Working as an internist at an HMO managed hospital, Dr. Lida Ghaderi found that it was “not a fit for me … battling insurance companies.”
The hospital where she worked wanted her to see 40 patients in four to five hours; something she found did not work when trying to adequately diagnose and treat patients.
“This is not why I became a physician,” Ghaderi said.
So, several years ago the dark-haired native of Iran did her research, made a business plan, got an SBA loan and opened her own healthcare center, Cenigent, in Santa Monica for which she serves as president and medical director.
The name of the center, Cenigent, stands for the cellular, endocrine, nervous, immune, genetics, epigenetic, nutrigenomics and thought systems, and reflects what Ghaderi focuses on in her practice: a systems approach that is “proactive, predictive, preventive, personalized and restorative,” as her center’s literature states. Rather than “diagnose and treat [a disease or other health problem],” Ghaderi uses advanced, head-to-toe imaging and diagnostic tests, comprehensive predictive “markers” and lab tests “to sample the body to see how it is functioning,” and then provides patients with a detailed medical assessment to treat and help prevent future health problems.
Ghaderi said she spends about 100 to 150 hours of research on an individual patient. She then can customize therapies, from dieting and prescribing medicines to targeting supplements for a person’s “deficiencies, disregulations, and imbalance in their core systems,” Ghaderi said.
“[We] can prevent future diseases, tackle existing diseases and optimize the immune system.”
Ghaderi comes from a family for whom “science was a big thing,” she said.
Falling in love with medicine at a young age, Ghaderi volunteered at a hospital in Iran and when her family immigrated to the U.S., she continued her volunteer work while attending high school here.
Earning a medical doctorate from UC San Diego School of Medicine and a bachelor’s degree from UC Irvine in biological sciences, Ghaderi completed her post-doctoral training in internal medicine. She was appointed a diplomat of the American Board of Internal Medicine in 1998, she worked at the Whitaker Center and served as the youngest medical director of La Vida Medical Group, a large multispecialty medical center in Los Angeles.
After she left “traditional medicine” in 2002, Ghaderi decided to work part-time and became interested in the human genome project.
“I wanted to see what can we do with these variations [in genetics and] customize medical treatment based on these variations,” Ghaderi said.
Ghaderi said traditional doctors look at the possibilities of medicine based on going deeper and looking at a person’s genetics and saying, “Wow, at this is the future of medicine.”
The future for Ghaderi includes being able to “pamper” patients, spending more time with them, being available to answer questions and being able to treat all kinds of diseases and problems from obesity, fibromyalgia, MS and Parkinson’s to low libido, low energy and menopause, as well as other age-related issues.
“The whole medical system needs to be restructured,” Ghaderi said, “more time needs to be spent with the patient, research needs to done.”
In addition to her center, Ghaderi hopes to add nonprofit research on the systems approach to health care, taking the “top 10 diseases and putting them through the method …to be able to treat in advance rather than spend money on [a health problem] at the end.”
A goal is to be able to prevent diseases, like cancer, with preventive medicine … “changing the probabilities,” Ghaderi said.
Cenigent is located at 2222 Santa Monica Blvd., Suite 200 in Santa Monica. Dr. Lida Ghaderi can be reached at 310.998.8600.