From what I read, there were multiple IVF clinics in Bangkok, with offshoots in Pattaya or Phuket. This [list] is a good starting point, if you are trying to locate a clinic in Asia, with the majority being in India and Thailand. This list however, is not complete, but it does give a run-down of what services are available in seperate hospitals in the following format, whereby the available services are checked off.
Part of what makes looking for a clinic and doctor complex, is that different institutions and clinics offer a range of different treatments. Some have frozen egg banks and some do not. Some have surrogacy and some do not. Even now, the state is saying that gender selection is not legal, although it is clearly stated as an available option in most of the clinics and it is inseperable from PGD testing.
Treatments Available:
Blastocyst Transfer
IUI (Intra Uterine Insemination)
Donor Eggs
IVF (In vitro fertilization)
Donor Eggs (Frozen)
Ovarian Tissue Freezing
Donor Embryos
PGD (Pre-Implantation Genetic Diagnosis)
Donor Sperm
Sex selection
Electroejaculation
Sperm Aspiration (TESA)
Egg Freezing
Sperm Freezing
Embryo Freezing
Surrogacy
ICSI (IntraCytoplasmic Sperm Injection)
Testicular Biopsy (TESE)
IVM (In vitro maturation)
Vasectomy Reversal
The following seem the most famous clinics in Bangkok, but each will also work with affiliated agencies which source their own clients online and will coordinate egg donors and surrogates, if required. I notice that recently, several of the egg donor agencies and clinics that offer egg donor services have pulled this offline.
The clinics I found online were (1) Bumrungrad Hospital (2) Bangkok Nursing Home, otherwise also known as Bangkok IVF (3) Jetanin Institute, which is the local clinic allianced to Superior ART (SART), a JV with Sydney IVF clinic, also known as Thailand-surrogacy.com (4) SAFE Fertility Clinic, also accessible via IVF Miracle Baby, Marvel IVF and Interhealth (5) Blastocyte Center or Perfect Woman Institute (6) ALL IVF, also Asia Infertility Specialist. Some independant agencies, such as Newlife Bangkok cooperate with many clinics, depending on request and budget.
Most of the patients I knew of, were either at Bunrengrad or Jetanin, with one forum poster stating that Jetanin had the highest proportion of ethnically Chinese and Caucasian egg donors, and another quoting that Blastocyst Center offered egg donor programs but at a very high cost. A seperate post stated that Jetanin required a blood relative for egg donorship and that Bumrengrad only allowed commercial surrogacy, if you knew someone in the hospital directly.
While each facility worked with external and third-party agencies for both clients, egg donors and surrogates, some also had their own frozen egg bank, by which they could offer patients donor egg FET cycles, as opposed to fresh cycles.
What are the stats for regular IVF and donor IVF in Thailand? I wish I knew, and the fact that no one knows, that you can just take a ‘holiday’, must be one of the dominant reasons for its popularity. (To be fair, this is also true of other places in developed countries, like IVI in Madrid, Spain, or CCRM in Colorado, US).
There is little doubt that these clinics cater to the elite in Thailand and to foreign medical tourists. They are all located extremely centrally, on Soi Chidlom behind the Central Chidlom department stores or Wireless Road, an easy few steps from the central SkyTrain stations and within office buildings annexed to malls and hotels.
As with most overseas centers, they coordinate the initial steps in the cycle with doctors in Singapore and you have to be at their clinics essentially for retrieval and transfer. Although that may still require up to a week, I don’t think the logistics of living or getting around in Bangkok are difficult.
What impressed me about Jetanin was the ISO standards and their addressing of questions and concerns. For example, their email comes with explanatory notes that all email will be retained “until we have made our best effort to provide you with a complete and satisfactory response, then it will either be discarded or in some cases, archived”.
The note goes on to say that email facilities are not completely secure and private and may be accessed and viewed in transit. What did not impress me is that my email enquiries went unanswered and unattended.
At least from the outset, IVF in Bangkok seems as professional (and as non-professional) as in Singapore. The clinics look like regular medical clinics, at least from what I saw, the facilities and laboratories are fairly new. Despite the hyperbole that you find on agency websites, there is nothing particularly self-promotional, or advertorial about the actual clinics.
In hindsight, I regret not booking appointments with most of the Bangkok hospitals and practitioners, just to get a better sense of what was out there, I may go on to do so, for future research. I would also like to get access to their egg banks and IVF management units, to experience and assess the level of professionalism and accuracy in their information classification, tagging, storage and disbursement.
