06/13/2026
The first question tells me everything. 👀
When someone calls my clinic and the first words out of their mouth are "do you take insurance," I already know. Not because they are bad people. Because they are still inside a system that was never designed to make them well.
I spent years inside that system. I used to believe people were healthy because their disease was controlled with a medication. I thought managed was the same as healed. It is not.
Insurance-based medicine is built around diagnoses and billable codes. There is no code for "exhausted but your labs are normal." There is no reimbursement for root cause investigation, for spending an hour understanding your timeline, for running the labs that actually explain why you feel the way you do.
So I left.
I have been called greedy for it. Uncaring. Told it is not fair to patients that I do not take insurance. So let me be direct about that.
If greed was the goal, I would have stayed. I left a system where administrators set my daily quota, where I was expected to see 20-25 patients a day in 10-minute visits, where the goal was management, not resolution. That is not care. That is throughput. And real root cause work cannot be done in 10 minutes. It cannot be done in a system that only pays you when someone stays sick enough to keep coming back.
I make significantly less money than I did inside that system. Going back would be the greedy choice.
Here is what my patients actually get instead:
Longer appointments where I am fully present and not distracted by the next room. A physician who trained specifically to go deeper, not just broader. The ability to meet you where you are: functional approach when that is what is needed, conventional tools when those apply. Both camps, one provider, one coherent plan.
And labs that tell the truth. ☝🏼
Every single day I sit across from someone and say "your labs are normal." Then I pull up their results and show them what optimal actually looks like. Every single time, they are stunned. Because "normal" in the insurance world means you cleared the threshold for a diagnosable disease. It does not mean your body is functioning well. There is a wide gap between normal and optimal, and most people are living in that gap, dismissed and untreated, wondering why they still feel terrible.
Here is what most people do not realize: care outside insurance is often cheaper.
A full female functional panel at my clinic runs around $150. That same panel, billed through insurance, has shown up on patient EOBs at over $2,000. The "free" system is not free. You are paying for it in premiums, in copays, and in answers you never actually get.
What I do requires something insurance will never cover: your willingness to invest in yourself. Time. Effort. The decision to stop waiting for a system to get you well that was not built to do that.
This work is not for everyone. That is not a judgment. That is clarity.
If you are looking for someone to manage your symptoms inside your plan, I can point you in the right direction. But if you are ready to actually understand what is driving them, that conversation starts here. 🙃