Latest / Finally Get Pregnant Naturally: Holistic Fertility Support To Conceive Naturally and Stay Pregnant After Miscarriage / #257 | The Functional Fertility Workup No One Ever Gave You and The Root-Cause Testing Behind WHY You Can't Get Pregnant and Miscarriage Keeps Happening

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#257 | The Functional Fertility Workup No One Ever Gave You and The Root-Cause Testing Behind WHY You Can't Get Pregnant and Miscarriage Keeps Happening · Finally Get Pregnant Naturally: Holistic Fertility Support To Conceive Naturally and Stay Pregnant After Miscarriage

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Katie: In this episode, you will discover the functional fertility workup that finally explains why getting and staying pregnant is not happening for you, even when everything on your standard panel has told you that everything looks normal.
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Welcome to the Finally Get Pregnant Naturally podcast, the podcast helping women identify the real reasons you haven't conceived or stayed pregnant so you and your partner can finally grow the family of your dreams.
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I'm your host, Dr.
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Katie Wood.
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Let's dive in, shall we?
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Katie: Here's what you'll be walking away with from today's episode: why the standard fertility workup run by your doctor was never designed to actually find what is going on and driving your specific fertility struggles, my go-to root cause testing
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Katie: that gives a completely different picture of your fertility and miscarriage risk, and what can actually become possible for you when you stop working from an incomplete picture and guessing to working with a complete picture with targeted action steps
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Katie: built for your body.
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Katie: So we're gonna start this episode by talking about the workup, the fertility workup that you deserve but you haven't gotten yet.
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Katie: So I know you.
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Katie: You are someone who solves problems.
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Katie: You have built your career, your life, and you've reached each goal that you have set for yourself so far, outside of fertility.
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Katie: This is the one thing that has just eluded you, so to say, and that was exactly what it was for me as well.
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Katie: Because when something needs to be figured out, you figure it out.
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Katie: You do the research, you find the right support, you do the work that is required to then yield the desired outcome.
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Katie: And then at some point You sat across from your doctor, who ran what we like to call a standard fertility workup, a conventional medicine workup, and they told you that everything looked normal and offered you a plan that
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Katie: at the time felt like your only option.
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Katie: And you've been living in that gap ever since between the answers you were given and the answers you actually need to support a healthy fertility and pregnancy.
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Katie: So here's what I want you to understand.
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Katie: The conventional fertility workup was not built for you.
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Katie: It was built to identify the most obvious, most structurally significant barriers to conception.
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Katie: That is the level that it operates at, and there's no blame or shame there.
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Katie: That's just what it is.
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Katie: It was never actually designed to identify the root cause drivers that sit underneath all of that, the internal environment that determines whether conception can happen and whether a pregnancy can sustain.
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Katie: That investigation requires a completely different kind of testing, and your doctor is not going to offer it to you No doctor, not your OB, not your PCP, not your, reproductive endocrinologist, none of them.
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Katie: So let's talk about my six-step approach that can change the picture for you.
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Katie: It can give you that complete picture.
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Katie: So I wanna walk you through what my functional root cause workup looks like.
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Katie: Six windows into your body that conventional fertility testing never opens.
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Katie: Not as a checklist, but as a full picture, because when you see all six together, you start to understand why looking at only one or two of them was never going to give you exactly what you needed, your
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Katie: fertility roadmap, so to say.
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Katie: So first and foremost, your blood.
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Katie: And we want a complete, comprehensive view, not just the basics, not surface level blood markers.
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Katie: So a comprehensive serum blood panel goes far beyond what your OB has ordered for you.
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Katie: A full thyroid function at fertility optimal ranges, not just a TSH that might be within their conventional reference range built for the general population.
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Katie: We're also looking at inflammatory markers, metabolic function, the hormones that signal whether your body is in a state that's going to support conception.
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Katie: And then of course, for your partner, a semen analysis that goes beyond whether he passed a standard range and into whether his numbers are actually optimized for natural conception.
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Katie: And his blood serum panel is just as important.
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Katie: There are markers that your doctor, if they're not drawing them for you, they're definitely not drawing them for your partner.
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Katie: And it can give us a lot of clues and pieces to his fertility puzzle in terms of what is potentially going in on his side of the fertility.
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Katie: Okay?
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Katie: And then of course, we have your gut.
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Katie: Your gut health is upstream of every hormone you are trying to optimize.
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Katie: The bacteria in your gut are directly responsible for how you metabolize and clear estrogen.
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Katie: When that system is dysbiotic or imbalanced, estrogen metabolism is disrupted, systemic inflammation in the body rises, and nutrients critical for egg quality and progesterone production are not being absorbed, no matter how well you eat, no matter how high
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Katie: quality your supplements are.
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Katie: Nobody checks this in a standard fertility workup, but it can absolutely change everything for you.
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Katie: And then we have your vaginal microbiome.
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Katie: There is a specific microbial environment in your reproductive tract that is directly associated with whether implantation succeeds or whether a pregnancy can hold.
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Katie: A microbiome that is out of balance at this level can create an inhospitable environment for an embryo, even if that embryo is chromosomally perfect and the lining looks beautiful on an ultrasound.
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Katie: This is where IVF transfers can fail because, yes, this is testable, it is very much addressable, but it is almost never discussed and never run, especially if you don't have symptoms.
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Katie: And the majority of my clients where we have run a vaginal microbiome test, they were all asymptomatic, but they all came back with some sort of dysbiosis.
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Katie: And then, of course, your hormones, and we're talking outside of just cycle day three hormones drawn, via your blood.
