Functional Medicine Doctor in Miami
What exactly is functional medicine? How does a functional medicine doctor differ from primary care physicians? At its core, Functional medicine is an approach to health care that puts you, the patient, at the center. When you seek care with a functional medicine approach, your doctor will aim to find the root cause of your symptoms or condition.
What is a Functional Medicine Doctor?
Functional medicine doctors are trained to look beyond a patient’s symptoms and diagnoses to find the underlying cause of their illness. They also aim to find the root cause of chronic illnesses, which can be difficult for traditional doctors. Functional medicine practitioners will often combine conventional medical treatments with alternative therapies such as acupuncture and nutrition therapy.
A functional medicine doctor can help diagnose and treat chronic illnesses, autoimmune conditions, hormonal imbalances, digestive disorders, neurological disorders, and more. One of the key differences between doctors like Faride Ramos and primary care physicians is that functional medicine specialists take a holistic approach to healthcare by looking at the whole body rather than just one aspect of it. This allows them to treat your condition from every angle possible in order to get you back on the road to good health.
What Can Functional Medicine Treat?
Functional medicine can help with a range of health concerns, including:
- Chronic pain
- Infertility
- Hormone imbalances
- Autoimmune disorders and more
In some instances, functional medicine physicians may recommend prescription medication or other medical interventions to treat your condition. However, they will also do their best to help you address the root cause of your symptoms. For example, if you have chronic pain that is not alleviated by traditional treatments like medications and physical therapy, a functional medicine doctor may suggest changes in your diet or lifestyle habits that can help alleviate your symptoms.
Functional medicine doctors typically employ natural remedies to treat serious health problems and educate patients on how to improve their lives through diet and exercise. Although there are no specific guidelines for what treatments a functional medicine doctor will use for a particular condition, it’s likely they’ll take a detailed health history of the patient before prescribing any course of treatment.
Common Treatments in Functional Medicine
In functional medicine, treatments are geared toward addressing the root cause of a patient’s condition. This could mean identifying and removing food sensitivities, treating chronic infections, optimizing hormone balance, or providing cognitive therapy to address depression. Here are some common treatments Dr. Faride Ramos prescribes:
Preventive Care
Based on your own distinctive factors including your family and personal history, lifestyle, behavior, and psychospiritual factors, Dr. Ramos will guide her care in order to prevent the development of medical problems. Even though you may have a predisposition for some illnesses, you may not develop them unless you adopt certain behaviors or lifestyle choices. There are many ways men and women can live longer, healthier and happier lives if they are proactive and take care of their own body.
Dietary Changes
Dr. Ramos helps you design a diet that gives you all of the nutrients you need for a healthy, functioning body.
Nutritional Supplements
Dr. Ramos recommends nutritional supplements to give you the vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants you need to be healthy, based on your blood levels.
Bioidentical Hormone Replacement Therapy
If hormone loss is to blame for your symptoms, Dr. Ramos recommends bioidentical hormone replacement therapy in the form of pills, patches, creams, or injections.
Athletic Performance Optimization
If you play sports competitively, Dr. Ramos can help you adjust your lifestyle and supplement your fitness routine with new, beneficial steps that help you stay healthy and strong. She can help you create a diet plan, select nutritional supplements, and orchestrate your sleep and recovery to help you achieve specific goals and perform at your best. The tests that can be done are amino acids, fatty acids, and nutrient hormones. All depending on your personal clinical history.
Functional medicine is not intended to replace other types of health care; rather, it is meant to supplement a patient’s current care plan. For example, if you have asthma symptoms and your doctor discovers a chronic infection that is going untreated, he or she may provide antibiotics to clear up the infection as well as additional treatment for the asthma itself.
Dr. Faride Ramos | Functional Medicine Doctor in Miami
Double Board-certified Functional & internal Medicine physician, Dr. Faride Ramos provides integrative, high-quality care to patients living in South Lauderdale, Florida.
Dr. Ramos understands that medicine is an art that requires integral and detailed training. She decided to specialize in Internal and Functional Medicine because of their complementary features. Both fields place lifestyle at the forefront and offer more diagnostic and treatment options than typically afforded by western medicine.
Schedule an appointment with Dr. Ramos today!
