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Infertility in Practice
5th edition
Adam Balen
Published by CRC Press
ISBN 978-0-367-55744-7
Price £125
This excellent book comes from a single author with long-standing experience in this field. He has produced a readable but detailed reference book on infertility. It is a hardback book that contains 434 pages and is very much a text-based book with a decent array of diagrams and tables.
However, this book’s strong point is that it is packed with dense knowledge, advice, and experience and is a superb resource on this topic. It is clearly aimed at specialists, which could include nurse practitioners, embryologists, and doctors. I would suspect junior and senior doctors with an interest in this specialty would all benefit from having access to this book.
The book takes a deep dive into seemingly all aspects of the specialty, and they are wide-ranging within the sphere of infertility. Even better, it is highly readable and understandable, and the text is broken up into small and sensible sections, which help the reader digest the information available.
I specifically enjoyed (if you can say such a thing) the excellent chapter on Male Factor Infertility (chapter 11, page 254). This chapter covers male fertility problems very well and provides lots of learning points. For example, sulfasalazine used to treat inflammatory bowel disease may (though not always) permanently impair spermatogenesis, unlike other drugs that may be fine for this condition. This book is dotted with gems like this pharmacological learning point, but all the chapters provide interesting insights.
There are some fascinating and interesting chapter headings, such as Chapter 18, on ethical and religious issues. Whilst the following chapter covers health outcomes of children born via assisted conception. I did not realise that in the developed world, the figure is around 2% of all children are born via assisted reproduction techniques. That figure surprised me, and that chapter again had a fascinating insight.
I imagine any healthcare professional wanting to learn more about infertility (for example, if it affected them or a family member) would find this a very good proposition as a key text. A GP with a strong interest in all matters related to infertility would probably enjoy having this excellent book. It is very much a specialist text.
It is not a cheap book, but specialist and high-quality books are not cheap, and I suspect that if you have a strong interest in this field, you would be attracted to it.
