Dr. Sandy Gluckman, an integrative child therapist, and Dr. Alina Olteanu, an integrative pediatrician, know all too well that treating only the symptoms does not heal children’s chronic health or behavior problems.

Together, they offer a natural approach to medicine in Dallas and Frisco, Texas. One that includes integrative pediatrics, a functional medicine approach and psychological treatment for childhood issues such as ADD, ADHD, mood disorders, anxiety, and depression.

Doctors Gluckman and Olteanu are educating their patients about the fact that compartmentalized medicine does not work because it does not treat the whole person and is, therefore, unable to bring about long-term, sustainable health and wellness.

They teach their patients how they have been ‘trained’ by the medical world to think of themselves and their children as made up of separate parts, and when one part is not working well, we seek a doctor who specializes in treating that particular part. In the years gone by, this sounded like a great idea, but medicine has evolved to the understanding that we are ONE integrated system where all the parts depend on and affect each other for health and wellness.

Did you know that there are several hundred medical specialties?  This means that doctors are practicing compartmentalized medicine, treating only the symptoms they want to see, instead of treating the spirit, body, and brain together as one. Doctors, Sandy Gluckman and Alina Olteanu, are showing patients the limitations of this approach by combining their areas of expertise and practicing spirit-body-brain medicine.

A patient could go to a neurologist for bad migraines or to a gastroenterologist for chronic constipation. Still, if these doctors are only treating the symptom and if no one is taking a step back and looking at the entire person, spirit-body-brain, the health issue resurfaces or gets progressively worse or new and different symptoms appear.

Of great concern to this unique duo of doctors is what this approach is doing to children who are grappling with learning, behavior, or mood challenges. Many children are labeled with all kinds of diagnoses and treated for the label. But a child is SO much more than his or her diagnostic label.

Young boy at pre-school class

No matter what symptoms adults or children have, there are always three layers of healing:

Physical body healing

This is influenced by genetics also by our lifestyle and diet, digestion, sleep, exercise. It includes everything we put into our mouths, onto our skin, and breathe into our lungs as well as including the way we use technology.

Brain healing

Optimizing brain health includes eliminating environmental toxins and improving nutrition through healthy diet and nutritional supplements, like omega 3 for example. Because the brain and the gut speak to each other, healing the brain also includes our gut health and microbiome. There is no coincidence, for example, that the majority of children with learning, behavior, or mood problems have some gut problems and vice-versa. Children with tummy discomfort frequently are anxious or moody. Brain healing is also influenced by the beliefs we carry, the thoughts we think, the feelings we have, and how we behave.

Spirit healing

The Gluckman-Olteanu spirit-body-brain approach is based on the scientifically proven fact that feeling good, behaving positively, loving life flows from a healthy inner spirit. Conversely, a hurting spirit creates a hurting body and a hurting brain. While the concepts of the “physical body” and “brain” seem self-explanatory, let us share with you what we mean about a child’s spirit. This is the energetic essence of your child. It is the uniqueness of who the child is.

Stressed out business woman and mother

One more major factor

Chronic stress is the root cause of the majority of health issues. Stress throws the spirit, body, and brain off balance and triggers symptoms in each of the three layers of healing. Dr. Alina Olteanu describes it this way:

‘Attempting to heal any disease without addressing the real underlying root cause, which is the stress level, is like trying to put out a fire with a water hose while also pouring gasoline over the fire.’

Mother helping daughter with homework

Parent-Child Relationship

There is a myriad of reasons why we can be stressed, but in the case of a child, the most primary cause of stress is a parent-child relationship that is not meeting the child’s unique needs. As Dr. Sandy Gluckman likes to say: “Our children arrive with the perfect parenting manual. They have come to teach us. We need to learn from then what works for them and what doesn’t.’

With all the love in the world, parents can inadvertently hurt their children’s spirit, either by not understanding their children’s unique needs or by not being healthy themselves.

A healthy parent-child relationship starts with healthy parents, in spirit, body, brain. Parents cannot give their children what they don’t have, or more precisely, what they are not. We cannot expect our children to be happy, self-confident, brave, calm, and peaceful if we don’t embody those qualities in ourselves.

Remember:

  1. Treating just one symptom, in isolation, does not lead to true healing.
  2. A child’s spirit-body-brain health starts with a healthy parent and a healing parent-child relationship.

Contact Dr. Sandy Gluckman, PhD at at 972 758 1246, drsandygluckman@gmail.com, or visit www.drsandygluckman.com;  Dr. Alina Olteanu, MD, PhD at 214-736-1954, info@wholechildtexas.com, or visit www.wholechildtexas.com