Marianela Horta Acosta was a licensed physician in Cuba for eighteen years before she came to the United States in 2016.
A medical license does not cross borders. To practice as a physician here she would have had to repeat residency and fellowship training she had already completed and spent nearly two decades using. She chose a different route — one that let her return to patient care without starting her medical education over. She earned her certification as a nursing assistant in 2017, her registered nurse license in 2020, and her Master of Science in Nursing as a Family Nurse Practitioner in 2023.
She practices at Vascular Wellness Institute as an Advanced Practice Registered Nurse. What she brings to it is eighteen years of medicine on top of everything the nursing training gave her.
Where She Learned to Practice
Marianela earned her medical degree at the Institute of Medical Sciences in Camagüey, Cuba, and spent most of her career in general practice — much of it in Vertientes, a rural community where the clinic had very little and the doctor was expected to manage whatever came through the door.
For part of those years she served as a Carmelite Missionary, working with people who had few options and less access. That work shaped how she practices: unhurried, thorough, and attentive to the parts of a person’s life that affect their health but never appear on a chart.
After emigrating, she worked in nursing homes, assisted living communities, and private homes throughout Sarasota and Manatee counties while completing her nursing education — caring for elderly patients with the same conditions she now helps treat.
How Marianela Works With Our Patients
Vascular care is not all surgery. A great deal of it is the ongoing work between procedures, and that is where Marianela does most of her own.
She manages peripheral artery disease medically — the medications, the supervised walking programs, the blood pressure and cholesterol and blood sugar control that does more to change the course of the disease than any single procedure. She performs preoperative testing and evaluation before scheduled procedures. She sees patients for follow-up afterward. She monitors aneurysms and chronic venous disease between visits, manages compression therapy, and coordinates wound care. She is also trained in sclerotherapy and performs it here.
She takes histories, examines patients, reviews test results and explains what they mean. When something needs a surgeon, she brings the surgeon in.
The eighteen years she spent as a physician are not incidental to any of this. Medical management of chronic disease — recognising when something has shifted, knowing which question to ask, judging what can wait and what cannot — is exactly the work she did for two decades.
Her Approach
“Treating vascular disease is more than treating a disease. It is treating a whole person.”
Patients describe her as someone who does not rush. She listens, explains vascular disease in plain terms, and makes sure you leave knowing what is happening in your body and what to do about it — because following the plan is what makes the plan work.
Marianela sees patients at our Sarasota office, and cares for people from across Sarasota County and the surrounding communities — Siesta Key, Longboat Key, Osprey, Nokomis, Venice, Laurel, Lakewood Ranch, North Port, and Englewood.