Many doctors, especially those who practice functional, integrative, or naturopathic medicine, value the time they spend with their patients and don't want insurance companies to get involved in the relationship. For this reason, they charge their fees directly to the patient. Its price depends on many factors: your location, training and, frankly, the demand for your services. We have seen that it takes, on average, 3 to 5 years of committed work to truly develop an established and bustling practice.
At this point, many suppliers choose to increase their prices, accept fewer customers, or be more selective with the customers they attract. The main factor in pricing is by far location. San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York are the most expensive markets with the highest demand for functional medicine. If you are in these areas, you may likely be able to carry more than in other areas.
However, telemedicine is changing the rules of the game. It can reduce the cost of running your business and allow you to see patients in areas where the ability to pay could be higher than your normal rates. As we will see later, with due diligence, cost-effective and highly effective functional medicine can be administered. If you want it to be covered by insurance or the NHS, you can fight for that and maybe one day functional medicine will become the standard for everyone.
However, they can help facilitate major lifestyle changes that can support the body's natural ability to restore proper functioning. If the initial exam wasn't covered, the next 4 to 6 visits you have may not be as well (this is a very “difficult” situation, since functional medicine providers who are doctors can get insurance to cover a higher percentage of their care relative to a chiropractor or naturopath). All three types of physicians must receive additional training in functional medicine and must sit for board examinations and have a license. I love what Functional Medicine has to offer the world, that's why I'm a practitioner, I just saw tactics that seem a little exaggerated.
This allows functional health professionals to help clients prevent serious chronic illnesses by addressing symptoms before the disease occurs. They look for more subtle patterns that may indicate that a body system is not working as it should. My problem with conventional medicine's approach to diseases like mine, which are autoimmune, is that they don't treat the underlying cause. At the same time, the overall costs of the participating provider's office increased dramatically due to the staff, time, and equipment required to process and track claims.
Apparently Cole agrees with me that functional medicine is pursuing elusive “perfect laboratory values.” In the world of Functional Medicine, you may undergo food and stool sensitivity tests that show some really interesting facts, but not cheaply. Using the criteria I've seen on various naturopathic, “integrative medicine” and chiropractic websites, I conclude that almost everyone suffers from some degree of “adrenal fatigue”; that is, unless one has no stress, is always happy and eats a raw vegan diet, and even then one could still have “mild” adrenal fatigue. The reason, of course, is that, of all the forms of “integrative medicine pseudoscience practiced, functional medicine” is more like real medicine, so much so that it often even tricks doctors into thinking there must be something in it.
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