If Israeli professor Eliahu Levitas has his way, women undergoing IVF treatment will all have the benefit of a hypnotist at their bedside. According to Levitas’s team from Soroka Hospital in Beersheva, hypnosis can double the success of IVF treatment. Levitas’s study of 185 women found that 28% of women in the group who were hypnotized became pregnant, compared with 14% of those who were not. 6.1 million American women and their partners experience infertility, according to the American Society of Reproductive Medicine. Of those about 5% choose in-vitro fertilization treatment.
IVF is a method of assisted reproduction in which the man’s sperm and the woman’s egg (oocyte) are combined in a laboratory dish, where fertilization occurs. The resulting embryo is then transferred to the uterus to develop naturally. Usually, two to four embryos are transferred with each cycle. According to the latest statistics, the success rate for IVF is similar to the 20% chance that a healthy, re productively normal couple has of achieving a pregnancy that results in a live born baby in any given month. IVF was successfully used for the first time in the United States in 1981. Since then, more than 114,000 babies in the US have been born as a result of the technique.
The Israeli study - the first of its kind - was presented last month by Levitas to the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology conference in Berlin. According to Levitas, the findings will be published shortly in an American medical journal. The Israeli researchers were looking to see if hypnosis could make the embryo transfer stage of IVF more successful. “We gave hypnosis to a group of our patients during the most stressful part of IVF treatment - the transferring of embryos into the uterus,” Levitas told ISRAEL21c. “It’s a crucial point of the treatment, and the point in which the embryos comes in contact with the womb of the woman. It all builds up to that special moment, which is not very painful but is very stressful.” According to Levitas, that stress can cause complications during the transfer that can put the procedure at risk.
