Frequently Asked Questions
We do a large variety of laboratory testing, including blood, urine, and time feces. These are advanced testing modalities, and sometimes they are expensive. At Richmond Integrative & Functional Medicine, we make a concerted effort to work with laboratory partners that are accepted by commercial insurances. This is not a 100% guarantee that what you have done will be covered all the time. But one of the things we do in our membership program is make a concerted effort to make sure that we're leveraging your insurance as much as possible.
The vast majority of our labs are done through commercial insurances, and in that case, your typical deductibles apply. If you have a high deductible insurance, then per your insurance agreement through your employer, or if you purchase it individually, you'll be responsible for the deductible. Some insurances will give the negotiated lab rate on the front end, and some insurances won't allow this until you've met your deductible.
We accept over 80 different insurances that are practiced, so it's impossible for us to know how your insurance works for you. Many of the functional labs are not covered by most insurance vendors. In this case, based on your insurance, we will try to use the lab that's the most cost effective. Typical labs that fall into this are organic acid testing, advanced stool testing, salivary, hormone and adrenal testing, and the like. We use vendors ranging from Genova and Doctors Data to Great Plains Labs and Micro Metrics.
Straight, non-supplemented Medicare offers the best insurance coverage for our practice, as it will cover most functional labs and typical labs. However, if you also have supplemental insurance with Medicare, that will sometimes "take over" the cost and sometimes won't cover functional labs.
The answer to this question depends on a number of variables. It depends on how sick you are, and it depends on how you're responding. You can always talk with your doctor or provider to ask questions and express your concerns.
Ultimately, RIFM practices individualized, personalized health care through which we strive to listen to our patients. If you have a concern about excessive lab testing, we will listen to you and do our best to make sure we abide by your wishes. Ultimately, our goal is to provide you the best care, as well as giving you access to the most up to date testing that leverages all of our experience for your health benefit.
We are specially trained and board certified in integrative, functional, and holistic medicine, but are not trained in integrative cancer therapy. We have many times come alongside patients who have already gone through treatment for cancer for prevention of recurrence or alongside individuals who are already working with either a conventional or integrative cancer physician. This is where we shine best.
If you're looking for someone to be the primary treater for cancer, Dr. Hartman highly recommends Dr. Mark Rosenberg. He is one of the trainers of doctors across the country in integrative cancer therapies, and his office is in Florida. His practice is called "Advanced Medical Therapeutics," and the following link will take you to his site: https://www.amtcare.com/
- We do NOT offer concierge medicine. RIFM does not offer access to a doctor 24/7 or access to a doctor to implement the patient's plan for their own care. Functional medicine is a partnership between patient and physician where the care plan is 100% personalized, but developed by the physician based on extensive training, patient labs, how the patient responds to given treatment/therapies, etc. You can read more about becoming a patient here: https://richmondfunctionalmedicine.com/patient-membership/
The short answer to this question is yes; we do hormone replacement therapy! However, it does require a little bit of explanation. There's a thing called the hormone hierarchy - The way in which you want to address hormones. The most important are your adrenals, your thyroid, and your sugar or insulin levels. If these are off it affects all hormones in your body, and many people have thyroid and sugar and adrenal type issues.
The next thing is to work on the gut. The GI tract is where most of female sex hormones are detoxified. If the gut is not appropriately addressed, then you can get estrogen dominance, and it can adversely affect hormone levels. Then we can jump onto the hormones bouncing progesterone, estrogen, testosterone, adrenals, pregnenolone, and other sex hormone-related hormones. There is a method to it that we go through based on data research and the way your whole body works together.
We don't just jump in and throw hormones at people. If the thyroid, sugar levels. Insulin, pancreas, adrenals, cortisol, and the gut are not addressed, you can actually drive a feed-forward cycle where people feel okay for one to two years, but then get much worse. We take the doctor's creed seriously of first and foremost do no harm, to the extent that we prefer not to do therapies that will do harm. Jumping right into hormones, before addressing the others can actually hurt patients.
The in-person membership offers 1:1 doctor-patient office visits from a functional medicine perspective.
We utilize a membership model in order to provide access to the time and expertise that falls outside the scope of the standard medical model. For a high level of detail on the in-person membership, you can visit: https://richmondfunctionalmedicine.com/becoming-a-patient/
Our online community is a resource for individuals interested in a self-guided process toward understanding their whole health story with a high level of support through the community, coaching, and courses. The online community is educationally-based and coaching is structured in a group setting. The goal is to help our members learn to discern their own health stories and heal with the support of courses, coaching, and community. 1:1 coaching is available as an add-on option as well.
It’s led by Dr. Hartman along with his team and is designed to give you a holistic, integrative, whole-person perspective on your health. It includes Q&A, group coaching, and will feature guest experts in fields like nutrition, aromatherapy, and exercise/movement to name a few.
This is still our best option for anyone from overseas as our in-person membership is actually in-person with a physical exam and labwork, etc.
For a high level of detail on the Full Thrive membership, you can visit: https://richmondfunctionalmedicine.com/online-community
From time to time, we will get questions posed to us through social media, through mail, et cetera, and due to HIPAA and a lot of medical requirements for licensing, we cannot answer medical questions via email or social media, et cetera. What we CAN do is provide a lot of education materials. We’ve done this in many ways.
A recommended reading list on our website has multiple books that are great reading for those wanting to know more about functional medicine and to take deep dives in certain subjects.
We have an extensive number of educational blog posts on our website, just for some great general information.
We also have a newsletter that we put out on a weekly basis to help educate patients about gut health, inflammation, mold, and a whole host of things.
For those who want to learn more, we have an online community where we have coaches, lead educational courses, and allow for individuals to come in, share their experience with the community, and then ask questions. Also inside the community, we have courses and a Foundations of Functional Medicine course that goes through the foundational things. We continue putting out new courses regularly.
For those who really want to take a deep dive, they can come and see one of the physicians in the office. We've laid this out to meet people where they're at for those who want basic information.
Hopefully that helps, unfortunately, due to our legal climate and the way things are, we can't answer medical questions outside of the approved routes.