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Frequently Asked Questions

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Find answers to your questions about Functional Medicine, Anti-Aging Medicine, and the Waller Wellness Center process. Read through a few of our FAQs below!


Functional Medicine FAQs

Functional medicine is an integrative medicine approach with three main goals: identifying root causes, preventing future damage, and providing natural treatment methods.

  • Root causes: Functional Medicine uses in-depth testing to discover the root causes of your symptoms rather than just using medication to mask them. Functional Medicine doctors use your test results to figure out 1) what’s missing from your body that it needs to function optimally, and 2) what might be harming the body that needs to be removed.
  • Proactive and preventative: Functional Medicine is sometimes called “upstream medicine” because it looks for problems coming down the line. Once these problems are identified, you can take active steps to prevent them. On the other hand, traditional medicine is reactive, often ignoring early warning signs and waiting until a disease has gone too far before recommending treatment. 
  • Natural treatment methods: Functional Medicine looks for treatments that work with the body to help it function optimally. Traditional Medicine uses medications that are designed to block the body's normal processes to force a specific result. Medications almost always have side effects, some of which are quite serious, and frequently cause more problems in the long run. 

If you want to learn more about Functional Medicine, you can visit our Functional Medicine page or the Institute for Functional Medicine website.

Learn More About Functional Medicine

Anti-Aging Medicine is a branch of medicine created by the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine (A4M). The goal of Anti-Aging Medicine is aimed at the early detection, prevention, treatment, and reversal of age-related decline. Anti-Aging Medicine focuses on prolonging your “health span” not just your lifespan, and improving your overall quality of life over time so you can continue to enjoy life well into your 80s and 90s!

Learn More About Anti-Aging Medicine

  1. Assessment—Our information gathering and analysis is much more extensive than anything you've likely experienced before. When you first become a patient, we’ll have you fill out a 16-page health history form which asks questions about everything from your genetics, family history, environmental exposures, and dental history, to your dietary choices, stress levels, exercise and sleep patterns. 
  2. Testing—Based on your history, we will suggest in-depth testing to dig deeper. Testing can include everything from nutritional analysis, hormone evaluations and genetic testing to antioxidant levels, heavy metal & toxin burden and food sensitivity testing.  We will explain your results in plain English so you understand exactly what’s going on inside your body, and give you copies of your results to take home. We also encourage you to record our visits to help you remember everything we discuss.
  3. Treatment plan—Then, we’ll suggest the best treatments to help resolve your problems naturally. These will usually include dietary & lifestyle changes, nutritional supplements and hormone replacement therapy (if needed), but may also include any of our other services such as acupuncture, craniosacral therapy or IV nutrients.
  4. Optimal Wellness for Life—For the most profound results, we encourage patients to participate in our “Optimal Wellness Program”: a comprehensive educational curriculum, which offers step-by-step guidance and health coaching in a group setting. In this 1-year program, we teach you to take the “baby steps” necessary to achieve a healthy lifestyle and to maintain optimal wellness for a lifetime.

Become a Patient

As you might expect, the kind of results you see will depend on how closely you follow our recommendations. Most patients who commit themselves to closely following their treatment plan will be rewarded with the results they seek, which may include more energy, better sleep, less pain, an improvement in their lab work, and the ability to get off their medications!

In our experience, this approach works MUCH better in the long run than traditional medicine because it resolves the underlying causes of a medical problem. A recent article published in JAMA on October 25, 2019 confirms this. 

But it’s important to note that since natural treatments are more subtle and have to work with the body, they may take a bit longer to get the desired results. So you may need to be patient. After all, you didn’t get this way overnight!  

Stick with your plan for several months, even if you don’t see a drastic improvement right away. Things typically begin improving within 1-3 months of starting treatment (sometimes sooner). Improvements may be subtle at first (like not needing to take a nap every day), but even a small change is enough to let us know we are on the right track. Make sure to tell us everything you notice, no matter how insignificant it may seem to you. It will often mean something to us.

And as with all things, individual results can vary because everyone is unique. It’s amazing sometimes how a particular treatment will give remarkable results for one person but do nothing for another! With Functional Medicine, we must account for an infinite number of variables, so we may need to modify your treatment plan if things are not progressing as anticipated. 

“Course corrections” are to be expected, and they often teach us more about you than the times of “smooth sailing.” Most often, changing the treatment approach will bring the desired results, but if it doesn’t, we won’t give up on you! We will dig deeper, do more testing, consult with colleagues and approach things in a new way.

So, what if nothing is working? Obviously this doesn’t happen often, or we wouldn’t still be in business, but no one is successful 100% of the time. So if it does happen, we aren’t too proud to admit that we’ve exhausted all of our options and need to send you to someone else. Usually,  this is a person who has expertise in a specific complex area of Functional Medicine, or even someone in the traditional medicine world who specializes in a rare condition we may have discovered in the process of working together. Ultimately, our goal is to get to the bottom of your health issues, and get you the help you need.

Here’s what some of our patients have said:

“Today I enjoy a priceless level of health and vitality that I've never known before and didn't ever think possible.” 

-Daniel D.

