In-depth Evaluation

In-Depth Evaluation

Once we’ve met in the New Patient Consultation (link) and determined together that you are a good fit for our practice, our first goal is to get a complete understanding of both your current health and your full medical history.

Before your In-depth Evaluation, we’ll send you a link on our website to fill out an extensive set of paperwork, but unlike most clinics, we don’t stop there. For us, the forms are merely a guide, helping us to ask all the right questions. Before we jump into testing or treatment, we conduct the In-depth Evaluation. This is a series of two 1.5 hour consultations on Zoom with both Niko and me (Dr. Shark). Both appointments are done on the same calendar week; that’s 3 hours of face time.

The first appointment is the Intake. In this appointment, we spend 90 minutes asking you questions and writing down the answers, in other words we spend an hour and a half listening to you tell us about your body and your experience. We will review your entire medical history, all of your paperwork and go into detail on every single symptom that is currently interfering with your ability to live life to the fullest. We do this so we can have a comprehensive understanding of exactly what is happening with your health and exactly what factors brought you here.

In-between the first and second appointments, Niko and I (Dr. Shark) sit down and review all the information we gathered and come up with a list of underlying functional issues that are either causing or contributing to your current health struggles. We don’t focus on medical diagnoses but on what systems in your body are not functioning as well as they could and what we can do to help them get back to optimal performance.

The second appointment is the Findings and Recommendations appointment. That’s where we explain to you what we see going on in your body and lay out a clear treatment plan. Most clinics skip this stage entirely. They may give you a list of diagnoses or flagged lab results, but they don’t take the time to educate you. This step is very important to us, because we want to be partners. We have tremendous knowledge and experience to bring to the table, but we can’t fix your health without you. This is one of the main differences between working with a natural healthcare provider and a conventional one. We’re not here to talk down to you or to make you do things our way, we’re here to educate you, provide you with the tools you need and coach you through the process of making the changes necessary to recover your health.

Once you’re educated and on board, we discuss treatment. Our treatment plans consist of a series of one-on-one consultations over a period of months. At each of these consultations, we’ll give you specific, actionable homework that you can work on between appointments. We’ll also prescribe Chinese herbs, give dietary advice, streamline your supplement intake and teach you techniques to bring your nervous system into healing mode. The frequency of consultation will be up to you and will depend on your motivation, commitment level and time and energy availability. We’ll lay out the focus and approach, and we’ll give you options of a slow, medium or fast plan, and you make the choice that’s right for you.

It’s very important to understand that our approach is not pre-determined. In order to create a customized approach that will work for your individual body, we need your feedback. Once we have the treatment plan written, we know where we are and where we are headed, but it’s not uncommon to hit bumps or barriers along the way. This is often the reason that people fail at self-treatment; they just don’t know what to do next when the first recommendation doesn’t work out. We have a lot of experience navigating this, so we’ll always be looking to you to report back how each change is going, and we’ll adjust the next step accordingly. That’s how we stay on the path to full recovery of your health.