Welcome to St. Petersburg Health & Wellness

New Patients

Health, Wellness, & Personal Responsibility

Thank you for choosing us for your health & wellness needs. Whether you have a significant health problem, want to optimize your health or slow the aging process, we are glad you have found your way here. To get you started, please read the following article. It will give you some idea of how we will work together to achieve your goals.

What you need to know …

Scheduling a New Patient Appointment

At your first appointment, we will collect a lot of information and you may be at the office longer than your hour scheduled time. You may wish to allow some additional time for your initial visit. Please be sure to arrive 15 minutes early to complete first time paperwork.

To make an appointment, call our receptionist at 727-202-6807. There will be a one-time scheduling fee of $100.00, which will be applied to your first visit (please see below).

Once your appointment is made, you will receive an email with our New Patient Packet, or you can go to Patient Forms and download this. To provide you with the best care, this packet will need to be completed and returned 3 days prior to your visit. This allows our providers time to review your information prior to your visit.

Our commitment is to help you feel better and to do this we set aside sufficient time – for you – to make sure we do this well. When you make an appointment seeking our help, please make sure you choose a time that you can keep. This will help us best serve you and effectively manage our time so we may also help others in a timely fashion.

New Client Visit Policy:

  1. A $100 deposit is required to reserve your appointment. Please note that we cannot reserve your appointment until we receive this deposit.
  2. This deposit will be applied to the charge for your first appointment.
  3. The deposit is fully refundable if you cancel or reschedule 48 hours (2 business days) before your scheduled appointment time.
  4. If you need to reschedule your appointment to a later date, this deposit can be used to secure your next appointment as long as we have had 48-hours notice.
  5. Cancellations made with less than 48-hours notice forfeit the $100 deposit pursuant to our Cancellation Policy.

Established Patient visit policy:

  1. We do not require a deposit for visits.
    2. The 48-hour cancellation policy still applies.
    3. For cancellations made less than 48-hours (2 business days) before your scheduled
    appointment, we reserve the right to charge a $100 fee pursuant to our Cancellation Policy. 

 

Health, Wellness, & Personal Responsibility

Our current medical system is based in the business of “caring for” sickness & disease. It is not designed to maintain your health & wellness. This system developed to fill a need and did so for many years to ease the pain & suffering of individuals and even occasionally cure them when they became ill. This was particularly true in the “antibiotic and vaccination era,” which is currently being challenged. There is still a great need for this type of health care for acute and palliative health issues.

The problem, however, is that this system has not supported or championed those steps necessary to promote health & wellness. What they have done is simply waited until you are sick or ill and then treated with a pharmaceutical that has improved your symptoms but rarely corrected the underlying problem or stopped the ongoing damage to your body. Unfortunately, the pharmaceuticals often cause other health problems. It may surprise or shock you, but a study conducted by the Ethics Department at the Harvard Medical School found that pharmaceuticals are tied with stroke as the fourth leading cause of death.

Health & Wellness, on the other hand requires an understanding of how the body works down to the biocellular & biochemical level. “Why is this important?” you ask. Because, this is where the abnormalities or imbalances begin that lead to symptoms and ultimately disease.

What is the biggest contributor to your health & wellness?

Personal responsibility, a desire to “Live Well” and then the actions to make it so!

There is no-one who will ever have a greater ability to contribute to your health than you! Once you understand this, then it’s time to get to work. As with anything else, the place to start is education. There are many places you can obtain this education and having a guide can be very helpful. And, as with all endeavors, implementing what you learn is critical to your success.

What are the major contributors to your health & wellness?

They are: 1) What you eat, 2) How much you exercise, 3) What toxins you expose yourself to and how often you detox, 4) Your hormonal balance and 5) Your genetics. The CDC has determined that, in any disease state, your lifestyle and environment provides an 85% contribution and your genetics contribute only 15%. This also means that your lifestyle and environment provides an 85% and your genetics only 15% to your health! This is an amazing amount of control and influence you have over your own health!

Of the 5 important contributors above, it is clear that you have control over what you eat and how much you exercise. What about toxin exposure? Again, education is important. The more educated you are about toxins and where and how you are exposed, the more control you have. A great place to start that education is Environmental Working Group (ewg.org). The most effective step of detoxification is toxin avoidance and, because we are becoming awash in toxins, regular detoxification is extremely valuable.

How about hormones? “I don’t have any control over them, do I?”

Well, actually yes you do! Much more than you think. Let’s talk about a few.

