Will HCG Get Me Pregnant?

Will HCG get me pregnant?

That’s a fair enough question.  After all, HCG is the pregnancy hormone.  Fertility doctors give it to patients to help them get pregnant.  No one wants to go on a diet and get pregnant as a side-effect.

So, HCG does cause pregnancy.  If I go on the HCG diet, will I get pregnant?

The easy answer is no.  But – and that’s a big but – you should be very cautious when you’re on the HCG diet because odd things happen.

The real answer comes down to the dosages used.  If you’re trying to get pregnant, you get pre-HCG hormones before you get the HCG.  Then, you’re given 5,000 to 10,000 units of HCG to cause you to release eggs.

On the HCG diet, there’s no pre-treatment.  The maximum amount of HCG that you get is 200 units. That’s just 2 to 4 percent of the pregnancy dose.  It’s very unlikely that such a small dose without pretreatment will cause you to ovulate.  And if you don’t ovulate from HCG, there is no other HCG effect that causes pregnancy.

But strange things happen in medicine, and we don’t want to take any risk at all, even if the risk is close to zero. 

That’s why we exercise extreme caution on the HCG diet.  If you’re a woman of childbearing age, we do a pregnancy test.  Only if it shows you’re not pregnant do we start you on the HCG diet.

And we insist that you use birth control.  Two methods are preferable.  That means a condom and something else.  This way, the near-zero risk of the HCG diet causing you to get pregnant is lowered to zero.

So, no, we’re not running a fertility clinic here.  But we always want to err on the side of caution.  An ounce of prevention is better than eight pounds of an unexpected baby.