Episode 017: Mike Etlinger, Through a Patient’s Eyes, Finding Health and Life with Functional Medicine

In Episode 017 of A Medicinal Mind: Wisdom and Well Being, I engage in a practical conversation with my close friend and fellow functional medicine advocate Mike Etlinger. Mike is a Full Stack Web Developer living in Brooklyn, NY. When he's not coding, he enjoys cooking, hiking, and riding his bike all around the boroughs. He believes that the best way to manage your health is to empower yourself with the knowledge and skills to make healthy choices. Mike is on a mission to help others, armed with his experience managing his Psoriasis and all the health woes that come with it. Mike and I first crossed paths after a synchronous email following my guest podcast appearance with functional medicine practitioner Dr. Michael Ruscio.

As you will hear in the podcast, Mike’s background is quite unique, however, his personal story of losing his health as result of an overall unsustainable and less than optimal lifestyle during his college years is one that is becoming much too common in today’s world.

In our conversation, Mike opens up about his personal journey as a young man seeking to recover his health, searching for answers outside of traditional medical structures, eventually beginning a path to restoring his wellness working alongside Dr. Ruscio and his progressive functional medicine practice.

In the podcast, Mike outlines some of the most important lessons he has learned from being a patient seeking to educate himself and find the right functional medicine clinician to meet his needs.

Asking such questions as:

Is the practitioner compatible with my needs in this moment?
Do I need some encouragement or a stern source of external accountability?
Will I have freedom to experiment or will things be more protocol driven?
And what about my emotional needs? Will these be met or just my nutritional deficiencies?

What is my potential doctor’s specific area of expertise? Does is match my primary concerns?

And of course money. What can I expect in terms testing and treatment? Will everything fit within my budget?

Mike also offers some incredible insights on how to best prepare for your visit, making sure to honor and prioritize your needs as well as the time of the practitioner.

Some suggestions from Mike include:

1. Outlining very clearly your 2-3 primary goals. Get specific, make them attainable, relevant and time sensitive.
2. Picking 2-3 priority areas, symptoms or perceived dysfunctions that you would like to address.
3. Come prepared with a detailed history of what you have tried up to your visit. Medications, supplements, herbals, diets other protocols. Make it easy for the clinician to know what has or hasn’t work for you and to what extent you tried various treatments.

We also discuss some of the often overlooked areas of the healing process, focusing on growth and the many positives that can come from an illness or suffering.

Some of the opportunities we discuss include

Building awareness into what nourishes your body,
And revealing what hinders its flourishing.
Beginning to cultivate gratitude for your symptoms, seeing them as information and the body’s attempt at solving an area of dysfunction and not something to simply suppress

And lastly we close discussing Mike’s dynamic career change as he now pursues a career in health technology following his personal dive into functional and ancestral health.

Mike shares his recent work developing a food diary app that seeks to aid in one’s documentation of overall food quality, allowing an individual to build his or her awareness around food, potentially elucidating a specific food, emotional state or eating environment that is actually negatively impacting one’s health.

I was so excited to share this conversation with Mike, and I really hope you enjoy the episode, seeing the real, authentic and practical side of restoring health and promoting one’s flourishing.

I am incredibly grateful to Mike for reaching out in the first place many months back, and encourage you to contact Mike from the information in our show notes to hear more about his path and perhaps how you can begin your own journey to restoring your health.

Please reach out to mk.etlinger@gmail.com with any questions or comments. ​

I hope you enjoy the show!

Connect with Mike

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