Approaches to care

Compare family medicine, direct primary care, concierge care, functional medicine, and longevity clinics: what the labels mean and what to ask before joining.

How to use these health guides

Start with the question you want answered. Each guide explains the terms, links to its sources, and suggests questions for a clinician. Use it to prepare for a conversation about your care; it cannot diagnose your symptoms or choose treatment for you.

How to use this page

These guides are about the words clinics use for how they practice and how they charge. A specialty, a membership fee, and a philosophy of care are different things, and the pages try to keep them apart. Read one label at a time. Comparing two models is easier after each page has said what it is for.

Each guide names the sources it checked and the date on those sources. A fee, a Medicare rule, or a board's definition can change after that date. The page is a starting point for questions, not a contract and not a referral. It cannot tell you whether a particular practice is worth joining.

The list below is every approach guide published in this section. Open the one whose label you have already seen on a clinic's site. If you are looking up a symptom instead of a practice model, use Conditions. If you need a definition of a cost or a lab, use Reference. Both sit under the health library.

Bring the questions at the end of a guide to the clinician you are considering. Ask what is included, what is billed separately, and who is licensed to see you in your state. License lookups and board contacts, where a guide gives them, are the official ones that guide cites.

If two labels sound alike, read both guides before you decide they are the same offer. Family medicine, direct primary care, and concierge care are easy to blur, which is why they are separate pages. The hub does not merge them into one recommendation.