SpermCheck has arrived and is filling the shelves of your neighborhood drug store as I write. What is it? It’s an over-the-counter FDA approved home male fertility test. What does it do? It tells you whether you have more than 20 million sperm per milliliter of semen.
That’s a good thing, right? Generally, yes. It’s good to know whether you have a reasonable amount of sperm, which SpermCheck says is 20 million per milliliter. The problem is in the yes-or-no nature of the test and in picking the number 20 million. As I described in this post, you can get a woman pregnant with sperm counts less than 20 million per milliliter and have problems with more than that amount. The numbers of swimmers don’t tell the whole story.
So, will SpermCheck help you? For most men, probably. Having a positive or negative result will point them in the right direction. But for the handful of guys that get the OK from the test when they have a problem or for those that get the thumbs-down from the test that are fertile, it’s not telling the whole story. According to the manufacturer, the guys that are getting it wrong is about one in twenty. If you’re OK with that, great–if not, you may want to see a doctor.
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