The Academy of Comprehensive Integrative Medicine

W. Lee Cowden, MD, MD(H)

Chairman of the Scientific Advisory Board and Academy Professor

Dr. Lee Cowden is a USA board-certified cardiologist and internist who is internationally known for his knowledge and skill in practicing and teaching integrative medicine. He has co-authored many books and articles on integrative medicine and has pioneered successful treatments of cancer, autism, Lyme disease and many other illnesses.

Practice

Cardiology/Internal Medicine/Integrative Medicine private practice from1984 through 1987 in St. Louis, Missouri and from 1988 to present in Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas.

Medical Education

University of Texas Medical School, Houston, Texas – M.D. 1975-1978
Internal Medicine Residency (St. Louis University Hospital) –1978-1981
Cardiology & Critical Care Medicine Fellowship (St. John’s Mercy Medical Center and St. Louis University Hospital) – 1981-1984

In 1975, I moved from arid Lubbock, Texas to hot and humid Houston, Texas to attend medical school at UTMSH.  Soon after arriving in Houston I developed allergic rhinitis, then allergic sinusitis, then infective sinusitis, then bronchitis, and finally pneumonia.  Isought help from the chairman of the UTMSH Allergy and Immunology department, then the chairman of the UTMSH Ear, Nose and Throat department and finally the chairman of the UTMSH Pulmonary department.  I continued to get progressively worse, despite following the instructions of these chairmen and taking their recommended drugs.  Fortunately, my wife’s grandmother came to visit us in Houston.  She was a school teacher and self-taught nutritionist.  She took me to the health food store and got me started on some vitamins, minerals, and herbs.  I then rapidly improved and was able to perform well in medical school again.

In my spare time during medical school, residency and fellowship, I read books on orthomolecular nutritional therapies, on Western herbal therapies, on Eastern herbal therapies, on homeopathy, on fixed magnetic therapies, diet, lifestyle, and so on.  As I learned new things, I would apply this new knowledge to my own health and the health of my family and friends.  The success that I had with these integrative therapies gradually improved.  In 1984, I finished my fellowship training in cardiology and critical care medicine at St. Louis University and opened a partnership practice with another doctor who had gone through the same training program with me. We were on the staff at several hospitals and did hospital rounds twice a day, mostly in the intensive care units.  I saw many of my patients improve to the point of leaving the hospital.  However, after a month or two, many of them were back in the hospital with the same problems, because they had not changed their lifestyle or diet nor supplemented with nutrients. After one year of this type of practice, I decided two things. First, I was intervening much too far downstream in these patients’ lives to make the kind of difference I wanted to make. And second, I realized that I could no longer, in good conscience, practice a type of medicine on my patients that I then knew was inferior to the type of medicine I was practicing on myself, my family, and my friends.  I then set up a preventive medicine/preventive cardiology practice in St. Louis.  Shortly after that, I moved to Dallas, Texas.  I could not find another doctor who had a similar philosophy of practice, so I rented an office space across the street from the busiest hospital in Dallas. As fate would have it, my office was also between the elevator and the busiest cardiologist in town. Many patients came to see me after they left the office of the cardiologist down the hall, who had a four-month waiting list.

I often recommended nutrients to my patients and would send them to local health food stores to get their therapy. The health food stores soon started referring patients as they saw my patients coming in with better and better health each visit. The patients who were referred were those who had failed conventional allopathic medical therapy and had failed self-treatment. My practice grew from a few patients in 1987 to four thousand patients in 1994. I had to close the Dallas practice in 1994.  Because of the extreme stress of that practice, my wife, who helped manage the practice, and I had both developed unstable angina (a heart attack waiting to happen), as well as likely malignant conditions.  I used only natural, non-invasive means to treat my wife’s and my conditions. When I went back into practice after recovering our health, I spent much of my time travelling and teaching, which I still do to this day.

Areas of greatest interest in medicine.

I have a passion to educate health professionals how to use all the different diagnostic and therapeutic modalities that are available in integrative medicine to help their patients, especially those patients who are given no help and no hope by the allopathic medical community.

Therapeutic modalities I have used.

Diagnostically, in addition to the usual allopathic history-taking, physical exam, laboratory testing and imaging procedures, I have used evaluative kinesiology, Chinese pulse assessment, sclerology, iridology, Chinese tongue and fingernail evaluation, and various forms of electro-dermal screening.  Recently, I have found the fully-automated, quantitative electro-dermal screening systems to be the most useful single diagnostic aid. Therapeutically, I use diet, lifestyle counseling, emotional counseling, Recall Healing, EMDR, REMAP, Thought-Field Therapy, orthomolecular nutrient therapy, herbal therapies, homeopathic therapies, fixed-magnetic therapies, pulsed-electro-magnetic frequency therapies, oxidative therapies (ozone, IV hydrogen peroxide, etc.), color therapies, laser and other photonic therapies, sauna-therapy, colon hydrotherapy, lymphatic-drainage, modified fasting and various other detox therapies, German Neural therapy, reflexology, electro-acupressure therapy, Ki-Iki-Jyutsu therapy, and prayer (just to name those I use most often).

Health conditions with which I have had the greatest success.

I have had very good success treating non-invasively the following conditions: atherosclerotic disease, cardiomyopathy and congestive heart failure, high blood pressure, all types of arthritis, chronic fatigue, Lyme disease, Autism, most cancers, type 1 and 2 diabetes, chronic sinusitis and a variety of other chronic diseases.