For more than a decade, Erika Schlick’s work in health education has been shaped by her own experience as a patient and a desire to help others better understand what is happening in their bodies so they can ask better questions and advocate for their health.
Erika’s health changed dramatically in 2012 when she became chronically ill and spent years dealing with Lyme disease, mold illness, autoimmune conditions, gut issues, thyroid health, and many of the overlapping factors that can make complex chronic illness so difficult to understand. After years of searching for answers and eventually reaching remission from Lyme disease, that experience changed the direction of her career.
Erika became a health coach, created The Trail To Health, wrote the cookbook Wandering Palate, launched the This Healthy Life podcast, and began interviewing physicians, researchers, and practitioners across chronic illness, root cause medicine, nutrition, women’s health, and longevity.
Her experience as a patient took another unexpected turn in 2024 when she was diagnosed with Lipedema and underwent four surgeries to treat the disease. Once again, Erika found herself trying to understand a condition that remains widely misunderstood and underdiagnosed, and she began using her platform to bring greater awareness and education to the Lipedema community.
That work eventually led to the creation of the Lipedema Summit in June 2026. What began as an effort to bring patients and experts together grew into the world’s largest Lipedema event to date, attracting more than 13,000 registrants and bringing together leading physicians, surgeons, therapists, researchers, advocates, patients, and healthcare professionals from around the world.
The response made something very clear: there is an enormous need for health education that gives patients direct access to the experts working in these fields while making complicated medical conversations easier to understand.
The success of the Lipedema Summit led Erika to co-found True Health Summits, with a mission to create high-quality educational events around health topics that deserve deeper conversations.
Now, experiencing midlife herself, Erika has turned her attention to a much broader question: what should women actually understand about their health as they move through their 40s, 50s, and beyond?
That question became the foundation for the Women’s Midlife Health Summit, a free three-day virtual event taking place November 10–12, 2026, bringing together more than 40 experts across women’s health, hormones, longevity, metabolic health, functional and root cause medicine, sleep, nutrition, oral health, environmental health, bone health, aesthetics, and healthy aging and because midlife health is about more than hormones alone, we’re also bringing in experts who can help us understand the often-overlooked connections between different systems in the body. One of those experts is Dr. Sandra Moldovan, an integrative dentist and a leading voice in the connection between oral health and whole-body health. Her perspective brings an important—and often overlooked—piece of the longevity conversation to the Summit, helping us understand how what’s happening in the mouth can be connected to what’s happening throughout the body.
Women’s Midlife Health Summit
November 10–12, 2026 Fi
Register free at midlife-summit.com
She is the founder and host of the Lipedema Summit and Women’s Midlife Health Summit, where she brings together leading physicians, researchers, practitioners, and health experts to make emerging science and clinical insights more accessible to patients and the broader health community.
Through her educational platforms, interviews, and health summits, Erika focuses on bridging the gap between practitioners and patients, encouraging people to better understand their health, ask informed questions, and become active participants in their care.
- Why Erika Schlick Is Bringing Together Leading Women’s Health Experts - August 21, 2026