Fertility Advice for Women

What we would recommend for a woman who wants to kind of protect their future fertility is to make sure that you are protected against STDs, get your yearly exam, especially if you have been sexually active, get your yearly Pap smear too to make sure that there’s no problems with the cervix and in general, just keep yourself as healthy and stress-free as you can. Any woman of childbearing age should be taking a prenatal vitamin if she can get pregnant, if she is not preventing pregnancy so that would be a good thing to add as well.

What advice do you have for a woman with an STD (Sexually Transmitted Disease)?

For a woman who has been recently diagnosed with a sexually transmitted disease, it can be very stressful. With a patient who is feeling kind of dirty from exposure to an STD, we would counsel them in the office. We also have other people in our office, counselors who can talk to them at a separate visit or we can refer them out for counseling.
Often it’s good for them to speak to someone maybe in their community, maybe if they are religious to speak to someone at their church, but we do reassure them too that some of the STDs that we are seeing today are very widespread, very prevalent, and that they are not the only one, that there is support out there. They can go online and join support groups, et cetera.