Melinda Couch, PT, Owner, Program Director
Melinda has been a physical therapist for over 30 years, graduating from The University of Texas Health Sciences Center at San Antonio in 1993. She started her career as a traveling therapist and arrived in Colorado in 1995. The early part of her career centered around sports medicine and orthopedic manual therapy. She began working for U.S. Figure Skating in 1999 at Skate America. Then, she joined the Sports Medicine Committee of USFSA in 2003 to help promote injury prevention and sports performance to our U.S. Figure Skating Team. She also served as a physical therapist at several events, including four World Championships, and then as a Team USA physical therapist at the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, Russia. She was awarded the Thayer Tutt Sportsman Award in 2018 for her years of volunteer service in the local and international sporting communities.
Melinda became interested in the potential for Low-Intensity Light Therapy, also known as Photobiomodulation, to help heal orthopedic and sports injuries in 2015 after reading The Brain’s Way of Healing by Dr. Norman Doidge. Chapter 4 of this book describes the work of a group of clinicians in Toronto, Canada, who had been researching and utilizing this technology for over thirty years, obtaining results for Traumatic Brain Injury and Stoke Recovery. They also treated a wide range of orthopedic and athlete injuries with great success.
Melinda and her former business partner eventually traveled to Canada to see this research and treatment center. The data and results that Meditech International was achieving seemed valid, so they founded Peak LiLT,LLC, to bring Low-Intensity Light Therapy to Colorado Springs.
Success was achieved immediately in helping people recover from sports injuries, as well as herniated and bulging discs in the spine and post-surgical recovery after total knee and hip replacements.
Soon after, they also started helping people recover from concussion injuries sustained in either car accidents or sports such as figure skating. They were astounded to see the results of light therapy in assisting concussions to heal quickly if treatment could be started promptly within a few days of the injury. With everyone treated in that window of time, most of the concussion symptoms cleared after 5-6 treatments of LiLT!
Melinda obtained full ownership of Peak LiLT in 2022 and has been shifting our treatment focus to Neurological Conditions, returning to her first degree in Psychology with a Neuroscience focus. She has combined her knowledge of manual physical therapy for implementing osteopathic cranial and visceral mobilization and the neuroscience of applying light to the brain and nervous system to achieve great results for those wishing to heal the brain and nervous system functioning.
We are now obtaining results with tPBM, or transcranial Photobiomodulation, for people suffering from Parkinson’s Disease, Alzheimer’s Dementia, Stroke Recovery, and continued successes with TBI and Concussion Recovery. We are also achieving great success with Autonomic Nervous System recovery, helping people struggling with Long-Covid as well as digestive disorders such as IBS, migraines/headaches, sleep disorder, and even bone density recovery (the Autonomic Nervous System controls bone density)!
Melinda is a lifelong learner and is now exploring putting together the pieces of research that are pointing to the possibility that many neurodegenerative diseases, such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, may actually start in the gut…stay tuned!
Bryce Martin, LMT, Operations Manager
