I am a board certified Internal Medicine physician, with 17 years of clinical experience. Through all those years, I tried my best in caring for and treating patients, applying what was taught and practiced in the current conventional medicine arena. As the years passed, I realized that despite following these “evidence-based” diagnostic and treatment recommendations by esteemed bodies of clinicians, many patients continue to require a lot of medications and get sicker.
What’s more, I witnessed a growing number of patients being diagnosed with mood disorders, inflammatory arthritis, various cancers, hypothyroidism, neurologic and autoimmune diseases, diabetes, heart disease, and many others. Clearly, I was frustrated with the results of using traditional internal medicine approaches. Conventional mainstream medicine alone was not serving my patients well.
In 2011, after watching documentaries on food and health (e.g. Food Matters, Food, Inc.) and then reading many books on health and nutrition, my husband and I made improvements in our diet for a few months and saw some positive physical and mental changes. This new and revived interest in creating health using nutrition led me to join the Institute For Functional Medicine (IFM).
In 2013, I became a Diplomate of the American Board of Integrative Holistic Medicine or ABIHM. Integrative Holistic Medicine is the art and science of healing that addresses care of the whole person: body, mind, and spirit.
I recently became a Certified Practitioner by the Institute of Functional Medicine (IFMCP). As of 2015, there are only three batches of certified practitioners so far nationwide.
In case you’re curious about my heritage, I was born and raised in the Philippines, finished my B.S. Public Health and Doctor of Medicine degrees at the country’s premiere university, the University of the Philippines, in 1986 and 1991, respectively. I migrated to the US in 1992 and did residency training in Internal Medicine at St. Francis Hospital in Evanston, Illinois. After working for a couple of years in Chicago, IL and then Cleveland, OH, I moved to Naples, FL with my family in 2001, where I have been an employed physician since. After learning functional and integrative medicine and applying its principles on complex patients in my primary care practice, I decided to focus on working with this new paradigm and thus I set up my own practice.
