Center for Health & Healing
Treat your emotions, mend your body
“UNDERSTAND ANYTHING AND YOU CAN CONQUER IT.” ―Dr. Melinea Holman
“Your body is a doctor waiting to be heard,” says Dr. Melinea Holman, owner of the Fort Myers-based Center for Health & Healing.
She specializes in listening. Those seeking out this holistic practitioner have lost faith in traditional doctors, she says, or they don’t consume a lot of medications or are what she terms medical throwaways. “Their doctors,” she says of those seeking her services, “say ‘it’s in your head,’ ‘there’s nothing wrong with you,’ ‘there’s nothing we can do,’ but their gut is telling them something else.”
Holman’s training is in chiropractic and nutritional therapy. But she does so much more than adjustments and alignments with the popular Body Talk System, a philosophy developed by John Veltheim, founder of the International Body Talk Association in Sarasota. Veltheim trained Holman and many other treatment professionals. Body Talk is a kind of natural biofeedback system, Holman says. “By using a certain protocol,” she adds, “I can tap into your own innate healing and your body can tell me the direction it wants to go.”
Holman says she can hold a patient’s wrist, observe how muscles tense and relax, for example, then establish communication and balance within the body by tapping the head and chest. This signals the brain and heart to prepare to heal, and deep breathing facilitates release, she says.
Melinea Holman grew up in a Midwest home serving organic foods and raw milk. “My dad,” she says, “didn’t know it at that time, but he was intuitive. He brought us to what they called ‘Hot Hands’ in Canada, like an energy-healer … everything was very natural.”
Understanding Body Talk takes a certain intuition, a gift Holman came to understand in her childhood. “When I was 5,” she says, “I had an out-of-body experience, and from then on I knew certain things about my life, not necessarily on a conscious level, but I just knew things.”
For instance, Holman at age 6 remembers “coloring on the floor and one of my mom’s friends, who was a nurse, asked me what I would like to be when I grew up,” she recalls. “Without even a blink of an eye, I said I will be the kind of doctor that will heal people when no one else can heal them.”
Holman in her practice will target five points of healing: physical, nutritional, emotional, mental and spiritual. While addressing each, she says, “The physical can only occur if the others are off.”
Getting to the root of her patients' physical problems rather than putting a Band-Aid on them inv olves uncovering emotions that, if left unchecked, manifest into disease and illness, she says. Holman says lungs, for instance, process grief, which on a physical level can cause chronic bronchitis or asthma, leading to allergies. When these health issues are identified during a Body Talk session, the tapping, breathing and your intention “shifts the energy,” she says, “get rid of the emotion and eventually you don’t have the issues anymore.”
When Juan Fernandez first met Holman in 2005, the Fort Myers man was “literally dying. I spent $55,000 on doctors who said nothing was wrong … but every day I was getting worse.”
Fernandez says he suffered headaches, dizziness and could not sleep at that time. With Holman’s help, he says, “I was almost totally recovered by the first year, with no medications or chemicals. I feel like a kid, everything is working in the right way.”
Estero’s Christina Kusak had suffered from lupus and other maladies. She says doctors at the time wanted to remove her spleen, with no guarantees. Like Fernandez, Kusak says now she’s the healthiest she’s ever been after treatments with Holman. “She gets deeper than anyone I’ve ever been to in my journey of holistic medicine,” Kusak says. “She unlocks the root of my issue, it surfaces, we work through it and I find the healing―it is extremely enlightening.”
Holistic medicine shouldn’t be expensive; $150-$200 for a first visit with diagnostic testing and consultation, $50-$100 after that, says Holman. She says typical patients need not see a holistic physician weekly or even monthly, explaining, “The body needs time to heal, to let the supplements take effect, and they don’t have to be expensive, either.” Gina Birch is a well-known Southwest Florida broadcast journalist and a frequent contributor to TOTI Media.