When month after month goes by with a negative test, couples naturally start wondering who is “at fault.” The truth is, infertility is a shared experience. Roughly one-third of the time, the struggle is due to female factors; one-third is due to male factors; and the rest of the time, it is a combination of both.
Dr. Lakshmi Priya treats the couple as a unit. We don’t just treat “women’s issues” or “men’s issues.” We look at how your specific bodies are working together, and we fix the exact roadblocks stopping you from getting pregnant.
What is Stopping My Body from Conceiving? (Female Infertility)
For a woman to get pregnant naturally, a lot of delicate timing and physical pathways have to line up perfectly. If any one of these steps is off, pregnancy won’t happen. Here is what we look for and how we fix it:
- You Aren’t Ovulating Reliably: If you aren’t releasing an egg every single month (often due to PCOS, thyroid imbalances, or irregular periods), the sperm has nothing to fertilize.
- How we treat it: Often, simple oral medications can regulate your cycle and trigger your body to release a healthy egg exactly when it should.
- The Pathway is Blocked (Fallopian Tubes): The egg and sperm are supposed to meet in the fallopian tubes. If your tubes are blocked by scar tissue or endometriosis, they simply cannot reach each other.
- How we treat it: We can sometimes clear these blockages with minor, minimally invasive surgery. If they cannot be cleared, we completely bypass the tubes using IVF.
- The Uterus Isn’t Ready for a Baby: Even if a healthy embryo forms, it needs a smooth, healthy uterine lining to implant and grow. Things like fibroids, polyps, or scar tissue act like physical barriers.
- How we treat it: Dr. Priya uses gentle, minor hysteroscopic procedures to remove these growths, giving your embryo a safe place to stick and grow.
Why Are His Numbers Low? (Male Infertility)
Men are often left out of the fertility conversation, but a healthy pregnancy relies heavily on the quality of the sperm. Male infertility is common, very treatable, and usually painless to diagnose.
- Low Sperm Count: There simply aren’t enough sperm in the semen to make the long, difficult journey up to the egg.
- Poor Motility (Slow Swimmers): The sperm are present, but they aren’t swimming forward fast enough, or in the right direction, to reach the egg before it dies.
- Poor Morphology (Abnormal Shape): Sperm need a very specific shape (a healthy oval head and a long tail) to crack through the egg’s tough outer shell. If too many are misshapen, fertilization fails.
- How we treat male factors: Treatment ranges from lifestyle adjustments and medications to advanced lab techniques. If numbers are slightly low, we might use IUI (washing the sperm to concentrate the strongest swimmers and placing them directly in the uterus). If numbers are very low, we use ICSI during IVF, where the embryologist hand-picks a single perfect sperm and injects it directly into the egg.
Stop Guessing, Start Fixing
You do not have to keep trying blindly. Once we identify exactly which physical hurdles are standing in your way, whether they belong to him, to you, or to both of you, we can stop wasting time and start the specific treatment that will actually help you conceive.
