Today we’d like to introduce you to Melinda Bekos. Them and their team share their story with us below:
Melinda started college as a dance major and ended up on a path that made her a three-time graduate of The Ohio State University. Her undergraduate degree became a personalized study program in the Neuropsychology and Physiology of Human Movement. Then she completed a traditional master’s degree in Anatomy and Medical Education specializing in developmental movement, fascial patterning, and functional lymphatic macro anatomy.
As a doctoral candidate, she researched developmental movement deficits related to ADHD in partnership with OSU and Nationwide Children’s Hospital. She holds a Ph.D. in Integrative Medicine with a graduate minor in Research Methods. In the late 1990s, she embarked on two-quarters of an independent study looking at the hip unwinding techniques from the cadaver lab applied to students in the dance department with reported hip issues.
That blending of academic worlds translated into the fascial unwinding and tensional relay balancing work that she has been doing with living clients ever since. Her applied anatomical approach has come to be called Somatic Integration Analysis (SIA). Through hands-on education, SIA helps people better understand their bodies and health concerns.
Melinda is not a medical doctor and cannot/does not diagnose any conditions, rather she aims to help people understand and work through their diagnoses. When there is no diagnosis, SIA can help locate sources of pain or limitation and potentially offer suggestions and/or resources toward reworking these patterns. There is no medical license in Ohio that covers this scope of practice.
With over a decade of experience teaching college-level, cadaver-based, regional and systems-based anatomy, physiology, and histology, she has logged over 3000 hours prosecuting cadavers for use in teaching programs, undergraduate courses, and continuing education curricula.
Melinda works with clients privately and teaches various aspects of applied anatomy and SIA to individual practitioners, professional groups, and out in the community. She is passionate about helping people find thoughtful teams of providers to help streamline individualized paths toward complete healing. Melinda enjoys helping people build integrative health networks for themselves and thrives from collaborations with other practitioners, teachers, and clinicians.
Integrative Medicine
The National Institutes of Health created the original framework in the 1990s with 4 primary domains of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) placed around a central health system of Western allopathy.
This more comprehensive model evolved as Melinda created her interdisciplinary doctoral program in Integrative Medicine to provide a framework for collaboratively joining together health and wellness professionals in a paradigm that empowers the individual and the provider. It helps round out and ground down care strategies, by educating and resourcing, and inspiring comprehensive healing within the community.
Dr. Bekos’ first integrative center, Columbus Comprehensive Health Center (CCHC), began in 2002. This group grew to 28 practitioners sharing space and focusing on team-based care. CCHC’s integrative model drew interest from the Ohio State University, which led to the acquisition of CCHC by OSU. The OSU Center for Integrative Medicine opened in 2005 and remains open today.
In 2006, Melinda founded Your-Center. A virtual community of like-minded professionals, Your-Center.com provided a valuable resource pool for the greater central Ohio community. Your-Center took the idea of a facility with many practitioners all ‘under one roof and instead created a collaborative, virtual consortium of practitioners throughout central Ohio.
This expanded concept better met the needs of prospective patients/clients/students by providing a resource in their neighborhoods instead of just at one elite location in town. It also better met the needs of practitioners, honored their culture of small business ownership/autonomy, and highlighted their existing facilities and private practices operating throughout central Ohio.
In 2013, the virtual community found a physical center. The All Life Center (ALC) was founded as a nonprofit community cooperative. Melinda served as ALC’s President and Director until the property’s development began and the center closed in 2018. IntegrateColumbus.org was then born.
The community continues to thrive under the umbrella of Integrate Columbus, established in 2019 as a 501c3 nonprofit organization. While there have been numerous iterations of her vision, the mission has always been the same… ‘Create a healthy community by collaboratively resourcing individuals, small businesses, and the healthcare system to integrate positive outcomes.’
I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey has been a fairly smooth road?
It has been a fascinating 25 years to be focused on fascia and integrative medicine. When I started college, nobody talked about fascia and there wasn’t anything called ‘integrative’ medicine. The places where the road has been tough have been matched by momentum sparked by public interest and the need for better solutions for well-being in our community.
It was hard to write up my academic degrees and hard to be laughed at by people that didn’t believe in the importance of complementary becoming an integrated part of healthcare, but we can all still feel that the pendulum needs to keep swinging and it is beyond rewarding to be part of the possibilities.
Appreciate you sharing that. What should we know about Integrate Columbus?
Integrate is a nonprofit focused on creating a healthy community. We collaboratively resource individuals, small businesses, and the healthcare system to be more integrated and find positive outcomes. By helping the public navigate the integrative healthcare landscape and improve their well-being, we ultimately hope to contribute to the growth of a healthy community.
By providing individuals access to comprehensive solutions and a clearer understanding of their overall health and wellness. We offer a contemporary model for positive support and advocacy and supply the most effective and industry-leading educational health/wellness resources.
We create a sustainable community culture of reputable care providers and inspire proactive outreach initiatives to meet needs throughout the broader central Ohio community. We are proud to be able to help people find the healthcare teams they need and deserve.
Risk-taking is a topic that people have widely differing views on – we’d love to hear your thoughts.
I think we all have heard that inner voice that tells us when a leap is worth taking. I had to learn early on to listen and stay committed to that voice. For the 15 years I spent in higher education, I had a lot of people telling me that my degrees weren’t ’employable.’ But I simply knew I couldn’t study anything else. I couldn’t have told you where it was going in the late 1990s, but I knew that the fascia I had been studying in cadaver labs needed more inquiry.
I knew I had to study fascia as rigorously and reputably as possible despite very little support and understanding of why this mattered or what worth a graduate degree was. Similarly, with Integrative Medicine, I knew it was perhaps crazy to open a center in 2002 with no business knowledge. Not knowing what I didn’t know at the time was my biggest asset and liability simultaneously.
But that center just a few short years later was validated, and acquired, by Ohio State University and we formed the Center for Integrative Medicine which is still there today. Risks don’t feel that risky when your heart and mind are aligned in telling you it is the right thing. When that comes together, the momentum comes together and you find yourself doing things you never could have imagined.
Contact Info:
- Website: MelindaCooksey.com and IntegrateColumbus.org
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/IntegrateColumbus
Image Credits
Sherry MacDonald
