A Brief Biography of Roger Gietzen
I was raised in Petoskey, a small town in Northern Michigan. My father loved being a doctor, and this was an early source of inspiration for my own career in medicine. My mother was a homemaker whose caring presence served as an important role model and helped fulfill my many growing curiosities in life. My two older brothers also became physicians, helping me see such a career was doable. I have one younger sister whose verbal communication skills are severely limited by Down’s Syndrome and Autism. She piqued my interest in the human mind and she also taught me how to be comfortable around other’s with disabilities.
During my medical school training, I began to develop an intense interest in alternative forms of medicine. I spent a rotation studying at Dr. Andrew Weil’s Program For Integrative Medicine in Tucson, Arizona, as well as many other holistic forms of treatment. I then became immersed in the training to become a neurologist, and holistic medicine took a brief back seat. However, after moving back to Petoskey and practicing as a self employed neurologist, I began to have a renewed interest in alternative understandings of health. This was prompted by an obvious mismatch between what I had learned in my medical training, and what I was seeing in real life. I found that most of the time, conventional medicine failed to adequately explain why people were ill and not surprisingly also failed at reliably resolving those illnesses. Four years after becoming a neurology attending, I made a strong intention to change my entire career path and started incorporating holistic principles in my work. After five years of intense self study, I opened this clinic, Healthy Mind Body, so as to be able to offer purely holistic services.