What to Expect at Your First Synergy Appointment
At Synergy, our unique approach begins day one — by blending functional neurology and functional medicine. Your initial evaluation will be unlike most doctor's visits. You’ll spend a full hour with both of our doctors, discussing everything from your medical history and symptoms to your childhood, school experiences, coordination, and more. We’ll also probably check you for a tongue tie, but we’ll save the ‘why’ behind that for your eval.
So what does this hour of evaluation look like? Well, let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start: making the appointment.
How to Schedule
Our office is located at 2502 Beech St Suite 60 in Valparaiso, Indiana. You can schedule your initial eval a few different ways:
By calling our office at 219-786-9596
By using this link to request more information. That will put you on our list to call, and a member of our team will reach out to you for scheduling.
Before scheduling, you’ll speak to a member of our team about why you’re seeking care. If you are looking for treatment or services beyond our scope of practice with chiropractic and functional neurology, outside of our area of expertise, or a condition requiring prior or immediate medical attention, we may request that you receive more imaging or follow up from a medical doctor before coming in for your evaluation.
Pre-Evaluation Requirements
Once your initial eval is scheduled, you will receive some intake paperwork online. The intake paperwork is very in-depth, and should be filled out as thoroughly and as detailed as possible, to allow us to draw some of the connections that we need to make in your medical history during your evaluation.
Prior to your evaluation, if you have prior labwork, imaging, MRI’s on a disc, operating reports, etc, we will ask that you email or fax those to our office so we can add it to your chart. If you have a large stack or folder of records at home, we’ll either ask that you drop those off prior to your first appointment so they can be scanned in, or bring them to your initial eval.
Your Evaluation
On the day of your initial evaluation, you can expect to spend about one full hour with our two doctors, Dr Anna Oppermann and Dr Isiah Shanko. Throughout the hour, we will discuss medical history in detail, discuss lifestyle factors like diet, inflammation, metabolic efficiency, mold exposure, any potential signs of autoimmunity, or any additional factors that challenge your system. We then perform a thorough neurological exam, assessing primitive reflexes, oculomotor function, vestibular function, balance, coordination, reaction time, sympathetic vs parasympathetic dominance, gross motor tone and reflexivity, and cognitive tasks like memory and attention. Some of these tasks and tests are physical in nature, but nothing that requires sitting down and writing anything on a piece of paper, like neuropsychiatric testing often requires.
For children with autism, behavioral difficulties, attention challenges, etc, we assess the areas that we can, and alter the testing to fit their age or abilities.
Depending on the patient’s abilities, we may use the RightEye, an FDA approved sensorimotor exam that helps identify and address visual tracking impairments like binocular vision dysfunction, ocular alignment, convergence insufficiencies, post-concussive syndrome, and post-TBI visual difficulties.
Example Portion of a RightEye Report
We may also see it fit to use our Balance Tracker, which is a testing protocol used to tease out and identify the source behind some patients’ balance difficulties to find root cause and address that system individually. The RightEye and Balance Tracking Systems both allow us to print out a report to hand to the patient so they can see their data and performance normative to their age group.
Example Portion of a Balance Tracking Systems Report
Your Labs
Based on medical history and exam findings, we may find that we need to run labs to get more answers. Due to the specialized nature of our labs, our lab work is private pay, and all kits that can be completed at home for children and adults. Depending on the lab, samples are collected via urine, saliva, a fecal sample, or a finger prick blood spot test. We do our best to avoid blood draws, especially for families with children with sensory or behavioral difficulties. Additionally, if there are any basic labs that need to be drawn at Quest or LabCorp, or that the patient would like covered by insurance, we are happy to provide you with a list of our required labs to bring to a primary provider to be ordered. Lab results come back 10-14 days after the sample has been shipped in, and Dr Anna sends a screen-recorded video going through lab results so you can see what we’re looking at, and you learn about your body alongside us.
Your Care
At the end of your evaluation, we will discuss our clinical findings, explain and educate what we found during the eval and how it’s related or unrelated to your symptoms or conditions, and discuss a plan for care moving forward. If labs are required to help us guide the plan, we’ll put a date on the calendar 3-4 weeks out from the date of the initial eval to allow for time to receive and interpret lab results and create a plan for that patient.
Each patient receives an individualized plan based on their neurological and metabolic findings, but the structure of care looks similar in that we typically start with 10 hours of care, which may not sound like a lot of time, but we do get a lot of very focused work done in that time. 10 hours is we have found to work best in keeping everyone accountable to accomplish our goals in a timely manner, rather than extending your care out for longer than it needs to be.
FAQ
How many people can come with to the evaluation? We welcome any and all caregivers and family members to evaluations. If additional children will be joining you, we ask that they remain non-disruptive to the testing process.
What does a treatment plan look like? Our one-week intensive is 5 days in a row for 1 week, 2 hours every day. Our extended intensive is 1-2 hours per week, for a total of 10 hours. While the timeline for treatment plans is standardized, the approach is indeed not standardized.
What if I or my child needs more than 10 hours? You’d be surprised what we can get done, and the progress we can make, in our office in 10 hours! However, if more than 10 hours of care is needed, our doctors will discuss it with you. We’re in the business of making lasting progress and lasting change - so if more work is needed, we’ll do it, as long as everyone at home is on board with the homework that needs to be done as well. (Yes, we’re those people that give home activities)
If you have more questions about what the first visit at our office looks like, fill out this form to have a member of our team call you! Form not working? Click here.