What I liked about the doctors was that they were straightforward and deeply commercial. When I say commercial, I don’t mean that they were pushing you to try again and again, in fact, they were not. The doctor suggested that based on our test scores, background and age, we had a fairly good chance of using our own blastocytes, but he told me that if we did not succeed on one round with our own eggs, we should move on, as it had already been enough goes (which I respected).
By commercially-focused, I mean that they said things such as — for comprehensive chromosomal screening, we have broken down our packages into smaller bites, so we charge a lesser amount for screening 4 embryos. If you have more than that, you can purchase a top-up for the remaining valid embryos, instead of paying much for screening 10 embryos, when it may never be necessary. As such, there is less wastage and it’s fairer to the patient. Most IVF patients, and older women, are not capable of producing 5 day blastocytes in large numbers anyway.
Another option, which I have to admit is commercially clever, is that they run parallel cycles of patient and donor eggs, which is to say that they perform the IVF/ICSI on both sets of eggs, your own and a chosen donor’s.
Then, depending on which are viable, they will do consecutive transfers, which gaurantees to some extent, that you will have a transfer and a pregnancy is likely to result. I can understand why physcologically, this gives some comfort to their patients and makes them feel at least closer to their end goal of creating a family.
The advantage of this to the patient, other than having this optionality, was that the cost for ICSI for both your own and donor eggs was only charged once, as it involves similar lab and embriology time. This brought down the cost of a parallel cycle based on your own and donor eggs, to essentially the same cost as a donor egg cycle. The takeaway of course, is that I should have explored these options before I was ready to approach them, then I would have best maximised my target cycles in or outside of Singapore.
What I did not like was that the doctors’ processes didn’t seem hugely different from the Singaporean doctors. For one of the doctors that we saw, he didn’t really recommend trying anything particularly different — the only difference was a long protocol instead of an antagonist protocol. He admitted that he would only do this after having tried an unsuccessful antagonist protocol first.
In terms of supplements, again, it was fairly similar, DHEA, Coq-10, but with additional supplements of L’Arginine (protein) and Androgel (1.62% Testosterone gel).
Hence, it didn’t seem to me that he was targetting the key difficulty in our IVF process, which is the egg quality — the tendency of our embryos to fall apart after a few days, and for few of them to make it blastocysts. So how would the result be different, unless they had superior embriology? (Which I’m sure Singapore hospitals would deny, given they have research and hospital labs and this is a clinic lab?)
The biggest struggle in such an experience, to me, still remains the inherent trust and regulation in the system and the information provided during the process, as well as the short amount of time that you actually get with the doctor and difficulty with coordinating a cycle from out-of-state. I was quite shocked at the paucity of information that they required from us before showing us donor profiles, or before you are allowed to sign up and begin an IVF cycle.
We did have extensive previous tests and results, but very few of the clinics even put us through a blood test work out or did an ultrasound scan — surely that is neither common nor advisable. The clinics that I visited have English coordinators who are fairly fluent and importantly, are very good at picking up their phone, however, there were still difficulties in communicating, and in their basic understanding of, several and vital clarifications.
Two simple examples of this are first, when I questioned if frozen egg cycles were statistically as successful as fresh egg cycles, the reply given was ‘Dr already give that you consider try once only, as not successful before’.
The second example, was when I queried a medication and asked what a half-vial injection was and how to measure one, and whether the medication was for intra-muscular (in the butt) injection as was suggested by its online medical profile, the nurse emailed back just two lines, that read ‘Diphelene 1/2 vial’ and ‘there are some studies which inject sub-cutaneously (in the stomach)’.
I don’t know about anyone else, but if I were already on medication, I would have lost it.
I have had many people, in Singapore, tell me that the process in Thailand was ‘full-service, like being in a resort’ but if you can’t handle local accents, or if that sort of communication would frustrate you, then probably the whole process won’t be as stress-free as advertised.
When I looked online, it was very hard to find poor reviews of any of the doctors, either from a viewpoint of IVF services or egg donor services — but how can it be that none of these overseas international clients never found the communication or specificity of the information given unreliable, or unsatisfactory in detail? Or are they all living on the edge, by choosing procedures in Thailand, anyway?
