Hi, I’m Danielle Perna-Amari, DC. It’s a privilege to have you here. My goal at Root Function is to empower you with the skills and brain-body connection to reclaim your health and vitality. It is my hope that our appointments will allow you to walk away with more resources and ease, capable of handling everything that happens outside the office.
Each time you come in for care, your visit will be unique to your current expression. Each visit entails checking in with the body and gathering information on where the nervous system may be hung up that day. Care is delivered in a way that best helps unfold the tension and stress patterns of the body.
Because your needs will expand and shift as you are under care, we empower you to make autonomous decisions about your frequency and length of visits. We’re not here to “sell” you on chiropractic care and prefer to offer education as we go, so you can make the most grounded decision for you.
If you've been under care before, you may be wondering how I approach adjusting. Most people fall into the traditional chiropractic care with a force applied to the system by hand. Many people don't need high force, and especially not in every region of the body. This is where the variety of approaches comes together, to be like goldilocks, not too much, not too little, for each area in need. Technical terms for this include: diversified, drop table, SOT, BGI, the webster technique and use adjusting tools like activator, arthrostim, and cold laser.
Our First Visit: We’ll go through your health history and make time for in-depth questions to make sure we understand your full health picture. Based on your history, we will do exams (physical, neurological, and chiropractic assessments). If it is both safe and appropriate given your history, an adjustment may be given.
Our Second Visit: We’ll leave room for more questions and connect some of the dots in your history and our exam findings to help you better understand where your body is at. After that we'll deliver your adjustment. At the end of the appointment, we’ll discuss what care moving forward can or ideally will look like for them based on what your unique goals are.
Third Visit + Beyond: Regular care will ensue, and as you change and develop or have a shift in need, we’ll periodically re-examine/ re-test you in order to adjust your care. We may also discuss other resources for continued support on your healthcare journey.
Bringing in your family?
Ask us about our family fee schedule!
Home visits are offered on a limited basis for extenuating circumstances when coming to the office is a limitation to starting or continuing care.
Home travel fees start at $50
Initial visits are $175 and subsequent visits are $60. Periodically, I’ll request a longer visit with you to check-in and perform ongoing exams and these appointments are $90
Initial visits must have a CC on file, and a $175 deposit is required. No-show’s for initial chiropractic appointments will be charged the full appointment fee of $175, it is not refundable. No show's for initial functional medicine appointments will be charged the full appointment fee of $350, it is not refundable.
HSA and FSA cards are accepted, we do not take any form of insurance and are not Medicare providers.
Those who are dealing with economic hardship are encouraged to apply for our non-profit to see how they qualify for accommodated fees for care. Read more about Shift Change, our non-profit offering, HERE.
Chiropractic care is a conservative approach to helping the body resource itself to heal and to function better, naturally. Compared to taking invasive measures like surgery or drugs with adverse side effects, chiropractic care is a great first step in many health care concerns even if patients do resort to more invasive or intensive approaches. My approach to care includes many lower force techniques. It's specific and has a “less is more approach”. With a number of approaches in my “toolbox” this allows me to do what is comfortable for the unique needs of each patient.
Chiropractic can directly and/or indirectly help the body move through many different forms of stress and injury. We hope for a visit or two to help create a big shift, but in reality some things move about quickly and others can be much slower. Your body’s inner physician has its own prioritized to-do list and it takes care of you in the order of most important- so that low back pain may be further down the list compared to helping your GI system calm down.
Depends on the concern. And, contrary to what you may expect, the focus is on resetting HOW the body is working, kind of like reorganizing your resources so that the same limited supply of resources impacts more things at one time. Over time, the body is able to add in more resources for handling the demands put on your body (be it stress or a new baby). As the body learns HOW to utilize or tap into its resources more efficiently, healing and health looks a lot more adaptive and shifts back to “normal” quicker over time. It’s a process, not a destination.
While honoring that the body moves at it's own pace, still at 6-8 weeks if we are not seen any changes, it warrants a referral or imaging to better understand why and to get you into the right hands to move forward.
We get this one most commonly, so let’s really spell it out.
Insurance qualifies care on the basis of something being wrong with you, versus the idea of capitalizing on what is right with you. That means, if they don’t think you “need” care, on their decision matrix, then you aren’t covered. This is especially the case with the pediatric population. Many people have high deductibles and that actually makes their care cost more through their copay than our office fees.
The insurance company did not go to school for chiropractic, nor take hundreds of hours of pregnancy and pediatric specific courses or do a masters in functional medicine- so how are they suppose to know what care you “need”? Their model doesn’t support preventative and wellness care, so working with them means waiting until worse to become worst- which is 100% unnecessary.
Last, by not taking insurance we give better care. You’ve been there- the chiro that takes your insurance and every visit entails some massage, TENS unit, heat pack, etc., and a whole 1-2 mins with the Doctor. That’s how many higher volume offices bolster the cost of your visit to get back maybe 30% of those fees, at best. They are encouraged to do this and to have higher volume to try to make up for the 70% of their time that they dont get paid. And, this means they need to hire additional staff to make all of this work, further increasing their overhead.
Our cash prices give us more time with every patient, more doctor-patient accessibility, and fees that go directly to the practice, not the insurance companies. You literally pay for what you get and you get the best of what we can offer.
That’s 100% up to you, and we likely aren’t a good fit long term as our practice is about teaching people how to look beyond JUST the pain and to focus on function and the things that led to that pain in the first place.. Luckily, there are plenty of Chiropractors and practitioners who are all about serving those who only want to get care when something is “out” or in pain. We are a small practice and with a specific focus, so we are happy to refer people to a place that is a better fit for them, ensuring we have room to see the people who have been waiting for someone like us to care for them! No judgment, as getting care for pain is 100% legitimate, but that is just not the sole supportive structure of our practice.
Yes, though my education and focus is predominantly on the unique needs of women, especially during specific phases of life, such as pregnancy, and the pediatric population.
My time has been and is being spent on a very specific population. With that, I value and benefit from seeing a population of women, as my limited time in practice can be more focused on me developing my clinical skills for women and children, helping me continue to build my expertise in that population’s unique needs.
Everyone deserves care and families under care can have better outcomes and support long term. And, that being said, regardless of sex/gender, we always make sure that people are a good fit for our practice and that I can give the best care possible, because that is what it is all about in the end!
From a developmental standpoint, kids are an advanced population! The amount of changes from 0-5 years old is wild and persistent, and understanding how to accommodate care to the growing population takes advanced care and education to do it well. Conversely, adults have more long term and structural dysfunctions hardwired into their nervous system, which takes a different kind of awareness and ability to accurately assess and care for. They are equally valued in different ways, so we additional family members prices versus discounting a specific population based on age/size.
I am not a medicare provider, given I focus on women of child-bearing age and children. This means that I legally cannot see anyone over 65, regardless of their ability to pay cash for our services. We have great referral partners for our seniors and know this is a population who really values this kind of care (and are some of the best patients!)
I do on a limited basis. These visits have a home visit travel fee starting at $50 to cover that time spent getting to /from your home. These visits are great for the families who want to get all their kids under care but getting them to the office all at once is challenging. I find doing the home visit makes it easier for us to focus on one kid at a time, while the other kids are playing and running around in a known/safe environment. These visits are also good for populations that have unique needs, like neuroatypical patients, newborns, and the solo-parent who can’t get coverage to leave the other kids to come to the office, etc.
Yes, and this will be more in place late 2023, as we polish up our systems for care. To learn more about this type of care and Dr. Danielle’s approach, you can book a Q&A call online or text/call: 484-552-4108.