there are some amazing advances in male fertility in diagnostics we can now diagnose men and understand why they’re not producing sperm and the quality of it. we also have advances in surgical techniques as well as advances in medications that we can use to treat infertility. (butt) we know for example that if you give an adult male testosterone replacement therapy the body senses that there’s plenty on board and shuts down the natural testosterone production and in so doing usually zeroes out or drops down sperm dramatically. so men who are on testosterone replacement therapy become sterile which is where they’re looking for birth control therapies for men. what we found is that there are certain medications we can give men that will boost the testosterone and sperm production just in the testicles without all this side effects. clomid is an older one an interesting category is the aromatase inhibitors which are used in women with breast cancer and we found that if we gave a man certain amounts of that medication in a controlled fashion over a period of time we could actually boost sperm production as well and alter the balance of testosterone-estrogen in favor of more fertility. hm. clomid is given to men? sm: yes it is. clomid is given to men as are the aromatase inhibitors. but again that’s something that most urologists would be comfortable with because that’s what’s in our literature that’s what we’ve learned. but if you go to the average non-urologist and you say how about these medications that are really known for given to women and you say you want to give them to a guy you’re really looked at weirdly and they think that you’re a having a sex-change operation.
what advances are being made in male infertility?