Dr Ahmad is Medical Director and Cofounder ShaMynds Healing Center- PC www.shamynds.com in Sacramento California, since 2021. At ShaMynds, she has coalesced all her training in narrative medicine, complex care, ketamine assisted psychotherapy, and integrative medicine, to take care of adults and adolescents with a holistic approach.

With Narrative Medicine, the arts and creative explorations are the fountainhead to connect to people in their illness, community, and social constructs. At UCSF, as former Associate Professor, she taught the methodologies of her master’s training in Narrative Medicine from Columbia University to teach and implement narrative medicine with compassionate-based inquiry. She continues to conduct narrative medicine workshops, for patients, healers, and educators.

She believes in fusing integrative, narrative arts, and psychedelic medicines to caring for patients- human to human. She is fellowship trained in Integrative Psychiatry, psychedelic assisted therapy, MAPs trained, and ketamine assisted therapy, and provider through IPI (Integrative Psychiatry Institute). Fellowship in primary care psychiatry Univ. of California, Irving. She has completed numerous additional trainings in Gabor Mate’ compassionate inquiry, nutritional psychiatry, natural remedies, and other healing arts.

Dr Alya Ahmad is a pediatric hospitalist and now an Integrative Medicine physician. Former Associate Professor of Pediatrics at UCSF and director of Down Syndrome clinic in the Sheikh Khalifa Medical Center-affiliate of Cleveland Clinic in Abu Dhabi UAE.

Her medical career begins as bio-chemical engineer from Univ of Texas-Austin- developing bio-compatible biosensors for infusion pumps and modeling receptivity of acetylcholine receptors in the hippocampus of the brain.

She completed her medical degree and pediatric residency at Univ of Texas Health Science Center. Thereafter, she has worked as a hospitalist in academic medicine in Texas, California and overseas.

Dr Ahmad is also an advocate for mental health, a public speaker and blogger for the art of healing. www.thecontextofcare.com

She is a medical officer for Psychedelic Entheogen Academic Council (PEAC) at UCSF, https://ucsf.campusgroups.com/peac/home/
a platform for shared knowledge for speaker and community to meet on active research, clinical work, community, advocacy, and indigenous, and experiential providers in the psychedelic healing realm.

She is an immigrant, and women of color who remains too curious as a learner and educator. Her journey as a healer has focused on treating the most needful populations. She has witnessed the effects of trauma, complexity and social disparity has on illness.
She has serviced care in rural health, immigrant populations, and refugee care centers, in the middle east, Pakistan, Lebanon, Houston, Fresno, and now Sacramento.
Her teaching as Clinical faculty at Baylor College of Medicine to Univ. of California, San Francisco, ranges in implementing and teaching better ways to caring for children and their families. She has founded programs for children with special needs, Down syndrome, obesity, complex care consultations services, and narrative medicine, only to emphasize “whole” person care.

Her mantra is healing the self and others with empathy and the respectful fusion of self-wisdom, ancient, and novel therapies.

Unbecoming the Good Girl: The Day I Chose Myself

Alya Ahmad, MD, FAAP

Maria Kang

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