Recover Wholistic Health with Mercy Family Health Membership

Mercy Family Health Sign Up Information

Greetings.  We would like to present some information about our new Medical Practice to assist you in making an informed decision about whether you would like to be part of this practice. We present the information in a bullet format to assist in tracking the details that may be important to you.

•  Our Vision is to create and provide a Family Practice model that has features representing our priorities.   We hope to provide Wholistic, Restorative, Natural treatments integrated into a traditional Family Practice model.   So to review those words:  wholistic means that we wish to integrate spiritual health into the goal of emotional and physical health.   Restorative means that we wish to help people reverse chronic disease, not just live with it, utilizing the body’s natural healing properties.  Natural means that we hope to use treatments that don’t depend on prescription drugs whenever possible.   Our vision is to provide primarily a chronic care model, although it can also be applied to many acute issues that people encounter.
•  We will take a more conservative view regarding medication prescription than is currently used in standard American medical practice.    We do not believe that the current goals for hypertension management, cholesterol management, and treatment of diabetes are based on good science but rather reflect pharmaceutical company influence.   We believe that that influence has severely biased a majority of the medical studies upon which these treatment decisions depend.  That shift in the treatments and goals that doctors— influenced by these studies—- recommend to their patients has potential for harm for many patients without a measurable benefit for many patients.  In other words over the years the pharmaceutical industry in combination with the insurance industry has managed to  make a cookbook approach to medical treatment of complex problems normative.  Instead of individualizing treatment plans based on lifestyle strategies that we know are effective, patients are more and more subjected to cookbook medicine.  And doctors are made to feel that they are giving poor care if they don’t follow the cookbook.  We would like to return to a more traditional approach to individualizing care based on different layers of lifestyle changes.  This “more traditional approach” is how medicine was practiced before insurance companies and drug companies controlled the practice of medicine.   This means that if you wish to be receiving medical care that is in the mainstream of current medical practice in the United States, we are not a good fit for your goals.  If you wish to pursue natural strategies to common problems, then we are potentially a good fit for what you seek.   A final comment on this point:  we cannot prove our approach is better than the cookbook approach, but over many years of observation we are quite convinced that patients do better and feel better the fewer medications that they take.  In general, studies show lifestyle strategies as a way to treat chronic disease are at least as effective as medication and frequently more effective in terms of long term health outcomes.   The key of course is knowing the right lifestyle strategy that has not been polluted by the pharmaceutical and insurance industries.   We are knowledgeable about these lifestyle choices.
•  We have no extra staff at this time.  So communication with us will be without the benefit of an office staffed by secretaries and nurses.  That means that we are not usually in a position to take care of your urgent issues and you should not expect that, especially if the urgent issue happens after 5 PM.   We will have answering machines and texting availability to message us.   Unlike an office that is staffed through the day, though, you will not be able to call and talk to somebody immediately.   While we will attempt to handle urgent issues that happen during the day, it is something that we cannot guarantee will happen, and we will definitely not be available after hours for new problems that come up.   Over the years patients have made the choice to go to urgent care clinics rather than call the doctor who is  “on call”, and this model seems to be becoming the norm.   We will be available to provide followup to the urgent things that happen and will make effort to fit followup appropriately into our schedules.   We will likely see people more quickly than they are often seen in traditional practices, but we do want you to know the limitations we have.  In part we are making this choice to make it more likely that we can provide this care for a longer number of years by not taking on more than we can handle. 
•  To help patients manage these urgent issues, we will be providing an online membership site that will ultimately have our guidance in video form for more than a hundred of the most common problems.   This will take a while to complete but should be completed in about a year.   Modules will be posted as they are completed during this time.  These videos will reflect exactly how we approach these problems rather than approaches that have been influenced by the pharmaceutical industry, and what we will create reflects more than 4 decades of experience.  This program will be free to our patients but will cost others outside the practice. 
•  We have chosen a cash reimbursement system for our office visits rather than working with insurance to  eliminate the increasingly corrupting influence of insurance companies on the practice of medicine.   Secondarily, to deal with insurance as a payer for the patient encounter, we would have to hire one or two people just for that as well as have a much larger office with the result we would have to double the number of patients to fund those costs at a time in our lives when we are attempting to slow down.  You will still be able to use your insurance for medication, testing, referrals, and hospitalization, but not for our fees.
•  We will provide telemedicine encounters if you cannot make it to the office, and this will also be available when we are out of town.     
•  For the first year, Sheri will mainly be shadowing Dr. Lang to refresh her skill set.  As a certified nurse practitioner she has been active in reproductive health for some time but would prefer to spend a while getting back into the flow of family medicine.   The other part of this plan is that both of us will know you, the patient, and if Dr. Lang is not available, Sheri will be able to continue the treatment without interruption.  She will also be able to refill medication if needed except she will not be refilling controlled drugs. 
•  When you sign up as a member, you will be emailed information about how to login to the membership site, which is fairly bare at this point but will be gradually fleshed out with information that will be helpful to you for various medical problems.   This membership site will allow us to email you easily and email our entire practice easily with updates etc.
