Many women suffer a great deal of heartache before reaching the thin blue line of a positive pregnancy test. There is a large number of infertility treatments and they do not work for everyone, by any means.

Thousands of women take clomifene citrate, a drug that stimulates the ovaries, as part of their attempt to conceive. But a recent study indicates that, for some patients, clomifene is no more help than “expectant management” – doing nothing. The researchers were studying couples receiving treatment at a clinic for “unexplained infertility”, which means that problems such as blocked fallopian tubes had already been excluded.