By Gerry Letendre, RPh, MBA, CHt
Dr. Kinga Porter, owner of Whole Health clinic, believes everything is a spectrum in medicine, starting with prevention, then involving supplements and diet and ending with medication, if needed.
As a native of Poland, Dr. Porter has been familiar with integrative medicine, which combines alternative and conventional medical treatments and practices, her entire life. She says this holistic approach to healthcare is more popular in her home country than it is here in the United States. Dr. Porter’s training and education included studying under a mentor who practices integrative medicine as well as learning from celebrity doctor Dr. Andrew Weil.
In addition to working with patients at her clinic, she works as a hospitalist at Lakewood Ranch Medical Center, where she practices acute medicine.
She ideally wants to keep her patients out of the hospital and off medication as much as possible. “A lot of chronic disorders can be treated and prevented naturally,” she says.
For instance, type 2 diabetes, depending on the patient’s blood sugar level, is preventable. She puts at-risk patients on special diets and she hopes that any medication is temporary. “My goal for everybody is to take as few pills as possible,” Dr. Porter says.
She often prescribes exercise and healthy eating habits as ways to avoid acute conditions like heart attacks and strokes.
Dr. Porter says she doesn’t have a “typical” patient. They run the gamut from professional athletes to a 100-year-old post-stroke woman with diabetes. However, all her patients have become frustrated by Western medicine. A lot of them tell her that conventional methods haven’t been making them feel better and they want to feel better.
“Patients don’t just want to prevent disease,” she says. “They also want to improve their quality of life and feel really good.”
When she does need to prescribe medications for her patients, she frequently turns to compounding pharmacies for everything from hormones to intense inflammatories. “I use compounded medications for a lot of different reasons,” she says. These could be because the dosage or delivery method of the standard medications aren’t right for the patient or access to medications are not commercially available. Also, with compounding, we can combine various compatible medications into a single dosage form eliminating the need for multiple prescriptions.
For example, she compounds medications into topical treatments for her dementia patients so they don’t have to swallow any pills. Dr. Porter also likes to work with compounded pharmacies to make hormones and vaginal creams purer and gentler.
“There are a lot of tricks we can use in medicine by being a little creative,” she says. “We recognize that each of our patients is unique. We ensure that our treatments are tailored according to your individual needs.”
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