  • With the exception of Type 1 Diabetes, insulin is totally controlled by what you eat. If you eat sugar and processed carbohydrates (bread, pasta, cerial, crackers, cake, etc.) you stimulate the greatest amount of insulin release in your body, which not only pushes sugar into your muscle cells, but also into your liver to make fat and the fat into your fat cells causing weight gain. Your insulin also keeps fat in your fat cells making it difficult to lose weight. When you eat protein, you also stimulate insulin release, which in this case causes you to build muscle. And finally fat does not stimulate insulin release. Put together, eating low sugar, low processed carbs, whole foods, free range and grass fed has the greatest effect on staying healthy by controlling insulin release.
  • Testosterone and Growth Hormone are both greatly increased by exercise, so every time you exercise you increase both these hormones, which are very important to maintaining healthy muscles and heart in both men and women.
  • Cortisol and Adrenalin are both increased with stress. When elevated, both lead to a number of unhealthy states – depression, hypertension, anxiety, etc. You can profoundly decrease both these levels through meditation, personal growth and other methods.

So it is clear that you can profoundly control your hormones when you know how through education.

“OK, but there is no way you can control your genes! Right!?”

Well, actually you can to a great extent! Your genes do only 1 thing – they code for protein. Your proteins then go out and do all the work of your body. And while it is true you can’t change the structure of your genes – you can turn your genes on and off. For example:

  • If you eat certain foods – cruciferous vegetables, colored fruits & vegetables, polyphenols in coffee & teas, etc. – you can turn on your antioxidant genes and turn off your inflammatory genes.
  • If you exercise, you turn on over 400 healthy genes.
  • If you calorie restrict, you turn on genes that make you healthy and live longer
  • If you eat a low sugar and low processed carb diet, you turn on anti-inflammatory genes, and weight reduction genes.

If you have genetic mutations then the proteins they code for don’t work as well or get as much work done in their specific job. You can also circumvent genetic mutations by increasing the molecules the proteins work on or the cofactors that help the proteins do their job. For example:

  • Your MTHFR genes code for a protein that takes a methyl group from B12 and sticks it on folic acid making methyl-folic acid. The C/C genes are normal, the mutated T/T genes decrease your ability to make methyl-folic acid by 80%. This process can essentially be returned to near normal by giving a supplement that has B12, B6, B2, methyl-folic acid and betaine in it.
  • There is a genetic mutation of a protein that transports zinc into the heart muscle that leads to heart failure. You can increase zinc intake to overcome (improve) this transporter “weakness”

Putting all this information together, do I have control to improve my health?

So, you have a greater than 85% ability to control to improve and maintain your own health. To do this well takes education, requiring interest, curiosity and motivation to seek it out. What are the best sources? It is good to have a mentor. Functional Medicine doctors and nutritionists are a good place to start. We also find that most results you can access via search engine are reliable when referenced by scientific research.

Secondly, it is important to understand that any symptoms, illnesses, or disease states occur as a result of multiple imbalances – genetic, nutritional, toxic, exertional and hormonal – and that they all interact. Each person has different imbalances which develop/accumulate slowly over time. And then one more imbalance tips the scale and leads to symptoms. If left unbalanced eventually structural changes begin and ultimately tissue and organ damage become irreversible. So, to maintain health, maintaining healthy balances is critical. Once you have developed symptoms, illness, or disease, rebalancing all imbalances is important. Optimization is the goal. This takes time and patience. You didn’t get out of balance overnight, it took years. Rebalancing ultimately requires consistent and persistent lifestyle change. This often takes years, through small sustainable incremental change. IV nutrition, supplements, intravenous light therapy, HBOT, acupuncture, detoxification, chelation, stress management, mental health therapy, etc. are often necessary to begin the balancing process and overcome multiple or large imbalances to speed the process, however, ultimately it is your job to correct your lifestyle to rebalance and maintain.

You are the person in charge of your health and you can be or become healthy through education and taking action on what you learn. Remember, greater than 85% of your health is lifestyle and environment, both of which you can control.

Next Steps …

New Patient Forms

If this is your first visit to St. Petersburg Health & Wellness, download and read the New Patient Information Package. Then download and complete the New Patient Questionnaire, which comes in a printable form that you can fill out by hand and fax, email, or mail to us. 

Please return your questionnaire 3 days before your visit. This will allow our practitioners to know as much about you and your health as possible when you arrive for your appointment. In this way, we can provide you the best care. Please be thorough. You may be surprised at what is important.

Please complete and return by email, fax, mail or bring in by hand 3 days prior to appointment.

CLICK TO DOWNLOAD

Request an Appointment

Contact

Address: 2100 Dr MLK Jr St N,
     St Petersburg, FL 33704

Hours: Monday-Friday
     8:00 am to 5:00 pm

Phone: 727-202-6807

Meet Our

Providers & Staff

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Les Cole, MD, ABAARM, ABIHM

Doctor of Functional & Metabolic Medicine

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Kathie Gonzales, ARNP

Family Nurse Practitioner

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Jayla Blair

Medical Assistant
Patient Care Coordinator

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June Drennon

Clinical Thermographer