photograph courtesy fertility associates of memphis
Editor’s Note: Every year, the national medical group Castle Connolly compiles a list of the best doctors in America. In the Memphis area, the 2023 Top Doctors list comprises 350 physicians, representing 59 specialties. Here, we introduce you to one of the caregivers who have been named a Top Doc time and again.
As he recalls, he hadn’t planned to stay in Memphis long. Dr. William Kutteh meant to work here two or three years after arriving from North Carolina with his wife, Dr. Carol Kutteh. But the duo saw a city that was sorely lacking in accessible reproductive endocrinology services.
“We moved here in 1996 when I was offered the job of director of reproductive endocrinology at UTHSC,” says Kutteh. “When we got here, I’d say that our field was around 10 years behind what I’d seen during my prior work in Dallas and Birmingham. There were only two other doctors in our division at the time, Dr. Steven Lincoln, and then Dr. [Raymond] Ke, who I still work with today.”
Bringing Memphis up to speed could have seemed daunting, but Kutteh was unfazed. A go-getting attitude was a huge part of advancing his career, whether it meant making extra calls to lock down a research lab position at Duke University, or, as a graduate student, offering to drive University of Alabama-Birmingham’s Dr. Max Cooper to the airport just for a couple minutes of facetime with one of America’s leading immunologists.
“The goal was always to improve the fertility care for women in our field,” says Kutteh. “It was about slowly changing how we do things, and recognizing the problems facing the community. There was tension between a few of the hospital systems that wanted their own fertility team, but there weren’t enough patients in the area to support that.”
“The work we do, for all our patients, is really about giving them that choice of whether they want kids, rather than that choice being taken away.” — Dr. William Kutteh
To address the issue, Kutteh founded Fertility Associates of Memphis in 2003, and continues to run the practice today alongside Drs. Ke, Paul Brezina, and Amelia Bailey. “Fertility can be a very personal and emotional issue for our patients,” says Kutteh. “Founding our own practice allowed us to cover a larger area and provide more accessible reproductive endocrinology services.”
Kutteh is involved with many of the medical institutions around Memphis and the Mid-South, from Baptist Memorial Hospital to a teaching role at Vanderbilt University. And his work helped Newsweek recognize Fertility Associates of Memphis as one of “America’s Top 50 Fertility Clinics’’ this year. But one of the doctor’s proudest accomplishments was setting up a fertility preservation clinic at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.
“After parents and patients receive a [cancer] diagnosis, fertility preservation wouldn’t be the first thing on their mind,” he says. “But after chemotherapy treatment, many of the young female patients wouldn’t be able to have kids with their own eggs when they grew up. So it became a process of thinking how we can convey the importance of this decision to patients under stressful conditions. Because that can have a huge psychological impact down the line.
“Just giving them that decision is so important,” Kutteh continues. “There have been studies that explore how these patients feel, ten years later, when they get married and think about having kids. They draw up psychological profiles of those who were never offered the chance to freeze their eggs, versus those who had the choice but declined. And those who had the choice were able to deal with and move past their infertility on an emotional level, because they made that initial decision themselves. The work we do, for all our patients, is really about giving them that choice of whether they want kids, rather than that choice being taken away.”
