Beyond Hormones: Why Fertility Care Needs to Look at the Whole Body

When most people think about fertility, they think about hormones and ovulation — the narrow window ofthe menstrual cycle where conception either happens or doesn’t. What rarely gets discussed is everything elsethe body is doing in the background: how well it absorbs nutrients, how the immune system is functioning,how stress is being metabolized, even what’s growing in the walls of someone’s house. In this episode ofthe WellnessJourney.LIFE interview series — and the latest installment in SindyXR’s collaboration withRewrite — Diana Canaan sits down with Dr. Amanda Scott and Dr. Priyanka Borkar to talk about what atruly whole-body approach to fertility actually looks like, and how Rewrite is putting that philosophy intopractice.

Both doctors arrived at integrative fertility care from strikingly different starting points. Dr. Scott’s path began in childhood, where undiagnosed celiac disease intersected with ADHD, gut dysregulation, and mental health struggles that conventional medicine couldn’t resolve. It took roughly seven years of graduate study after college for her to understand how to use nutrition therapeutically rather than generically — training that eventually led her to become a naturopathic doctor, a certified nutrition specialist, and a practitioner of Chinese medicine, combining disciplines she found only worked when layered together. Dr. Borkar’s route ran through four years in emergency medicine, where she watched chronic, manageable conditions repeatedly escalate into crises by the time patients reached the ER. Coming from a family that practiced Ayurvedic medicine as a matter of daily life, she found herself drawn toward the idea that for most relatively healthy people, medicine happens far more outside the doctor’s office than inside it — in what’s on the plate, in the body’s baseline state, long before a diagnosis is ever made.

That line, from Dr. Scott, captures the throughline of Rewrite’s clinical philosophy. The body doesn’t compartmentalize its systems the way medical specialties do. When the immune system is actively managing something like thyroid autoimmunity, the body sequesters resources toward that fight — leaving less available for everything else, reproduction included. Rather than treating fertility as an isolated system to be optimized on its own, Rewrite’s practitioners look at digestion, inflammation, nutrient absorption, and immune regulation as inputs that  the reproductive system can function the way it’s meant to.

What separates Rewrite’s model from a standard fertility workup is the depth and individuality of the data behind it. Every consultation runs a full hour or longer, specifically to make space for a real back-and forth— understanding not just a patient’s labs, but their history, their goals, and their lived experience of symptoms that often go undiscussed. Layered on top of that qualitative picture is genetic testing and Rewrite’s panel of more than 160 biomarkers, used to build a protocol specific to that person rather than one pulled from population-wide guidelines. In practice, that can mean identifying something as unexpected as mold exposure in a patient’s home as the missing piece in a previously unsuccessful IVF journey — the kind of root cause a standard fertility workup, built around hormone panels and cycle timing alone, would likely never surface. It’s this combination — genetics, biomarkers, and genuine clinical time — that Dr. Scott and Dr. Borkar point to as the core of what makes Rewrite’s approach different.

Stress itself turns out to be a measurable, addressable variable in that picture, not just an emotional backdrop to the process. Dr. Borkar describes cases where simply giving the body time — sometimes as little as six weeks, sometimes closer to three months — to come into nutritional and physiological balance is enough for what she describes as a protective barrier to lift on its own. Having an experienced practitioner as part of that process, she notes, does more than guide the clinical protocol; the reassurance of working with someone who has seen the pattern before can itself lower the stress load a patient is carrying into an already difficult diagnosis.

The conversation takes on additional weight given Diana’s own history with infertility — a journey she’s spoken about openly in previous WellnessJourney.LIFE interviews. Reflecting on her own experience in an IVF clinic, she describes a process that felt impersonal by design: a doctor reading lab results and defaulting to IUI or IVF largely based on how much time a patient had, rather than any deeper investigation into why previous cycles hadn’t worked. Multiple cycles and losses later, without ever reaching a healthy pregnancy through IVF, she ultimately conceived naturally — through the kind of personal research and bodywork that Rewrite’s model is built to provide from the outset. The waiting rooms she remembers, filled with women crying and no real answers being offered beyond “try egg donor next,” are precisely the experience she hopes platforms like Rewrite and SindyXR’s own community can help other patients avoid.

Both doctors see informed consent as the piece most often missing from conventional fertility care today— the simple fact that many patients aren’t told IVF and IUI are options, not the only options, and that unresolved imbalances in the body can undermine even a well-executed procedure. Their hope for the future of fertility care is a shift from reactive to proactive: understanding where a person’s body actually stands before deciding the next clinical step, rather than after a cycle has already failed. It’s a vision that mirrors exactly why SindyXR partnered with Rewrite in the first place — connecting patients who’ve felt like they were navigating this alone with a platform, and practitioners, built to walk the path with them from the start