46-year old conceives naturally

Center for Human Reproduction in NYC (Barad and Gleicher, docs) just sent me an email announcing it--here is an excerpt:

"We discharged a 46-year-old patient into obstetrical care who spontaneously conceived after 6 weeks of our DHEA treatment. This is an exciting validation of our POA treatment.
We just received approval to patent our proprietary DHEA medication. CHR was one of the first centers to recognize the potential of DHEA treatments for aging ovaries. "

I think we should all be heartened about this for a variety of reasons, not least, that the whole DHEA treatment which yielded this result, was discovered and done independently by one of their patients long before she told them about it! That is, they did not come up with it themselves--one of their patients did, instead. And she didn't tell them until it started to work so obviously that there was no way they could miss it. Then they wrote it up as a case study and started some long term double blind studies around it. But the original idea and treatment was hers, not theirs. And because of that woman, they started giving the DHEA to other women, and this 46-year-old has conceived because of it.

We are experimenting with a lot of things--suppliments, lipiodol HSG's, autoimmune treatments, etc--that our RE's may also think are useless or disapprove of. But the fact is, we don't have decades to futz around waiting for the clinical studies the way they do; and sometimes, like the case of DHEA for some women, it works.

I am very glad for that 46-year-old, but also glad because here is an example of what women like us can do for others and for ourselves. on our TTC journey.