There’s a number of reasons why men struggle with fertility issues. And I think it’s first important to know that no matter your health status, if you just wanna come in and see your fertility potential by getting a semen analysis, we can certainly have one of those ordered and look at it in detail and make sure that your fertility is intact. Now, say you came to me, maybe you’ve already had a semen analysis that showed suboptimal results, or you didn’t have any sperm in the semen analysis, then you’d come to me as an infertility patient. And the definition of infertility is not being able to achieve pregnancy successfully within a 12 month period.

So if you’re satisfy that definition by definition, you’d have infertility. And my job with you is to figure out if you had a male factor for that infertility and then see what we can do to try to fix it. Often in my initial evaluation, we’ll talk about, you know your history, do you have former children and it may be a different marriage, or do you have any kids in the marriage that you’re in? What’s the rhyme or reason to the infertility? In kind of your story, we’ll get to know each other and find out exactly what’s going on.

After that, we may do a hormone evaluation with a hypogonadal panel, which is basically some blood tests that we can do to assess the function of the testicle and the interaction the brain has with the testicle, with the different hormones that tell the testicle to work and produce sperm. After that, we may get a semen analysis. That’s all the male factor for fertility. Now it’s also important to understand that men come to me with infertility problems and the infertility problems may be due to the man, but it may be due to the woman.

So we sit down and we make sure that the partner had a reasonable evaluation by an infertility specialist. And a combination of me helping the man and an infertility specialist helping the woman. Most often, we’re able to achieve a successful outcome of pregnancy or a baby in some capacity. It’s important to understand that fertility is a spectrum. Every patient that comes with infertility is not the same. It actually makes it an interesting subject that I enjoy treating patients of all different shapes and sizes and different problems.

If you think that you may have a male factor to your infertility and would like to talk about it, or just discuss fertility in general, I’d be happy to. Again, I’m Russell Libby with Northwoods Urology of Texas, and I’d be happy to discuss your fertility needs. Please visit us on our website at northwoodsurology.com or give us a call at [281]404-3000 and make an appointment to see me today.