FAQs

Great question! Please see Insurance & Practice Policies for details.

Wonderful! Please call our office at (734) 929-2696 or use our online scheduler to request an appointment with our New Patient Coordinator. We will answer all your questions, go over pricing and insurance details, and get you scheduled for the program that best fits your individual needs. We are here to help and look forward to speaking with you soon!

Because our clinic is known for helping people with complex symptoms who are frustrated and who often travel a significant distance, ALL our programs have the option to begin with a no-obligation phone or video consult with one of our clinicians to solidify your decision to work with us. There is a fee for this service. However, if you wish to proceed after speaking with us we may be able to count this meeting towards your New Patient Bundle.

Because we hear this frequently, we have done our best with this website to show you how we aim to measure up to your expectations. Please visit Our Approach and Our Difference.

Conventional medicine and functional/complementary medicine are two distinct approaches to illness and health. Integrative medicine combines them, and in our opinion, is the most “naturally balanced” approach to patients.

Conventional medicine focuses on treating symptoms and restoring health using life-sustaining medicines. It also employs surgery and other procedures, which are often life-saving measures. Treatments are based on the knowledge of body parts, organ systems, physiological machinery, and biochemical reactions, as opposed to the dynamic entire human biology or being.

While many conventional physicians themselves may understand the human being in total, conventional medicine simply lacks the tools to address problems from this perspective. Clearly, this approach is best for rescuing a person from acute, hard-hitting disease and emergency or traumatic situations.

Functional/complementary medicine seeks to better address the patient in total. This paradigm emphasizes genetic predispositions, nutritional deficits, emotional state, and bioenergetic balance, and its approach is more individualized and better promotes total health and well-being.

Furthermore, many treatments attempt to address the underlying cause of illness. As such, symptoms (however clinically important) are approached carefully and seen as an opportunity to locate problems, which may potentially be corrected with lifestyle changes and natural/nutritional remedies.

Any strategy offered is meant to support the body’s ability to heal itself and to root out imbalances at the source and prevent clinical disease from continuing or worsening, sometimes offering patients fundamental and long-term solutions to their medical conditions. Clearly, this approach is superior for many chronic illnesses, prevention, and the overall health and well-being of patients.

Integrative and functional medicine appreciates and utilizes both approaches under appropriate circumstances. It requires a conventionally trained physician motivated to understand both paradigms and remain up-to-date in both conventional and alternative schools of thought. It is often said in conventional medicine that if you can’t see it, test it, touch it, or remove it, then it’s idiopathic, psychosomatic, or otherwise not explainable.

Strictly conventional medicine has limited value in such cases. However, physicians also open to other paradigms will seek to identify the origin of imbalance and address subtle clinical findings more thoroughly, thereby partnering with patients to achieve overall health and healing where possible. Clearly, the combination of both conventional and functional/complementary strategies, and knowing when to apply each, is the most “naturally balanced” way to approach patients.

Great question! It is important to know the background and motivation of the clinicians you work with. Meet our team here

(Answered directly by Dr. Boggess) “Our center is known for our precise, individualized approach and we often boast success helping our clients with issues and symptoms considered a mystery to other clinics and clinicians.

This success starts with offering focused educational sessions for patients where we talk about the fundamentals of nutrigenomics and functional testing, and how we put it all together to tackle their particular life-impacting symptoms and health concerns. 

Education sessions via video or in-person, combined with subsequent review of labs and genomics allows us to offer an even better experience in a more efficient way.

Finally, the advantage of focusing on educating you has proven itself time and time again by increasing patient confidence, compliance, and motivation. It also has led to more efficient, shorter, and more cost-effective follow-up visits once treatment is fully underway – a win-win for our patients and our clinic.”

Ultimately, with all our Preventive, Wellness, and Precision Medicine programs, there are five questions our doctors need to ask to address any condition from a functional medicine perspective:

1. Is a health imbalance associated with something the body needs? (examples: magnesium, electrolytes, B-vitamins, essential fatty acids, etc.)
2. Is it associated with some form of stress the body needs to avoid? (i.e. chemical toxicity, inflammation, food intolerance, oxidative stress, stressful people or places, etc.)
3. Is it caused by something that needs to be eliminated/detoxified? (i.e. poison/toxic accumulation, parasites and other pathogens, even overgrowth of normal (good) GI bacteria, etc.)
4. Are there other factors interfering with and/or preventing healing and restoration? (examples: weak adrenals, hormone imbalance, physiological memory of pain or trauma, vertebral subluxation, emotional blockage or episodes imprinted into the autonomic nervous system)
5. Are there any maladaptive emotions or core beliefs that impede improvement? (i.e. excessive fear, catastrophic thinking, fear of normal movement, belief that one is not deserving of health, subconscious “desire” to remain unhealthy, etc.)

Of course, not every patient will require every aspect of these five concepts, but in the context of a functional medicine approach, we must at least consider all 5 of these questions about fundamental health and well-being in order to return to a state of “natural balance.”

(Answered directly by Dr. Boggess)

“Our way of doing things at Natural Balance is much different than the insurance model allows for. For years we billed insurance but eventually had to stop due to the continual denials of our medical services and testing we ordered for our patients.

The good news is that the insurance companies tend to treat their own clients (i.e. you) much better than they ever treated us, and the vast majority of our patients report getting reimbursed fairly for their visits and labs as per the details of their insurance contract.”

(Answered directly by Dr. Boggess)

“While the number of physicians who utilize this type of approach  is growing steadily, it’s not nearly as widespread as one would expect given the excellent outcomes most doctors who offer this type of care observe.

Also, the current requirement for doubly blind, placebo-controlled studies to legitimize alternative approaches often proves difficult because it too individualized and comprehensive for any given product vs as sugar pill placebo for example. 

Many medications are hailed deservedly for saving lives and people do need them sometimes. However, they are also over-marketed (especially in the US, where TV commercials are allowed) as first line or only options, when many functional health imbalances might be remedied using more natural approaches instead.

So despite the growing momentum in this direction all over the world, medicine-at-large is slow to embrace new approaches that operate under a entirely different paradigm as such."

Our doctors order an array of functional, medical, and genetic tests. Insurance generally pays for these tests when ordered by a physician and the testing laboratories we use are finding ways to make tests that insurance won’t cover more affordable for patients as an out-of-pocket service while conventional research catches up.