•  The fee currently is going to be 100 dollars a month for a single adult and 150 dollars a month for a married couple.   At this time we will not charge more for minor children because we in part see this practice a ministry to families with small children.  If we notice that somebody is using the practice resources in a manner we believe to be excessive (our time and stress levels), we will either ask that person to find a different doctor or increase the monthly fee to something that is more fair.  However to be clear we expect and want to see you as frequently as is needed for as long as is needed for the problems you might develop. For example if you develop a respiratory problem and need to be seen twice a week for a month, the fee will not change at all.  We will not accept new patients with complicated medical problems, not because we don’t know how to handle them, but because we will not have the staff or infrastructure to provide consistent and appropriate care.  These types of patients typically require a lot of frequent phone contact with the office to obtain the guidance they need which means frequent calls sometimes more than once a day.  We will not be staffed for that type of care.    However if you already are a patient and become a lot more complicated rest assured that we will care for your needs as long as we feel we can provide the care you need.   
•  There are two services that we will also provide that are not included in the above monthly fees.  The first is the NaPro work that Sheri does with women who have either cycle issues, infertility issues or desire natural family planning.   This is extremely labor intensive and she currently charges a fraction of what I (Dr Lang) think she should be charging.   When you factor in the time spent in all the charting she does per encounter, she is getting less than minimum wage for very complex work.   The second area that will not be included with the above monthly fees will be an advanced pain management system called Softwave.   This non-invasive device uses a special form of shockwave therapy that helps to reduce pain, decrease inflammation, cause healing of even advanced degenerative changes, and cause rapid stem cell migration into the treated area.   This will be a separate service we will offer and will also be cash only.  Insurance does not cover it in spite of the fact that it has been more than 16 years since it was invented and has over a 140 published papers on its effectiveness.   It has a success rate of 85 to 95% depending on the diagnosis.   It is currently being used in more than 40 professional sports teams as part of their athletic training and PT departments to keep their athletes moving at peak performance.    This service will not be covered by the monthly membership fee, but all of our family practice patients can have access to this treatment.  Patients of the Softwave Pain management practice will not automatically be patients of the Family Practice.  The Softwave patients will have an alternative to living with pain or taking opioid pain medication, and in many cases surgery can even be deferred or cancelled.   If you are not interested in Softwave, we will of course evaluate and treat your pain regardless of cause according to the monthly membership fee already discussed.   We just want you to know that this alternative will be available to you if you need it and want it.
•  One factor to consider in using our practice that you should know about is that insurance companies have for many years been creating hurdles to access treatments and expensive testing like MRI’s to limit their cost.   They do this by requiring what is called “prior authorization” meaning that one has to get permission before they agree to pay for the procedure and treatment.   In offices that participate with insurance companies, they have to assign an employee to spend most of the week getting these “prior authorizations” approved.   Because we will not be participating with insurance companies, we will also not be hiring help to deal with this increasingly unethical set of hurdles that these companies use to deny treatment  and testing and make more money for themselves.   That means that in our practice the patient would be responsible for making at least some of the phone calls to the insurance company for these kinds of medical events.  In other words if your insurance company declines to cover a legitimate order or treatment, you will need to be involved in the discussions with the company to get approval.  On our part, we will endeavor to avoid as much as possible treatments and testing that we know is likely to trigger this unethical but now normative behavior by these companies.   This problem pretty much applies to non-emergent treatments and tests that are very expensive, like MRIs.  So if you think you will be needing these kinds of things, you should know there will be more responsibility on you, the patient, to have the discussions with your insurance company rather than on us who might order or recommend the test or treatment on your behalf.   However, if you are generally well and intend to follow a lifestyle (that we will teach you) to stay well, these kinds of needs would be much less—or never.    Only God can see the future, so we cannot know whether you will have insurance that covers these things well or poorly.  And of course none of us can see the illnesses and accidents that might be in our future— that’s the point of having access to a doctor in the first place, because we don’t know.    For the average person or family, it is my opinion that it is better to live a healthy lifestyle, pay only for catastrophic insurance and put money away for these kinds of expensive things that you would otherwise be spending on more comprehensive insurance.   In other words if you invest in a healthy lifestyle you are much less likely to need expensive medical intervention.   Of course if you already have chronic disease or multiple risk factors for chronic disease, your need for more comprehensive insurance will be much higher unless you embark on a health care journey to reverse your risk for disease.   If you make this choice, we can help you.   In the early 20th century the incidence of chronic disease in adults was less than 5%.  It is now more than 50%.  The same change has happened in children, only worse.   We can help you change this risk.  It should be clear that our approach will address your lifestyle choices so that is something you should consider before deciding to join our medical practice.   

The sign up link for a family is: Family Membership Sign Up Form (this link will require one adult in the family to be the contact person for the family)

The sign up link for a single adult is : Single Adult Sign Up Form

We will currently restrict the practice to 100 adults (plus their minor children) to control the schedule, and we intend to use a questionnaire to make sure that prospective patients are a good fit for this medical practice.   It is impossible to anticipate the demand, but we do believe there will ultimately be a waiting list; so if you are inclined to be part of this, do not delay.  If you sign up, we will need to schedule the equivalent of an intake encounter in part so that we can have a chart for you already created in the case of an urgent issue.  This could be with telemedicine resources or face to face.  The latter would be preferable so that we can document a cardiac exam baseline.  We wish you God’s richest blessings and guidance as you consider whether to be part of this medical practice.    

Sincerely,

Sheri Lang, CRNP

Stanley Lang, M.D.