In Conversation With Dr. Safa Maklad, MD
Board certified in family medicine and obesity medicine, on functional and regenerative care and where it sits alongside the primary care you already have.
What this conversation covers.
Everything below is Dr. Maklad describing her own work, in her own words. Wellsprings Health does not provide any of it.
Dr. Maklad trained traditionally in family medicine. After moving to Florida she began adding functional work to what a family medicine visit normally covers: hyperbaric oxygen, IV therapies and a great deal of laboratory testing. Her patients are not asked to give up the care they already have.
Before Florida she was medical director of a hospital wound care center in New York, where hyperbaric oxygen was used only for FDA approved indications. She did not plan that path. A chief of surgery suggested she try wound care one day a week, and she liked it more than she expected.
DNA methylation, hormone panels, metabolomics and gut microbiome testing all come up. Dr. Maklad explains that she puts the results together into one plan rather than reacting to any single number. What interests her is which bacteria a person is short of, or carrying too much of.
Her clearest example is a patient with diabetes on standard medication. Dr. Maklad explains that some of those medications, metformin among them, can deplete certain vitamins, and that a routine primary care visit would not usually check micronutrient levels. Without the test, nothing gets replaced.
Asked for one thing a person could start at home, she did not name a machine or an infusion. Dr. Maklad recommends a multivitamin and a probiotic, given the food supply and how narrowly most of us actually eat. She suggests checking the vitamin D level in it.
Who Dr. Maklad is, and where to find her.
Dr. Safa Maklad, MD is board certified in Family Medicine and Obesity Medicine. She ran a hospital wound care center as its medical director, then moved to South Florida and built a practice that folds functional and regenerative work into primary care. Her first appointment runs about an hour, long enough to take a full history before deciding which labs to order. That is why Dr. Leslie sends patients to her.
Her practice is at 2429 Hollywood Blvd, Hollywood, FL 33020. This is a referral, not a promise about any result, and hyperbaric oxygen, IV nutrition and peptide therapy are hers, not ours. Watch the full conversation on the clinic's YouTube channel. What we do at Wellsprings:
Three things worth taking from it.
You are not being asked to choose
Dr. Maklad describes most of her patients keeping their primary care physician or endocrinologist and adding her work alongside it. If functional medicine has been sitting open in a browser tab for months, the question is not whether to switch.
Ask what your prescriptions use up
The metformin example generalises. If you have been on a long term medication and nobody has checked your micronutrient levels, that is a fair and specific question to put to whoever prescribes it. You do not need a new philosophy of medicine to ask.
Then come back to the pelvic floor
None of the above is what we do. If leaking, pelvic pain, painful sex or a postpartum symptom is what brought you here, that is our lane. Florida is a direct access state, so you can book an evaluation without a physician referral.
So a lot of those medications kind of like metformin will actually deplete some of your vitamins.
What we actually treat here.
Urinary Urgency
The signal that will not wait. Urgency is a coordination problem, and coordination is trainable.
Coccydynia
Tailbone pain that turns a meeting or a car ride into something you plan around.
TMJ and TMD
Jaw pain, clicking and night clenching. Jaw and pelvic floor tend to guard together.