Shady Grove Docs

[Anonymous]

which one is best and most experienced doc at Shady Grove? anybody knows who has better success rates. i know each one of you will respond based on your successes and failures. i want to make most informed decision in choosing doc at Shady Grove. with more than 20 docs I am kind of lost... Levy, Chang, Wildra, Greenhouse, Sagoskin, Stillman, Osborne etc???i dont care about location, just want best if it is possible to rank them...

[Anonymous]

I know it might sound cliche but it's so hard to say - so much depends on your personality, what you are looking for as far as bedside manner (do you need someone to hold your hand or do you want someone with a black/white personality), etc. I'm sure you know that you really do end up dealing with my REs than your own b/c you'll see different ones for monitoring, your retrieval, transfer, etc. - sometimes I (sadly) almost think it's more important to have a solid RN who will be your advocate than one who will just go with the flow.

I did 9 IVFs total with SGF over the last 4 years so I've met most of the REs in the practice.

My RE was Sagoskin who I liked because he was willing to try new things and didn't give up on us - he wasn't conservative like a lot of the REs are there. However he isn't into providing lots of emotional support, can take a while to return phone call. However I totally attribute having one child and my current pregnancy to his thinking outside the box.

I dealt with Chang when my RE wasn't in the office and liked him because he was aggressive with his decisions when I monitored - might not be the most "touchy/feely" type of doctor but I wasn't looking for a friend so it wasn't an issue for me.

Out of Annandale - I liked Greenhouse the best. I only had him for monitoring so I'm not sure how aggressive, etc. he is but I thought he was personable and informative when I cycled.

[Anonymous]

I worked with Dr. Chang and liked him a lot. He is not warm and fuzzy, but he knows his stuff. I think the Rockville office is sort of the most organized in general. I worked with Rockville, but did much of my monitoring and such in Annapolis.

[Anonymous]

I have heard from other REs (not in DC) that Dr Stillman and Dr Levy are the most prominent in the field -- but that doesn't mean that they are the best at dealing with patients. I have the impression that the REs are tracked pretty closely and since SG takes so much pride in their success rates, I bet they don't let REs with low success rates stick around too long. I have Dr Widra (DC office) and really like him.

[Anonymous]

PP 6:56 - How did your doc think outside the box? I am always looking for new ideas. Thanks!

[Anonymous]

PP - 6:56 - What do you mean by the docs at SG being conservative?

[Anonymous]

6:56 Here: My experience with Sagoskin was that he was very open and willing to consider new drug protocols for IVF cycles. After doing so many cycles with SGF - I reallly felt they treated patients on the averages and used the same conservative protocols with their patients. I'm clearly not an average patient which is evident by how many cycles it took (9 total) to achieve 2 healthy pregnancies. I did a couple second opinions with other clinics and he was willing to take into consideration things they said along with other protocols I had heard about from other patients. We attempted the Estrogen Priming Protocol along with one which involved administering low doses of HCG to try and achieve more mature eggs. He was aggressive in my doses - sometimes going up to 600 Follistim/day and also would allow my Estrogen level to go sky high (my best cycles had my estrogen level above 6,000 at trigger before retrieval) which usually freaked out other REs that I saw during monitoring.

He was also willing to take chances - we did PGD with almost all of our cycles b/c a chromosome disorder causes us to miscarry - but on our last cycle he recommended to forgo the PGD and put our remaining 3 embryos back on Day 3 and I'm currently pregnant with twins. The head of the PGD lab ALWAYS recommended we do PGD even if we had just 1 or 2 embryos on Day 3 and we started to wonder if maybe the biopsy process was harming our embryos (we kept miscarrying beautiful PGD normal 5 day blasts) - and we appreciated that Sagoskin didn't have an issue with us rolling the dice and put back non PGD biopsied embryos.

