Do you take my insurance?
No. If your insurance company pays toward the care you receive from me, I'll give you a claim form that you need only mail to the address that they give you. I will even help you to get reimbursed. But I don't accept insurance in payment, and I'm truly sorry about that. I decided long ago that I wanted to focus ALL of my attention on patient care, and that I also wanted to spend as much time with each patient as possible without charging a whole lot. Trust me when I tell you that your doctor's office spends more time trying to get paid from your insurance company than s/he actually spends caring for you. To provide the kind of individualized attention that I do while accepting insurance would mean that I would have to charge about double what I am currently. That's not acceptable to me -- or to anyone else either, probably. Ok, Dr. Smarty-Pants, how much DO you charge? $80-$90 per visit, and you'll be here about an hour. $110 for the first visit, and that takes up to an hour and a half. What do you want from ME? If you decide you want to see if what I do will help you, I want you to commit to seeing me three times in a one- to two-week period. That doesn't mean I will yell at you or anything else if you decide immediately that what I do isn't for you. It DOES mean that you need to give these kinds of treatments a chance to work. After the third visit we'll talk about how you feel and where you want to go from there. Typically eight to twelve treatments will get you a good result for acupuncture alone, and three to ten for chiropractic alone. But a good result CAN take anywhere from two to thirty treatments, depending on the person. And we won't know how long it will take until after we start work. (That's why I ask you to figure that you'll be seeing me at least three times.) It can sometimes take a while to get a really thorough, long-lasting result. But the results themselves are often quite remarkable and unattainable in any other way. And in my opinion, well worth trying. I'm afraid of the needles. Don't be. They are EXTREMELY thin and since they don't have a "barrel" like hypodermic needles do, there's very little tissue damage and consequently very little (if any) pain. People often don't even feel a needle going in. Once in a while you get a "yowza" if one of the tiny nerves in the skin gets touched, and those needles come out immediately. I want to take herbs but I'm already taking so much other stuff. The "dangers" of herbs are WAY overblown. Although about a third of Americans have taken an herb of some sort, so few people are harmed by them that the government doesn't even bother to track the numbers. Plus, most Chinese herbs have been in use for so long that although they haven't been officially "researched" we know when they can and can't be used anyway. And the herbs that are most likely to interact with medications are well known and can easily be avoided or substituted for. I encourage you to try them if you are curious. Are you going to do chiropractic or acupuncture on me? Usually both, because they work together fabulously well. It depends both on what you want or don't want, and what I think should help you most. But really I'm not going to "DO anything to you" at all. We are going to work together, and WITH your body, not "on" it, to help get you back to where you want to be -- functioning normally. Can I just get herbs and not do the other stuff? Yes, and if that's what you want to do I think it's great. Herbs alone can help so much I wish that everyone would use them. I hate the traffic in Green Hills. Me too. But if you avoid rush hour and mostly stay off Hillsboro Road, you'll be ok. --dr. diane holmes Copyright © 2018 |