As I went through the donor profiles that the clinic had in their respective egg banks, I frequently wondered whether the information was reliable and even if it was, how would you be able to ensure that the correct procedure on the right donor eggs was carried out?
There were two prime examples of dodgy misinformation in my experience, first, I wanted to see blood tests for viral and infectious diseases both before and after donation. This information was hugely difficult to obtain and finally, the nurses said that although there was a blood test 3 months before the egg retrieval, there was no blood test at the time of retrieval nor after, unless the donor came back in for a subsequent round of egg donation.
Now, given that it takes 3 months for a condition like HIV to show up in a routine blood test, the earlier test is useless for any donor and recipient pair, because the donor could easily have contracted something between testing and egg retrieval.
So for most of the fresh donors, except those that are previously frozen and repeat donors, they have no idea basically, if they had HIV at the time when the embryos are used. Great. Secondly, when I pushed for these tests, some were submitted to me, without dates and others were submitted to me with dates, but guess what, they did not correspond in age to the donors I had shortlisted. Now, would such a system give you concern or confidence?
Additionally, I wonder whether the nurses would be prompt about following up, after you had actually made the enquiries and paid the money. I think you would remain extremely dependant on your local practitioner, since they would be instrumental should anything go wrong with the process or the subsequent pregnancy.
If the transfer actually takes on the first try, that would be perhaps happiness enough but what if you had to do many rounds of this that increased the chances for error and therefore the stress of the patient?
Again, if you have experience or research in Thailand or would like to share more or correct where I’ve misquoted facts, I appreciate all input and comments and would love to know more, please contact me! My intention is to build on the following list and anecdotal personal experiences.
IVF Clinics, Bangkok (underlined link in the post)
*ALL IVF Center - Dr. Pisit Tantiwattanakul
12A(13) Floor, unit 4, Sivatel Building, 53 Wittayu Road, Lumpini, Patumwan
Opposite the main entrance of The British Embassy, Bangkok. (Ploenchit Station)
Phone: +66-26555972, +66-887860434
This clinic has now been shut down following the public scandal on commercial surrogacy, irregular surrogacy for multiple children of single men and had not been registered with the Royal College of Obstetrics and Gynaecology.
*SAFE FERTILITY CENTER -Dr.Wiwat Quangkananurug
17 floor Amarin Tower, 496-502 Ploenchit road, Lumpini, Patumwan
Phone: +66-22523833, +66-813450660
Sky train: Chitlom station
*Perfect Woman Institute or Blastocyst center - Dr. Tongtis Tongyai
2123/1 New Petcbury Road, Bangkapi, Huaykwang, Bangkok
Phone: +66-27167001, +66-836740890
*Jetanin Institute for Assisted Reproduction- Dr Kriengchai and Dr Pinyo
5 Soi Childlom, Ploenchit road, Lumphini, Patumwan, Bangkok
Phone: +66-26555300, +66-26555310
The S-ART offshoot of Jetanin is on Wireless Road, just behind the British Embassy.
[info@jetanin.com] (a link in the post)
*Bumrungrad Hospital- Dr Pansak Sugkraroek, Dr Kamthorn Pruksanadonda, Dr Chartchai Srisombut
Samitivej Hospital
Sumkhumvit Soi 49, Soi ThongLor
Ramkhamhaeng (RAM) Hospital- Dr Poonsak Waikwamdee
Bangkok Nursing Home (BHN)- Dr Viwat Chinpilas
This is also Bangkok IVF
7th Floor, Zone A, BNH Hospital, 9/1 Convent Road, Silom, Bangkok 10500, Thailand
An update on the situation in Bangkok - earlier this year, a media firestorm broke out over a case in which an Australian couple abandoned their Down’s syndrome baby with his Thai surrogate mother and left the country taking only the normal twin (the case has many irregularities that surround the surrogate and system, as much as the parents).
The international attention prompted a crackdown by authorities on Thailand’s largely unregulated surrogacy business. Although only commercial surrogacy has been suspended and banned with immediate effect, two clinics, ALL-IVF and New Life IVF (formally New Life Donor Egg Agency) have been shut down for operating without a specific IVF medical license from the Thai medical council.
As a collorary to commercial surrogacy, clarifications regarding donor eggs is also pending and donor egg banks have been temporarily suspended, with the clinics referring new cases out to donor egg agencies. Donor agencies are however are uncontactable, as are previous patients and donors themselves.
