We recently connected with Melinda Bekos and have shared our conversation below.
Melinda, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to hear the story behind how you got your first job in field that you currently practice in.
I started college as a dance major but an injury had me taking a few quarters off. I decided I’d take an elective anatomy course to learn more about my body. This was back in the day of actual papers and people in the registrar’s office, and somebody made a mistake admitting me into the cadaver anatomy course for physical therapists. I was not only hooked, but I was really good at it. By the time I started graduate school, my dissection skills were on-point and I was hired that very first summer between undergrad and grad school to prosect a cadaver for use in the undergraduate labs the upcoming fall. Prosection is dissection but with the intent for it to look good in the end, like a 3D anatomy poster image so students can study those structures. At that time I couldn’t have summed it up so clearly, but prosecting is removing most of the body’s fascia to leave behind the muscles, vessels, and nerves students need to learn. I was given a list of structures, my tools, and a quiet lab to work in to get the cadaver ready for the autumn quarter’s students. Without the confines of a schedule or protocolled dissection manual to follow, I followed patterns instead. I had this unique opportunity to begin exploring the fascinating interconnectivity and organization of fascia in a time when fascia wasn’t really a thing yet. I’d go on to spend thousands of hours in cadaver labs, but that very first summer job was an absolute game changer in the trajectory of my professional passions and purpose.
Melinda, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
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 masters degree in Anatomy and Medical Education specializing in developmental movement, fascial patterning and functional lymphatic macroanatomy. 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 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 prosecting 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.
Melinda’s 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 collaborative, virtual consortium of practitioners throughout central Ohio. This expanded concept better met the needs of prospective patients/clients/students by providing 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 center closed in 2018 and became a virtual resource once again. IntegrateColumbus.org was then born as a 501c3 nonprofit organization to continue the mission of helping the public navigate the landscape of Integrative Medicine.
Beyond ‘just healthcare’ it is becoming increasingly clear that wellness, a felt sense of well-being, isn’t found in the offices of providers or the remedies or advice they provide. It has become starkly clear that community, connection, interconnection, and belonging are the elements that determine our sense of being well beyond the biometrics and images ‘healthcare’ can provide. This knowing found its way to the fore in 2021 when Melinda started meeting with a small group that would become the founding circle of the WellBeing Cooperative. This new community organization holds great promise for co-creating personal, community, and global well-being and is open to individuals, providers, small businesses and other community organizations, and investors to join!
The micro/macro aspect of it all is not lost on Dr. Bekos. Over 20 years later, the world of fascia with its roles in connection, communication, inter-relatedness, and tensional integrity beautifully meets the world we are living in and the state of healthcare where we are in desperate need of authentic connection, healthy communication, social cohesion, and appropriate direction of tensions.
If you could go back, would you choose the same profession, specialty, etc.?
Yes! But I have had a unique moment in time and the path I had to travel will never be necessary for future people interested in fascia and integrative medicine. When I was in graduate school, fascia was just a few lines in a few anatomy books. Then in 2007, the first-ever research congress of fascia met. And in 2015, it officially transitioned from a vague ‘connective tissue’ to a full-fledged system of the body just like all of our other organ systems. Now, students have direct access to an international and ever-growing body of research and clinical interest. I predict that fascia will have its own specialists, just like all other body systems have, and just like integrative medicine is starting to have. I love my work and wouldn’t want to be doing anything else, but this particular window of time in the history of fascia in medical education and the advancement of integrative medicine has been particularly inspiring to get to be part of!
Have you ever had to pivot?
I taught cadaver anatomy for about ten years when I found myself having a really difficult time with the politics of academia. I’d been heartbroken to leave the Center for Integrative Medicine at Ohio State University just after we opened it. My resume reads like that is exactly where I was supposed to be: teaching gross anatomy, researching integrative medicine, and coordinating the center. But it wasn’t for me and I’d thought that a community college would be a better fit where I could focus on the lab work, my students, and the art of medical education. I was glad to have found a home at Columbus State where we had partnered with OSU to set up their brand-new cadaver program. This seemed like a place I could settle in and enter the tenure track. But I couldn’t settle into that bureaucracy or politic either. One day after a particularly strange department meeting I just went back to my office and called my husband to complain about the common themes. He suggested I just write a letter to my dean and quit. I think he was half joking and half serious. But I did write it. I didn’t plan to resign necessarily, but it felt good to put the possibility on paper. I wrote it quickly, saved it, and went on to whatever else. But the next day, there it was looking at me from my computer. I remember sitting there at my desk looking out over the downtown Columbus skyline with the late morning sun coming into my window. Yes. For sure. I was going to quit, I had no doubt about it. It seemed like a strange choice to give up this ‘great career’ with benefits and security. But I printed out the letter and walked it to my dean.
He was shocked. I was pretty surprised too. That was in early March of 2010, just enough time to finish up the quarter. I felt a huge weight off of me. No more department meetings. I didn’t have to care the state was moving from quarters to semesters. No more lectures. No more grading. And I was pretty sure about the things I’d miss: my students, my cadaver labs, and my sunny office. But I knew it was the right leap to leap. And it looked like I’d already leaped.
I thought I’d have a life of teaching and researching fascia and integrative medicine within an acadamic backdrop. I used to think I could best impact healthcare by teaching future healthcare providers how to appreciate the interconnection of our body as part of gross anatomy and thereby be more integrative practitioners. But the years of clinicals, residencies, and preceptorships that followed their time with me muted my message regardless of how inspiring an anatomy professor I could ever be. I think I’d feel totally defeated by this now if I hadn’t left. That wasn’t going to be a fruitful goal.
Instead, I was given a life where the only path-of-least-resistence, reasonable thing to do was focus on my small ‘practice’ that has been bubbling along on the side. I would see a few people a few evenings of the week. This had been going on informally since 1997 when I’d done a study between the anatomy department and the dance department and thereby ended up with some people that I did movement and bodywork with. So, that was the plan. And, I needed to finish my dissertation research. And, I found out we were expecting our first child. A total change of course.
I often go to that inner feeling I felt at my desk in my sunny office that day as a barometer for when I know something is the right thing to do. It didn’t make sense really, but I was sure. It was what right action felt like. If I’d thought about it much longer, the pros and cons might well have not turned out the same way. But that day was a pivot that turned me from an academic into a clinician and an employee to a community organization.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://melindacooksey.com/
Image Credits
Francesca Poliseno Miranda Wagner