Beliefs among fertility patients

Beliefs that run deep

Thailand's old animist religion — the religion of the spirits — was rooted in our DNA thousands of years before Buddhism arrived, and it has blended into Buddhism so completely that we can hardly tell the two apart any more.

Medicine is no different. In more than ten years of practice I have found that Thais — medical staff as much as patients — still hold on to beliefs that are simply handed from one person to the next. Even when study after study has shown that what we believe is not true, we cling to it and refuse to change: out of fear, out of habit (we have always done it this way and nothing bad happened), out of not knowing, and a hundred other reasons. For example:

The ones I meet again and again

• The lights must be dimmed during egg collection, during embryo transfer, and even during ICSI.
• After an embryo transfer: no climbing stairs, no bathing, no hair washing, for at least 3 days. Yet there is a great deal of research showing that keeping the body still after a transfer not only fails to improve the chance of pregnancy — it lowers it by at least 10%.
• Eating “by the book” — the food rules patients love to pass around on social media: kaffir lime juice, protein powder, cutting out starch and sugar, and so on. Some of them do make sense for particular conditions. Others are simply baffling — nobody knows where they came from.

Read next

• 10 fertility beliefs: true or nonsense? Part 1
• 10 fertility beliefs: true or nonsense? Part 2
• Infertility beliefs among Thai people

With my best wishes — Dr. Patsama Vichinsartvichai · 19 October 2023