“After one treatment, I was amazed at how much better I felt. After six weeks, I was a new person.” 

-Barbara D.

“I had numb toes, vibration feelings in my legs and feet, headaches, brain fog, and fatigue. Now all of those symptoms are gone and even some other issues improved, too.” 

-Elizabeth B.

“With the Waller Wellness Center my cholesterol has dropped 120 points in the past 5 months & I have lost 40 pounds in the past 4 months. There are many other health issues I had that are no longer an issue.”

-Erin G.

We will be honest with you about whether we believe we can help. We can’t help everyone, especially if they’ve waited too long and their body is significantly damaged. Luckily, this is rare in our office. We have been able to help most everyone who walks through our doors.

There are hundreds of different tests we can order, including:

  • Genetics
  • Telomere testing
  • Nutritional deficiencies 
  • Hormone imbalances
  • Food allergies
  • Heavy metals 
  • Toxin levels


The treatments we offer are backed by science and have helped thousands of men and women find lasting relief from their symptoms. We also offer a one-year educational curriculum called the Optimal Wellness Program, which takes patients through 10 classes designed to provide step-by-step guidance and mentoring to help them eliminate many of the underlying causes of their unresolved issues.

Learn More About Our Treatments

Waller Wellness Center medical providers are not primary care physicians. We don’t provide the acute or routine care services provided by primary care physicians (like pap smears or annual physical exams). 

Instead, we act as consultants, advising you on alternative and more natural options to resolve the underlying causes of your health issues. Our goal is to complement the care you receive from your primary care physician, not to replace it. For this reason, we recommend that you maintain your relationship with your primary care physician.

Some of our patients get reimbursement for their visits, but we do not bill insurance companies for our services. We will give you an itemized receipt with the appropriate diagnostic and billing codes on the day of your visit. It will be your responsibility to submit the receipt to your insurance company for reimbursement.

 Insurance companies may reimburse patients for a portion of the visit, but it depends on the insurance provider and the individual policy. Often you must meet an office visit “deductible” (sometimes $1000 or more per year) before you can receive reimbursement.

Billing For Lab Testing

Reimbursement for diagnostic testing can be quite complex because it depends on several things.

  1. “Medical Necessity” - Insurance companies get to decide what they think is “medically necessary”, which usually doesn’t include preventative or proactive tests (looking for early warning signs of problems coming in the future). So,since we are a very proactive medical practice, many of the tests we order may not be considered “medically necessary” by your insurance company and may not be covered.
  2. “Experimental” - This is another term insurance companies will use when they don’t want to pay for a newer type of testing. Diagnostic testing is advancing at lightning speed, but since the insurance companies don’t want to pay for these new tests, they will deny their usefulness for as long as possible.
  3. In Network vs. Out of Network - Insurance companies have “contracts” with most traditional labs to keep their costs down. Many of the more progressive diagnostic labs (which we use) are not “in network”. 


Since this has happened so many times to our patients in the past, we have developed a work-around that bypasses your insurance company altogether, which could save you thousands of dollars.

The decision about the best choice for your health is up to you. If you request it, we will provide you with the reasoning behind our recommendations and the evidence that we based it on. You can share this information with your other physicians if you like.

However, because they are coming from a different paradigm (way of thinking), they may still not understand or agree. Although traditional medicine and Functional Medicine can work together in harmony, many traditional medicine practitioners are hesitant to accept holistic treatments—despite the evidence in favor of them. 

It’s your health. You should make the best choice for your body, whatever you believe that may be.

Bioidentical hormones are very safe. They are identical (have the same molecular structure) to those made naturally in your body, and have been in use since the 1980s. Today, there is controversy surrounding them—mostly because many physicians don’t understand that synthetic and natural hormones behave very differently in the body.  

At the Waller Wellness Center, we believe that the natural hormones estradiol (17-B Estradiol), progesterone, and testosterone are safer than their synthetic counterparts, and we use them in our practice. 

If you would like to learn more about why we believe this, you can read this 2009 review article about the safety of bioidentical hormones.

The natural treatments we offer are extremely safe. They have a considerably lower risk profile than any medication or procedure recommended in traditional medicine. Side effects can happen, but they are very uncommon and usually mild if they occur. 

Because everyone is unique, it’s important to let us know if you feel you have any negative reactions to anything we recommend. We can discontinue a supplement or herb to see if it was causing a problem, then reintroduce it if it was not the culprit.

Learn More About Our Treatments

No, we do not take you off a medication that another doctor put you on. We may recommend a change in medication or a decrease in the dose if your body doesn’t need it anymore. That said, getting to a point where you no longer need medication takes time and must be done carefully. 

We have helped many patients get off their medications by resolving the underlying causes of their symptoms, but this usually requires a willingness to change lifestyle habits. 90-95% of the underlying causes are related to lifestyle choices, which is why we offer the Optimal Wellness Program. It works! 

Most physicians are happy to take you off medications if you lose weight or change the lifestyle factors that caused you to need the medication in the first place. In some cases, we may take over the management of your hormone deficiencies (i.e. thyroid medications and/or bioidentical hormone replacement). In other cases, we may refer you to a primary care physician who is more familiar with our way of practicing.

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