’s egg. We can unblock the tubes through several procedures. If a woman has anything concerning hormonal imbalance, we can use some drugs to balance her hormones, especially hormone repressing therapies which replace the hormone that is not balancing. Then she can conceive. If a woman has fibroids, maybe they have blocked the tubes or anything that has blocked the tubes; we remove the fibroids or give her drugs to shrink the fibroids. If there is any anatomical issue like a woman cannot conceive because she does not have any ovaries or she does not have reproductive organs which can produce an egg, there we can opt for IVF…In vitro fertilization or donation,” he informs.

Adding, “We get someone’s eggs and we fertilize them outside the body in a laboratory. After fertilizing them with a man’s sperms, we transplant an embryo from the laboratory to the woman’s uterus, if she has a uterus and other organs are not working. For a man, if there is a problem with his sperm, especially those people with a low sperm count; we can use some drugs to improve the sperm quality. Some men have what we call retrograde ejaculation. Whenever they ejaculate, instead of pouring sperms through the urethra, they [the sperms] instead go back into the urinary bladder. We can reverse this through surgery. If men have problems, their testes did not descend or they have other defects, we can give them treatment according to the cause.”