Episode 123: Can Your Fertility Monitor Really Tell When You Ovulate? | Dr. Thomas Bouchard

So with the Marquette, and I know you're not speaking on behalf of the Marquette method per se right now, but with using the Marquette approach with the mirror monitor then, do you think, um, because we, we had a really interesting conversation, um, with Louise Boychuk.

I'm not sure if you know her or not.

Yeah, very

well.

Okay.

Very well.

Okay, great.

So, um, Louise was on the podcast and one of the conversations we got into was, um, the approach, uh, from the NFP medical professionals towards the attitude maybe, or just the way that someone might feel.

towards this demographic of NFP users that achieve a pregnancy when they were not intending to achieve a pregnancy.

And that sometimes it seems as on the patient or the user side that from the researcher medical professional side that it's kind of discarded as, okay, well, we must have messed up on following the instructions that were designed.

And even if we feel confidently that we did not, that we heard the directions and we follow the directions accurately, and yet women are achieving pregnancies when they weren't intending to even though they were following again the method directions well um and we kind of went back and forth with her in a great conversation and talking about the specifically the Marquette method and using um the clear blue monitor she couldn't speak to obviously the mirror monitor because this study wasn't published yet at that time but using something like the monitor to help identify that opening of the fertile window And also in our instruction to couples, recognizing still what we might not know.

And so for couples who have discerned that they have a reason to avoid a pregnancy, should they even be attempting to engage in the marital act during the pre-ovulatory time? Or should they just be waiting until they have that progesterone confirmation, that post-ovulatory time? Because if we're still learning things like, oh, well, you don't have to have the LH surge necessarily.

You just have to have a start of a rise and then you could be ovulating.

Then the method and the use of it might not be as effective in trying to avoid a pregnancy.

What do you think?

I think there are several factors at play.

One of them is that you can't use a single indicator at any point to define the beginning and end of the fertile window, you're using multiple checks, right? And so the LH surge is one check, right? And so the Marquette method has been used with, say, the pre-mom LH test and using that as the gauge of when ovulation is happening and providing parameters before and after that to say when the fertile window begins in it.

Clear blue had estrogen metabolites in the urine and LH in the urine.

So that gives you two indicators of hormones.

And so that gives you the possibility of having an opening of the fertile window But there are lots of situations where there's not enough of a lead time.

Estrogen seems to not give you a five-day warning.

On average, it does.

But in some women, they have a short estrogen rise prior to the LH surge.

And so that can be frustrating for some people because they don't seem to get that additional warning.

So that's where something like the Marquette Method early days algorithm fits in, right? You want to add some more days because...