Well, here is something we haven’t done for a while. Recently Alex and Jason were able to sit down and have a conversation with Dr. Kathy Raver, Founder and CEO of Well Life ABQ. Well Life is an Albuquerque, New Mexico based Direct Primary Health Care Provider. That might sound like a typical word salad and therefore a typical doctor’s office. However, it is anything but. Well Life isn’t held down by all the features of modern medicine that we take for granted today, it isn’t hampered by the system as it has developed and too many regard as normal. Yet, it isn’t an overreaction to that system either. Well Life isn’t going to just hand you supplements and send you on your way. It is a serious provider that also isn’t afraid to give you some supplements if that is the best thing for you.
Too often, healthcare really just means dealing with people when they are already sick, hitting them with a barrage of tests, a couple of prescriptions and that is the end of it. It really doesn’t have a whole lot to do with keeping people healthy. In fact, everything about the system is geared towards profiting off of people being sick, not keeping people from getting that way in the first place. Think about it, if there is nothing wrong with you, there is no reason to run all of the many expensive tests that are available which means that the insurance company can’t be charged a ton of money. In short, what we currently call traditional medicine is not traditional and it is barely medicine. Dr. Raver is trying to change that.
Dr. Raver is doing that in her little corner of the world by practicing integrated functional medicine. This style of medicine is actually more traditional in that it truly is interested in keeping people healthy and correcting what is wrong when they aren’t, rather than filling people full of prescriptions that typically only mask the real issues while probably causing a few of their own. Naturally, they use all the benefits of Western medicine and the many tools for diagnosis and treatment that it has developed. Well Life is also not afraid to look to other cultures to see if they have good ideas on how to treat certain ailments. Therefore, Dr. Raver will not hesitate to suggest various supplements if that is really the best option available. In many cases, treatments like the kinds that she sometimes recommends often find themselves accepted by Western science, she’s just ahead of the curve.
Another area in which Well Life is ahead of the curve is in the area of insurance. Anyone who knows anything about insurance knows that it doesn’t always deliver the peace of mind that it promises. All too commonly, it adds headaches on top of blood pressure as you try to sift through mounds of paperwork to find out your claim was rejected or that you’ll wind up paying much more than expected. Health care providers will sometimes order expensive tests just because they know they can make money from the insurance company. That kind of paradigm is anything but sustainable or responsible. By minimizing their use of insurance companies, Well Life is actually able to save a lot of money because they don’t need to deal with all the paperwork that comes with insurance. They also are able to negotiate their prices for various treatments, at times getting it below the cost that a person would pay with insurance.
Well Life ABQ represents the kind of approach that TARTLE would like to see more of in the world. They hold on to the best of the familiar and look to find the best in the new, or simply the unfamiliar. Next time, we’ll get more into their business model and how they put it into action to help their patients stay healthy.
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