About Joanna Bauer-Savage
A doctor who lives a complex health journey too.
Joanna Bauer-Savage is an integrative medical doctor and author based in Berlin, Germany. She works in English and German, supporting people navigating complex health journeys — and writing about how to navigate them well.
I am a doctor. I am also a patient.
That dual perspective shapes everything I do.
I live with hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (hEDS) and Mast Cell Activation Syndrome (MCAS) — two complex, multi-system conditions that are often missed, dismissed, or poorly understood. I don't just manage them. I thrive with them. And I work alongside people who want to do the same.
My work is for people living with complex chronic illness, for the clinicians who want to support them better, and for everyone who senses that the way modern medicine treats complexity needs to change.
My story, in short
I have lived with hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome and Mast Cell Activation Syndrome since childhood — though I didn't have names for them until much later in life. For most of my life, what I now understand to be hEDS and MCAS presented as a long, unrelated-seeming string of "bad luck": joint subluxations from sport, sprains and injuries that didn't heal well, fragile and easily-marked skin, sensitivities to medications and food, gut and neurological symptoms, complicated births. Each thing was attributed to its own cause. Nobody connected the dots.
At twelve, I developed something else entirely: severe joint pain and inflammation that turned out to be an autoimmune disease, seronegative spondyloarthritis. I had textbook symptoms, including the enthesitis that's a hallmark of the condition — but I was also an atypical patient in several ways, and the diagnostic process was long. It was eventually diagnosed at the Mayo Clinic in the United States, and biological treatment helped a great deal. What no-one realised at the time was that I also had hEDS in the background — a rare and under-recognised condition that wasn't on anyone's radar — contributing to a parallel set of symptoms and complicating a clinical picture that was being viewed entirely through a rheumatological lens.
The autoimmune disease was severe through my teens and twenties — and into my early thirties, when, as a mother of three small daughters and a physician working for the World Health Organisation in Geneva, I had a significant flare following my third pregnancy. Postpartum flares are common in autoimmune disease. By then, I had also developed a series of opportunistic infections that meant my body could no longer tolerate the biologics that had helped for so many years. I could stand for twenty minutes at a time. Every step was excruciating. My rheumatologist told me — kindly — that there was nothing more they could do.
I refused to accept that as the end of my story.
A year later, through an integrative approach combining medical care with nutrition, lifestyle change, nervous system regulation, and deep personal work, I was walking again. Pain-free. My autoimmune disease went into remission, without medication. I was discharged from rheumatology in 2016. It has stayed in remission ever since.
That experience changed me as a person — and as a doctor.
It led me back to medicine differently. I trained in functional and integrative medicine. I opened my own integrative medical practice in New Zealand, working with people with complex chronic illness — the patients others had given up on, or who had given up on the system.
It was a clinician in New Zealand who first suspected hEDS, at 38. The official diagnosis came four years later in Germany, where genetic testing is more readily funded.
The hEDS is a different story. A genetic condition is not something you "go into remission" from — but hEDS symptoms and severity can fluctuate, and the way you live shapes how much they affect your life. As the years pass, the hEDS has come more clearly to the foreground — particularly after my births, which were complicated by the bleeding tendency that comes with hEDS and left me with a massive postpartum haemorrhage and significant medical trauma. The same integrative approach that resolved my autoimmune disease has become the foundation of how I live, and thrive, with hEDS and MCAS.
More recently, I cleared HPV-16 — the most aggressive high-risk strain — against an initially unfavourable prognosis, and continue to work integratively to reverse the pre-cancerous cervical changes it caused.
The most defining experience of my life was the traumatic birth and near-death of my first child, who is now a thriving young adult. The medical trauma I carried from that, layered with distressing experiences as a patient and as a clinician, became post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that I have since healed. It is the reason trauma-informed care sits at the centre of my practice today.
For the full story — including the corridor in Geneva, the talk that changed my life, and the unexpected results that followed when I addressed trauma — read the long version here →
What I do now
Clinical work
I am completing my specialist qualification in General Medicine (Facharzt für Allgemeinmedizin) in Berlin and continue to develop my integrative practice. I am not currently taking on new patients, as my focus is on writing and on building the broader work below.
Coaching and facilitation
I am also the founder of Wild Woman Reborn, a separate platform offering transformational life coaching, workshops, and longer journeys for people of all genders, in Berlin and online. The work goes behind the symptoms — to the emotional, psychological, cultural, and belief-level patterns that shape why we get sick, why we self-sabotage, and what we are really here to live. Conscious sexuality, embodiment, and personal transformation sit at the centre of it, because so much trauma, shame, and unmet wounding live in our relationship to sexuality, and very few of us are taught the real skills of communication, boundaries, and consent. I believe this is where a great deal of health, including illness, is rooted. Wild Woman Reborn is adjacent to my medical work and lives at its own website.
Writing
My book Patient Badass — a practical guide for navigating complex health journeys in a fragmented healthcare system, using an integrative medical approach — is forthcoming. You can sign up for early chapters and updates on the homepage.
Wild Woman Reborn
Alongside my medical work, I trained as a coach with Animas in the UK — an International Coaching Federation (ICF) accredited pathway toward the Associate Certified Coach (ACC) credential. Group facilitation is something I came to on my own, drawn to the depth of face-to-face contact and the particular alchemy of a group. My work draws on attachment theory, trauma-informed practice, embodied approaches to change, and transpersonal perspectives, always with consent and safety at the centre.
Qualifications & training
Medicine
Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery, Bachelor of Obstetrics (MB BCh BAO), Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI), Dublin, 2004
Master of Science in International Health (MScIH) and Diploma in Tropical Medicine and Public Health (DTMPH), Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, with University of Basel, University of Copenhagen, University of London, and University of Heidelberg, 2014
International Diploma of Humanitarian Assistance, Royal College of Surgeons Dublin and Hunter University New York, 1999
Registered with the Berlin Medical Council (Ärztekammer Berlin)
Currently completing specialist qualification in General Medicine (Facharzt für Allgemeinmedizin)
Integrative & functional medicine
Foundation Modules and Women's Health Module, Australasian College of Nutritional and Environmental Medicine, 2019–2020
CHEK Exercise Coach and Holistic Lifestyle Coach Level 1, C.H.E.K Institute, UK, 2014–2015
Advanced Certification of Resuscitation and Emergency Care, New Zealand, 2021
Coaching, trauma & facilitation
Transformational Lifestyle Coaching Accreditation (ICF-aligned, ACC pathway), Animas, UK, 2026
Trauma-informed coaching, Julia Vaughan Smith, UK, 2025
International experience
Consultant for the World Health Organisation (WHO), Geneva, Switzerland
Health Focus, international humanitarian aid organisation, Germany
Clinical training and practice in Ireland, Germany, and New Zealand
Rotary International Scholarship to Japan, 1996–1997
Secondary education in Perth, Australia
Stay close
Contact
info@joannabauersavage.com
© 2026 Joanna Bauer-Savage
All rights reserved
Joanna Bauer-Savage
10115 Berlin, Germany
Link to Wild Woman Reborn:
https://www.wildwomanreborn.com