HISTORY, BOTH STATIC AND EVER-CHANGING, meanders from myth to reality and back again. Such is the story of Juan Ponce de Leon. History tells us the great Spanish explorer discovered Florida, which may or may not be true, but his legend is the stuff of movies, poetry, art.

In the end, the Fountain of Youth's siren song proved to be a powerful lure, and whether he came here among the blooming flowers of April and the gentle swaying of palm trees in the spring breeze to find youth, sexual vitality or wealth, the stories all end the same way: Ponce de Leon, killed by an Indian's arrow, so close to his dream of immortality that the irony must have been maddening.

Poor guy. If he was truly seeking the Fountain of Youth, he was born five centuries too early.

TINA MIRANDA KNEW something was wrong. Just knew it. She didn't go to medical school for this. Doctors battling disease with a pharmaceutical sword-a weapon covered by a capsule. Got a tummy ache? Take a pill.

No. It cannot be like this. Surely there's a better way. Tina Miranda, a native New Yorker, battling big city attitude with a singular determination that can be summed up with one startling theory: people simply don't have to be sick.

"You know, after seeing five years of medicine and the way doctors practice medicine, it makes me queezy," she says.

OH, YOU CAN CALL it holistic medicine, natural medicine or whatever label makes you feel better. But that you have to call it anything just proves Miranda's point: our culture, our society, our very way of living...it all must change.

"It's just practicing medicine," Miranda says.

Miranda is the owner of Rejuvenate, a series of three anti-aging clinics in south Florida that may well have ended Juan Ponce de Leon's search and saved him from his fate. Her three medical facilities in Hollywood, Miami and Palm Beach-and more are on the way around the country-exist to bring life to her vision.

Miranda understands what she's saying is controversial, shocking, even. It's also revolutionary. Her thesis? Aging is optional. It's that attitude that is turning her into the leader of a new wellness revolution, a modern maverick.

"Aging is a process," Miranda says in her smoky voice blend of Brazilian sexy and Miami cool. "I'll use women as an example. They have menopause, right? In menopause, it is basically the loss of estrogen. When that happens, your skin wrinkles, there's dryness. You start getting gray hair. Your self-esteem is affected, and once your self-esteem goes, you can forget it. Your mood changes, and you forget wanting to have sex. And once the sex goes, you can call it a day. Then there's lean muscle loss, which is another issue."

Miranda begins speaking more rapidly. She's found an audience, and she's taking advantage of it. This is her life's mission, and she's passionate about it.

She's not alone. Age management is one of the fastest growing healthcare fields. Membership in the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine has nearly doubled in five years, according to CNN, which also reports that anti-aging products represent a $45.5 billion industry. Doctors like Miranda are taking notice.

"Essentially, aging equals a depletion of hormones," she says. "If you replace these hormones and do it in a timely fashion, what I mean by that is, as it happens, you can stop all of this from happening. I don't want to say I'm competing against western medicine, because we've made many, many advances. But we can't forget about the basics of caring for human beings. That's what hormone replacement is all about."

HORMONE REPLACEMENT THERAPY, or HRT, is a big-ticket news item these days. Celebrities are into it. Athletes are into it. It's not hard to see why.

Throughout the human life span, the pituitary gland secretes testosterone and estrogen, but a funny thing happens as you get older: all that energy you had when you were a teenager? It goes away because the hormones go away. After that, Miranda maintains, you start seeing all kinds of issues. Increased fatigue. Decreased lean muscle. Wrinkles. Hair loss. Sexual dysfunction. The picture, Miranda says, ain't pretty.

That's where hormone replacement therapy comes in, and Miranda is both a proponent and a practitioner of it as an age-management strategy. In her three south Florida clinics, she offers hormone treatments that run the gamut: human growth hormone, testosterone, estrogen, progesterone, cortisol, DHEA.

Replacing these naturally occurring hormones in the human body effectively stops the aging process, Miranda claims, thereby increasing muscle mass, burning off cellulite, strengthening skin, halting graying hair, improving mood-all the things the elusive Fountain of Youth purported to do.

But this is no fairy tale, and it's no myth. The benefits, Miranda says, are very, very real.

"I tell people, 'Look in the mirror. You're 50 pounds overweight. How do you change your life?'"