He kept an optimistic outlook for us and didn't give up on us (we did miscarry/have ectopics 3 times with IVF as well) and kept trying different things to try and increase the number of embryos we had to work with. He is personable but he isn't going to really hold your hand and explain everything to you in great detail unless you question him - but I got over needing a friend in this process and really wanted someone who would advocate for us and try different options until we found one that worked. He doesn't have an ego and he isn't arrogant - I really believe he is just trying to help his couples succeed which we appreciated.

[Anonymous]

SG is definitely a conservative practice in general. They work primarily off of a handful of very formalized protocols. They don't like to deviate from these protocols and they don't really tailor the care to each patient.
Their doctors are very good and competent in the field but none of them are trailblazers in reproductive medicine. When they do use a "new protocol" (like the estrogen priming protocol listed above) it's one that was invented at another clinic. And often they are VERY reluctant to use a new protocol.

Examples of true trailblazers or risk takers in the field are people like Schoolcraft at CCRM, Owen Davis at Cornell, Geoffrey Sher at the Sher Institute, Dr. Check at Cooper in New Jersey and mabye Dr. Zhang at New Hope. These are all doctors who are known as being very innovative and practicing "outside of the box". They have some of the best success rates in the nation while seeing the most difficult patients.

That all said, Shady Grove does have the BEST success rates in this area. What they do, they do extremely well. Their lab is top notch. They cycle the largest cohort of patients in the nation and manage to have success rates that put them in the very top of the second tier (behind only those clinics mentioned above). It's really quite an amazing operation that they have going on.

As to who you should see at SG, I really don't think it matters. All major decisions are made in tandem by another RE. I've found that most of the REs are reluctant to make clinical decisions that are too outside of the box of the rest of the practice. It's almost as if they function as one large brain instead of 18 (or however many physicians there are at this point) minds.
All procedures are done by whoever is on call. Monitoring is also done by a rotating staff of the physicians and ultrasound techs. Physician oversight of the monitoring (i.e. changes in stims) is sometimes also done by whowever is on call. As such, it's possible to see one physician for an IVF consult and then not have him be involved in a single step of your IVF cycle.

[Anonymous]

to the PP:
Jerome Check is a QUACK. He is a medical endocrinologist, not a board-certified RE
Totally agree, Davis and Schoolcraft...trailblazers
Zhang, Sher...not so much. Not highly respected in the field.
Crazy does not always equal good

[Anonymous]

Agreed that Check is not formally trained as a RE. But he was (and is) one of the first and only to use low-dose stims (and agree to cycle) women in ovarian failure with many previous failures. Pts that were written off by their previous practices. And he has gotten many of these women pregnant. I know 2 personally and the high FSH message boards are littered with them. The guy is likely a complete nut but he's offering a service that few others do (and was the first to do it).

[Anonymous]

"SG is definitely a conservative practice in general. They work primarily off of a handful of very formalized protocols. They don't like to deviate from these protocols and they don't really tailor the care to each patient."

I totally agree. Its like they have a file cabinet full of pre-printed protocols and they pluck out the one that they think best matches your need - no thinking required.

[Anonymous]

Seems like a good practice to me, since it works so well. There is a reason they have one of the highest success rates in the US, despite also having one of the largest case loads.

[Anonymous]

"Seems like a good practice to me, since it works so well. There is a reason they have one of the highest success rates in the US, despite also having one of the largest case loads."

Yes, it is a good practice for those who are statistically likely to do well under their set protocols, which is a good number of their patients. It is not a good practice for tough cases that require more thinking outside the box.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:to the PP:
Jerome Check is a QUACK. He is a medical endocrinologist, not a board-certified RE

Crazy does not always equal good

Harsh words for a man who has had such good results. We have left SG DC for Cooper and I am hoping for great things there. We are all very anxious/hopeful here so it is not very nice to hear your Dr. is a Quack.

[Anonymous]

I'd like to put a reccommendation out there for Dr. Anitha Nair at Shady Grove in the DC office. I "stumbled" upon her when I went in to have an initial consultation. While she is probably the youngest doctor in the practice, I loved her. Her bedside manner was great - warm, very caring, and became almost a friend to me and my husband.

Ended up pregnant with twins on our very first IVF.