By Robert Hiini
Parish Reporter
Australia is on the way to receiving more NaPro Technology fertility practitioners after a recent seminar held in Sydney from 9-17 January.
The seminar was the first of two in a 13 month training course with 12 students hailing from Brisbane, the Gold Coast, Sydney, Melbourne and an international candidate from Gibraltar.
The programme’s teaching faculty includes Perth’s Dr Amanda Lamont, founder of Fertility Care in Yokine, and two US-based fertility specialists including Diane Daly, who pioneered the technology with Dr Thomas Hilgers MD in 1976.
Dr Lamont told The Record that the eventual addition of new NaPro Technology practitioners in Australia would bolster the provision of services that provide a rate of pregnancy that is comparable to In Vitro Fertilisation (IVF) but at a much lower cost.
After several years working at a fertility clinic in Galway, Ireland, she returned to Perth to establish Fertility Care in 2002, which now has a staff of four doctors and four accredited NaPro Technology practitioners.
With 30 to 40 percent of their couples eventually conceiving, Dr Lamont said that their approach to reproductive health could take longer than IVF but had the long term benefit of dealing directly with the underlying causes of infertility.
Many women tell her that they wish they had known about Fertility Care sooner with mainstream public hospitals committed to investigating causes of infertility only after a woman has suffered three consecutive miscarriages.
She estimated that in 30 percent of the couples she sees, subfertility is experienced by the male party with a roughly equal number of couples where the woman’s fertility is suboptimal.
In the remainder of couples, both men and women require thorough diagnoses and treatment.
In spite of their success rates, awareness about the existence of Fertility Care’s services and alternatives to IVF remain scant; something Dr Lamont puts down to the low number of accredited practitioners and their lack of advertising expenditure relative to large, profitable IVF clinics.
While it may cost several thousands of dollars for one cycle of IVF treatment, Fertility Care services are based on GP rates with most of their clients learning about Fertility Care via word of mouth.
Local Church support for the provision of NaPro services has been great, Dr Lamont said, with Archbishop Barry Hickey providing encouragement and advice and St John of God providing the centre’s original facilities. For more information see advertisement below