DUTCH Provider Spotlight: Dr. Lynne Mielke
by Clinical Consulting Team
Dr. Lynne R. Mielke is the founder of Optimal Health Spectrums in Pleasanton, California. She takes a whole-person approach and uses specialized testing to determine the underlying cause of each person’s health condition. After the source of the problem is identified, natural integrative medicine treatments are customized to meet the needs of each individual. Helping her patients reach optimal health is her personal and professional mission.
Dr. Mielke graduated from the Indiana University School of Medicine, then completed her Psychiatry residency at UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute, where she became board certified by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology. She has received extensive training in anti-aging medicine through the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine. Dr. Mielke is also a Fellow of the American Academy of Ozonotherapy.
DUTCH: What inspired you to become a healthcare practitioner?
Dr. Lynne Mielke: I was inspired to be a doctor when I was a young girl and I saw a female doctor for the first time – I knew at that moment that I wanted to do that.
DUTCH: What is your training?
Dr. Lynne Mielke: I am a board-certified Psychiatrist who practiced traditional psychiatry for years before I was exposed to integrative medicine principles and changed my entire career focus.
DUTCH: Describe your medical background/practice?
Dr. Lynne Mielke: I now practice full-time integrative/functional medicine in a full-service private practice clinic called Optimal Health Spectrums that I founded.
DUTCH: What other functional testing do you use in your practice?
Dr. Lynne Mielke: We do nutritional testing, bioidentical hormones and anti-aging medicine, IV chelation and heavy metal testing, Lyme testing and treatment, GI tests …. pretty much the full gamut of functional medicine testing.
DUTCH: How have you incorporated DUTCH Testing into your practice?
Dr. Lynne Mielke: I do DUTCH testing on all my bioidentical hormone patients, which is a big percentage of my practice.
DUTCH: What are the changes you have seen in your patients and practice since incorporating the DUTCH Test?
Dr. Lynne Mielke: What I love about the DUTCH test is that it always correlates with the patient’s clinical picture. For example, if a patient is having symptoms of low estrogen, the test will show that. I found that blood and saliva testing rarely correlated with the clinical picture that I was seeing and were not helpful to me in making treatment decisions. Those testing methods also did not provide me with the important metabolite results and now nutritional markers that the DUTCH test provides. Getting hormone levels over an entire day through these 4-5 spot urine collections is much more helpful than a blood test at a single point in time.
DUTCH: Where do you see functional/integrative medicine 20 years from now?
Dr. Lynne Mielke: I am hopeful that functional/integrative medicine will become much more the standard of care in the next 20 years, and an eventual dream would be that it would be covered by insurance so that more patients could benefit from it.
DUTCH: What do you like to do outside of work?
Dr. Lynne Mielke: I love to sing in choruses-musical harmony is good for the soul.
