Seeing Doctor Quack

Our fertility doctor was wonderful.  Next time, I promise I will tell more.  However, it seems appropriate to joke/rant about Doctor Quack first.

I don't know if I mentioned that JK has Taiwanese origins.  She believes in both Eastern and Western medicine.  And, honestly, so do I.  Eastern medicine often has ways to gently treat ailments that Western medicine mishandles.

After our second miscarriage, and on the suggestion of certain friends, I entertained the idea of finding an acupuncturist for JK.  Our once infertile friends Brant and Jen had a good experience with acupuncture, and others seemed to voice the same sentiment.  So, now there was only to find one.

After hearing of several, we settled upon a reputable fellow in Chinatown.  I call him Doctor Quack, because I do not want to write something that would bite me in the butt later.  Now you the what but not the who.  That will have to suffice.

Upon arriving at this office, we see shelves stocked with copious amounts of herbal remedies: pills, teas, tinctures, blah-dy blah-dy blah!  As busy as this office is, I quickly realize that most of the money made here is in the packaged stuff up front.  Doctor Quack's own herbals, as it happens.

We tell him our story, simple enough at this point: get pregnant on the second try, miscarry, wait three months, try again, get pregnant on the second try, miscarry.  One miscarriage of unknown cause, and one known: Turner's syndrome.  He checks a few things out on JK, and then confidently declares that with his care and the herbals she would be taking, we were going to have a baby right away.

If the Internet could convey smells, you might be picking up the scent of bull$^*+.  I certainly did.  So did JK.

His assertion that we could begin trying right away when the miscarriage had just occurred?  A woman's insides need time to right themselves first.  Our excellent OB GYN always suggested waiting for three cycles.

As for the rest of it... I don't know how many hundreds (or thousands?) of dollars we would have sunk into his remedies, had we drank the Kool-Aid.  I don't want to know.  JK had an issue that needed to be solved medically.  Doctor Quack didn't know that, and neither did we.  I wonder how many couples cling to Doctor Quack's indomitable confidence when pitted against the confusion and heartbreak of infertility.

If you take the cynical point of view (as I do), he and others like him are predators.  Infertility has a way of causing confident people to doubt themselves.  Decisions that seem objectively obvious become something else.  A quack dangling hope in front of a heartbroken, hopeless, infertile couple will often succeed.

Fortunately, we high-tailed it out of there, politely refusing the prescription as they tried to push it into our hands.  Happily, our fertility doctor at FCI was nothing like that.