On the Job

Many of Deborah Post’s patients are sick and tired—not just from some ailment, but of assembly-line doctor visits. A nurse practitioner for 25 years, Post worked for years in offices where the bottom line required physicians to push through dozens of patients per day, giving each just a few minutes. Since opening a private practice at Perlmutter Health Center in Naples, Post has been practicing “functional medicine,” getting to the bottom of her patients’ complaints so she can help “rebuild their engines.”

How did you get into functional medicine?
You can’t fully address people’s issues or problems in 10 or 15 minutes. You could treat a little bit of an issue; drugs are the cheapest and fastest way to move things along. But that’s just not the best way to practice sometimes.

What makes your practice different?
It’s about rebuilding, using integrative ideas and basic anatomy, physiology and nutrition. I can sit with someone and really find out all the different parts of their life. When you give drugs to people, a lot of times you’re not solving the problem, you’re just making it livable. The idea is to go back and find out what the original problems were and restore function.

How many patients do you see?
New patients I see for at least an hour, and a follow-up more often than not is going to be for a half hour. I might see six, eight, 10 people, but that would be a big day for me. I’m not trying to have people build dependency on medicine. I want them to learn enough so they can maintain a healthy lifestyle with occasional tune-ups.