Karen Dente, M.D. Functional Medicine in Paris

I am a certified MD who received my medical training at Heidelberg University in Germany, and in the United States where I attended Harvard, Yale and Cornell Medical Schools for my internships. My focus in medicine was on cancer and infectious diseases, as well as pediatrics.

I received my training as a nutritionist and health coach from the Institute of Integrative Nutrition where I learned about more than one hundred dietary theories and studied a variety of practical lifestyle coaching methods. I work with an emphasis on Macrobiotics and Asian dietary theories paired with a solid modern Western understanding of nutritional scientific evidence. Drawing on this knowledge, and medical background through years of learning, I will help you create a completely personalized “roadmap to health” that suits your unique body, lifestyle, preferences, and goals by using a holistic approach based on integrative medicine with a focus on nutrition and overall well-being.

As someone critical of the narrow traditional western medical approach to treating disease, I will assess your current health situation by analyzing your past medical history and current dietary and lifestyle habits and helping you to find a preventive approach to your health, giving you the tools you need to maintain health.

I do believe the modern medicine has solutions to offer for certain illnesses, though rarely for chronic conditions, for which a holistic approach based on wholesome nutrition, happy relationships and exercise include some of the key ingredients for a healthy, happy life. Whether you are struggling with fatigue, autoimmune disorders like an underactive thyroid, food sensitivities (that may be unknown), eczema or psoriasis (to name a few skin disorders), frequent urinary tract infections and recurrent winter colds due to a weakened immune system, I can support you to strengthen your overall health to help put you on a healthy path where you are more in charge of your own health destiny. Many Western traditionally trained doctors fail to see the whole picture and have a very narrow specialized focus when seeing and treating their patients.

I also work with women and couples struggling with infertility to boost their conception chances, whether they are undergoing assisted reproduction with IVF treatment or hormone therapy, or trying the natural route to conceive. Women with PCOS and endometriosis often have trouble conceiving, and I help with a lifestyle and nutritional plan to improve their chances. I work together with fertility specialists in my area and am happy to refer you further should you seek a specialist.

I also support pregnant women planing their pregnancies to reclaim power over the birth process.  To echo Dr. Gabé and confirm the convictions of French obstetrician Dr. Michel Odent, I believe that reducing women to passive recipients of medical care during perhaps the most momentous passage of their lives is not only figuratively but physiologically dehumanizing, as it disrupts psychological and hormonal and physiological processes that have evolved in our species over millions of years to maintain the vital bonding necessary between a mother and her baby at the time of birth and beyond, to ensure the healthy development of our youngest human beings.