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Katie: A single blood draw tells you what your hormones are doing in that moment in time.
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Katie: It does not tell you how your cortisol is moving across the day.
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Katie: It does not tell you whether your body is converting hormones efficiently or whether chronic stress is stealing from your progesterone.
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Katie: A dried urine collection, easily done at home, across your cycle maps all of it for you, and that level of detail is the difference between treating a number and actually understanding your pattern.
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Katie: And then, of course, we have what you're eating, what you're actually absorbing, and what your cells are missing.
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Katie: So I'm sure you are eating intentionally.
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Katie: You are taking your supplements every day, and your body may still be triggering an immune response to these, quote-unquote, "healthy foods" that are driving inflammation directly in your body and in your reproductive environment.
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Katie: And most times it can be without a single obvious symptom.
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Katie: And the supplements that you're spending hundreds of dollars on every month may not actually be the right ones for your specific cellular needs to actually reduce oxidative stress.
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Katie: There is a way to test both.
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Katie: You do not have to guess, and you don't have to follow a protocol designed for somebody else, a one-size-fits-all, right?
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Katie: If you test, then you know what your body actually needs to thrive.
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Katie: So now let's talk about what becomes possible when you have this full, complete picture.
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Katie: When you have these six windows open at the same time, something shifts.
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Katie: Things start to make sense.
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Katie: You stop guessing.
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Katie: You stop adding in supplements because you saw it worked for someone in a Facebook group.
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Katie: You stop adding in supplements to a stack that was never built on your data to begin with You stop following protocols designed for a woman that is not you.
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Katie: You start seeing the actual pattern of what your body is doing and why, and that pattern becomes the foundation of a protocol that is specific to you, not borrowed from someone else's journey or story.
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Katie: But for you, the woman who has spent months or years trying to figure this out, trying to meal piece it together, that is not a small thing, believe me.
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Katie: That was me.
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Katie: I remember ordering, like, doing this rabbit hole search and finding that these, like, raw peanuts could potentially support fertility, and I bought them.
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Katie: And I think I still have them in my cupboard for, like, years and years and years later.
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Katie: So I understand what it's like when you're just trying to figure out, "What can I do?"
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Katie: But that is the difference between working harder and working with the right information.
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Katie: Because you've always been capable of solving this.
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Katie: You just haven't had the right data points yet.
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Katie: You haven't had the right support yet.
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Katie: So this is the exact investigation I run with every client inside Fertile as a Mother.
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Katie: All six areas interpreted through a root cause fertility lens and built into a protocol specific to what your body is actually showing us.
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Katie: And I wanna go back to speaking on the root cause fertility lens because a lot of times I will have women that I'm speaking to in my DMs on Instagram and they'll say, "Oh, I've worked with naturopaths, dieticians,
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Katie: nutritionists," you name it.
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Katie: They've done the testing.
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Katie: They've worked with these functional providers, and that's great.
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Katie: I'm just I'm so happy that you found help outside of the Western medicine, you know, system.
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Katie: But one issue I have seen time and time again is, yes, these practitioners are trained in functional medicine and root cause medicine, but 9.9 times out of 10 they are not specializing in fertility.
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Katie: And fertility is just It's different than just looking for Optimal health.
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Katie: There are much more specific targets that we are looking for, and I think that that's a lot of the missing piece that people are having even when you are trying to go through a functional approach.
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Katie: They're just not looking through it through the same fertility lens that a practitioner who has been trained in functional medicine who specialize in fertility does.
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Katie: So let's recap.
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Katie: The conventional fertility workup was not built to find your root cause.
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Katie: Don't kill the messenger, it is just the sad truth.
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Katie: The six windows that actually explain why getting or staying pregnant is not happening are your blood at a fertility optimized level, your gut, your vaginal microbiome, your full hormone picture across your cycle and what you're eating, what you
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Katie: may be having food sensitivities to and what your cells are actually able to get from these nutrients.
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Katie: Are they depleted?
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Katie: Do they have enough of these nutrients in them?
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Katie: And when all six are open at the same time, your picture becomes crystal clear and a clear picture is where a real protocol begins.
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Katie: You've always been capable of solving this.
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Katie: The right data was just the missing piece.
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Katie: So I have been where you are right now.
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Katie: You've been trying to conceive for years.
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Katie: Maybe you've experienced loss along the way and you still don't have real answers.
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Katie: You have spent so much time, money, energy, tears chasing solutions that just have not been it for you.
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Katie: They're not working and it's exhausting.
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Katie: You don't even know if you can keep going anymore and if nothing changes, you're just gonna stay stuck in that same cycle.
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Katie: More waiting, more guessing, more heartbreak and that's exactly why I offer a free fertility strategy call.
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Katie: Exactly what I was looking for when I was struggling.
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Katie: On this call, we'll look at your journey and pinpoint what's actually getting in the way so you can finally understand why it hasn't happened for you and start moving toward the family you desire.
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Katie: So book your call now.
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Katie: The link is in the show notes.
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Katie: Thank you so much for listening.
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Katie: I hope you have a beautiful day, and I'll see you on our next episode, released every Tuesday and Thursday.
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Are you ready to finally discover why you haven't been able to get or stay pregnant?
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The Ultimate Fertility Blueprint is a quick, insightful quiz designed to reveal your overall capacity to conceive and help you discover potential root causes and areas to address to improve your fertility so you can finally get and stay pregnant.
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You'll find the link in the show notes.
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As a quick reminder and disclaimer, this podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for medical advice.
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Always consult your doctor or healthcare provider before starting any new supplement or protocol, especially if you're actively trying to conceive or undergoing treatment.