01. Functional Medicine I Can Actually Afford
Functional medicine seeks to find the root cause and treat with basic methods like diet and lifestyle. So why won't insurance cover it?
In trying to figure out what was behind my gut trouble and my other odd symptoms—like sudden bouts of extreme fatigue—I had been reading books like Holistic Gut Health by Dr. Stengler. He said he was a doctor of functional medicine—a type I’d never heard of before, but it seemed like it would be good for me. He said the traditional approach to medicine only seeks to relieve symptoms, without searching to find their cause. Functional medicine however, which doctors can add on to a conventional medical degree via certification, looks at the whole body instead of dividing it among separate, often disconnected parts.
I remember asking the nurse at the gastroenterologist, “But what about the fatigue that comes on with the stomach aches?”
She said, “That would be rheumatology,” and left it at that.
I had been able to find doctors in the D.C. area who were practicing functional medicine, which someone told me was more of an Eastern viewpoint, as well as others offering holistic or homeopathic approaches. But I couldn’t find a single functional or holistic doctor who took insurance. Even though their appointments sounded luxurious—three times as long as a standard 20-minute doctor visit—they would run anywhere from $500 at a neighborhood office to $1,500 for top doctors at prestigious downtown clinics.
But as the high-tech scopes and scans that the traditional GI was ordering were one-by-one yielding no answers, I started getting more and more desperate. Every few days, I would log into the United Healthcare website or open up a new browser tab and try different search terms, like pushing coins in a slot machine.
One morning in late August, I got up and made coffee for my husband and a cup of Gut Wellness for me, put the pink load in the dryer, folded the blues, and started the washer with whites. When the kids were settled into their activities—Mark at cross-country practice, Diana making stickers, and Luke cutting someone’s grass—I sat down with my computer and typed in again: Functional medicine doctor that accepts insurance.
Something came up!
Functional Medicine Specialists. Now accepting all major insurance carriers!
It seemed like a mirage. But someone actually answered when I called and by the end of the call, I had four appointments on the calendar: an intake, a blood test, a follow-up, and a nutritionist. Besides the lab work, they were all virtual, which was disappointing, but I figured that was probably how they kept costs down.
For the next four days before the first appointment, I was dreamy. Someone was finally going to figure out what was wrong with me. They were going to sit down with me and slowly listen to everything that had been happening. They wouldn’t brush off my fear that I had decimated my gut microbiome with long courses of antibiotics. They wouldn’t prescribe medications that could make things worse. They would methodically get to the bottom of this, and I would finally get better.
Periodically, as I pulled food out of the fridge for dinner or got dressed for the day, I would practice in my mind how I would summarize the last four years. I pictured their empathetic faces and imagined how good it would feel to be heard.
I couldn’t believe I was going to get all of this for a $10 co-pay. I was in heaven.