Healing the Brain Through Integrative Medicine, with Allen T. Lewis, MD and Alex Doman

Personal experience and a thriving integrative medicine practice have combined to make Allen T. Lewis, MD one of the most successful practitioners utilizing The Listening Program® (TLP) to care for patients with many special needs.

In a heartfelt interview with Alex Doman, Dr. Lewis shared his own experiences with his child and autism, as well as how he cares for patients with many special needs using Functional Integrative Medicine practices, and The Listening Program with great success.

Dr. Lewis began his career in mainstream pediatric care. Over his first ten years as a pediatrician, he found himself pulled toward thinking about things from an integrative perspective by the parents whose children he was seeing. He found that listening to the parents was very important in healing and helping the child.

Integrative thinking became more prominent for Dr. Lewis when his son, Brian, was diagnosed with Autism at age 3, in 1999. Within the first year of his son’s life, he knew something was wrong. Colleagues noted that he “just wasn’t present”, and Dr. Lewis saw it too. He needed to find answers, and integrative medicine approaches brought about the healing and changes he was seeking for his son.

While all patients are different, Dr. Lewis believes that peeling away the layers of illness to un-impair the brain can open the potential for each person.

With 30 years of medical practice, Dr. Lewis is the founder of The Sancta Familia Center for Integrative Medicine, and is now a Functional Integrative Medicine provider, treating Learning, mood, developmental, behavioral, immune, ADD/ADHD, PANS/PANDAS, Lyme, anxiety and gastrointestinal issues.

In the interview, Dr. Lewis tried to pare down some of the major obstacles to healing he has seen with his patients over the past several years, and he said that common concerns among all of his immune patients, and the majority of his entire patient population, to some degree, are toxicity, inflammation and stress.

Dr. Lewis has found that by removing these base roadblocks, you can often resolve many issues without having to address them directly, as these base roadblocks often drive the weakness that lead to many other issues in health.

Dr. Lewis expressed that a major issue in brain-impairment, and a substantial roadblock to healing, is stress-overload. In several years of treating patients, he has found stress-overload to be a prominent root problem in many of his patients, both with immune conditions as well as other diagnosis and concerns. Stress impairs healing, immune function, behavior, detoxification, digestion, sensory processing, socialization, language perception, sleep, balance and overall development as Dr. Lewis shared in his article, Optimize Healing by Reducing Stress.

In order to heal, the body needs a “safe signal”. Safe signals can come from food, sleep, exercise, medication and prayer, hobbies and music. He said that unfortunately, things like getting good sleep, exercising, yoga and meditation, and even engaging in hobbies that you enjoy can be very difficult when you are sick.

This is where TLP comes in as a very important part of his treatment model. He likes TLP because it is a gentle approach to healing the brain, and it is easy to do, even in your own home and on your own schedule. He has found that dramatic beneficial changes can occur in 15 or 30 minutes a day of listening to music that can “Reboot the Brain” to be able to function better, and in turn better support the body and all of its systems.

Dr. Lewis says he has seen multiple success stories, which continue to grow in many different areas of use. When he first incorporated TLP into his practice, he quickly found that it was very helpful with his ASD patients for sensory processing, language, learning, behavioral and social development, as he shared some of his patient stories like this 13 year old patient with Autism, and this 32 year old patient with Autism and Auditory Processing Disorder. He has also had success with PANS and PANDAS patients, even seeing improved response to immune treatments and elimination of “flares”. He is currently incorporating TLP into his Lyme disease treatment protocols.

Dr. Lewis doesn’t just recommend TLP for others, he is also a listener. He finds benefit for himself with increased creativity and lowered seasonal effective disorder symptoms. He has also used it for family members to restore memory, increase energy levels and elevate moods following cancer treatments and Lyme disease.

When asked if he would recommend it for other medical practices, his answer was a quick “It’s a no-brainer!” He went onto say “As a medical doctor, TLP is a powerful tool. When in doubt, do it yourself, talk to Alex, or talk with other medical professionals who are using it now”.

In closing, Dr. Lewis restated that to truly be able to find optimal healing, you need to restore the basic pieces of health, and remove the base roadblocks to healing.

Please tune in for this amazing interview with Alex Doman and Dr. Allen T. Lewis, MD as they discuss Healing the Brain through Integrative Medicine.