HOW MIRANDA CHANGED her life, again, was simply observing things that just weren't working. There, in that emergency room, people's lives weren't any fuller when they walked out than when they walked in. Oh, sure, they were treated and released, but the root problems of their lives were just as real as the day they realized they needed to see a doctor.

It's a cultural problem, Miranda asserts.

"You come in, you have a stomach ache and you get Nexium. But what it does is neutralize the acid in your stomach. So what that does is it starts to change the PH balance in your body. It screws everything else worse. Instead of telling people to modify your diet, you perpetuate the things that were wrong with you in the first place," she says.

That's when she discovered the American Academy of Anti-Aging. On a whim, she attended a conference...and watched her life change.

"Here were all of these doctors who were thinking outside the box," she says, the excitement of the moment still lingering in her voice. "Not everything is about writing a prescription. You ask a patient, 'What are you eating?' There could be a million reasons you are having trouble. So, it really was an opportunity to practice medicine in a different way: the way it should be practiced."

That led to the radical conclusion that going to a doctor just isn't enough. American society needs to climb up and sit down on that exam table, lie back on that crinkly paper, open up and say, "Ahh."

"This is the mission in what I'm attempting to do. Reprogramming somebody is such a complicated, in-depth thing," she says. "We are such a TV-oriented society. There are programs, and the marketing comes on and there's the food industry telling you to constantly eat. Trying to re-program society is very difficult. The pharmaceutical industry has managed to program doctors, when instead they should be thinking about their patients. Instead of programming that says 'stomach-ache equals Nexium,' they should be thinking about lifestyle change. Because I've been exposed to these other philosophies, I'm able to extract from these situations more information."

She offers an example. A friend came to her, complaining of breathing problems. She'd been to the doctor, who was at a loss. For once, a pill didn't have the answer.

So, Miranda started asking basic questions. What are you eating? Are you taking vitamins? Are you exercising? Has anything changed recently?

"I found out that she had just started drinking soy milk," Miranda says. "A lot of people are highly allergic to soy milk, so as soon as I got her off the soy milk, the breathing problems stopped. Within minutes I was able to manage something a doctor couldn't. I looked at the situation from another angle. I'm not pretending to know everything, but if you took the time it's amazing what can happen for people."

WHAT CAN HAPPEN TO PEOPLE is why Miranda is in business. She combined her medical training, her first-hand knowledge of how modern medicine is broken with her business acumen-she does, after all, hold an MBA from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute-and, viola! Rejuvenate Anti-Aging was born.

"Essentially, it's the opportunity for me. This is it: when you are working in emergency room medicine, you are confined by the restrictions placed on you by the officials that work there. The art of practicing medicine is gone, and doctors are scrambling to keep up. It takes us 20 years to establish a career, then you have to establish a practice, and that takes five years. By the time you are finished with all of that, you are fat and ugly and bald and wrinkled. Peeling yourself away from that environment is difficult. It just felt right. It gave me the opportunity to do this."

THE WORLD IS CHANGING. Miranda sees it, understands it. People want to look better, they want to feel better. The problem, again, is that they're often not willing to do what it takes to do it. So, attitudes are changing. Culture isn't.

"I want to believe it is, but the statistics tell me otherwise," she says. "Morbid obesity continues to increase. What it really is is a lack of education. I take 10 minutes to explain that to everyone. And they want to learn. I want to change things. It's education, education, education. Again, I want to think people are more receptive, but the statistics are telling me otherwise."

This is your life. Are you who you want to be? Dr. Miranda is on a crusade. Against obesity. Against cultural attitudes that accept the status quo. Against complacency. Against the very process of aging itself.

"This is your pyramid: if you can't get out of bed, you can't pay your bills, you can't enjoy your life, you can't have sex, you can't do anything. It's the same for anything else. When there is something festering in your body, it needs to be addressed. If it's a weight issue, sweetie, you need to address it. I gain three pounds and I'm a mess. Self-esteem is so important."

The Fountain of Youth? Juan Ponce de Leon looked but never found. Maybe Miranda has found it. Maybe she hasn't. But the act of searching...well, that's the stuff life is made of, isn't it? And life isn't in the finding. It's in the journey.

If that journey lasts even longer? Even better.