Blog

If you've stumbled across the term "Direct Primary Care" and thought, is this a subscription for my health?... honestly, you're not far off. Let us explain.

The 15-Minute Problem

You book an appointment three weeks out. You wait 40 minutes in a paper gown that crinkles every time you breathe. Your provider gets exactly 12 minutes with you before they're out the door to the next room. You leave with more questions than you came in with, and a bill that shows up two months later like an unwelcome plot twist.

That's not a you problem. That's a volume problem, most primary care practices are built to see as many patients as insurance reimbursement requires, which means less time for the thing that actually matters: you.

So What's Different About DPC?

Direct Primary Care flips the model. Instead of billing insurance for every visit, you pay a simple membership fee directly to your practice, like a gym membership, but for your actual health.

That membership fee means:

No surprise bills. Your visits, follow-ups, and most in-office care are already covered by your membership.

Real appointment time. 30–60 minutes, not a sprint.

Actual access to your provider. Questions between visits don't have to wait for the next available slot in six weeks. Just text or call!

A relationship, not a transaction. Your provider gets to know your whole story, not just the chief complaint typed into a chart.

Because we're not billing insurance for each visit, we're not incentivized to rush you through the door. We're incentivized to keep you well, which, wild concept, is what healthcare was supposed to be about all along.

What About Insurance?

DPC isn't insurance, and it isn't meant to replace it. Think of your membership as covering your everyday care, the checkups, the "hey can we talk about my thyroid" conversations, the women's health visits, the weight management check-ins, while a high-deductible or catastrophic insurance plan sits in the background for the big, unpredictable stuff like hospitalizations or surgery. Many of our members pair the two and come out ahead, since they're no longer paying copays for the visits that used to add up.

Why We Built Karmi Wellness Around This

At Karmi Wellness, we didn't just want to open another primary care office, we wanted to build a place where every body is welcome to grow. 

It's Not Just Physicals and Prescriptions

Because we built Karmi as a whole-person practice, your membership doesn't stop at primary care in the narrowest sense. That might mean hormonal health support, birth and postpartum care, GLP-1 guidance for weight management, or even popping by for a little aesthetics maintenance, because feeling good in your body and feeling confident in your skin aren't actually separate goals.

The Bottom Line

DPC is what happens when you take healthcare back to something simpler: a provider who has time for you, pricing you can actually understand, and care built around your whole life instead of your chief complaint.

If that sounds like the kind of care you've been looking for, we'd love to have you grow with us.

Curious which membership tier fits you best? Reach out, we're happy to walk through it together, no pressure, no sales pitch. Just a conversation.

I didn't set out to start a practice. I set out to survive my own pregnancy.

I was in clinical, pregnant, dealing with piriformis syndrome and symphysis pubis dysfunction, conditions that made it physically impossible for me to stand for eight hours straight. At one point, I had a chair. Then someone decided I couldn't have it anymore, because "no chairs in the hallway." That was it. No accommodation, no conversation about what I actually needed, just a rule enforced on a pregnant body in pain. Not long after, I was effectively pushed out of that clinical rotation.

I want to be honest about something else, too: I don't think that was only about the chair. A year later, an NP student behind me went through something strikingly similar with the same preceptor, and she was also a Black woman. I can't prove what was in anyone's head. But I know what it felt like to be dismissed, and I know I wasn't the only one it happened to.

Postpartum didn't get easier. I went through it without the kind of community or support that makes those first months survivable, and I dealt with postpartum depression largely on my own. If you've been there, you know how isolating that is, how much you need someone to simply notice you, and how rarely that happens.

That period of my life is where Karmi Wellness actually started, long before I had a name for it, a logo, or a lease. It started as a question: why does the healthcare system so often fail the very people it claims to be built for?

What I Kept Seeing

Once I started really paying attention, I couldn't stop seeing it. I joined a Health in Her Hue cohort focused on fibroids, and I was the only provider in a room full of Black women sharing their stories. What I heard was hard to sit with, not because it was rare, but because it wasn't. Woman after woman describing years of pain dismissed as "normal," basic care that took far too long to get, symptoms explained away instead of investigated. It confirmed something I already knew in my body: this wasn't an isolated bad day at one clinic. It was a pattern.

I've lived a version of that pattern in another area, too. I've struggled with my weight most of my life, and I know what it's like to sit across from a provider who has never once dealt with food noise, lecturing me about willpower like it's a simple math problem. It isn't. That's part of why I refuse to gatekeep GLP-1 medications from patients who could benefit from them. They aren't a shortcut or a "cheat code", they're a real tool, and pretending otherwise mostly just punishes people who are already struggling.

Who I Built This For

Karmi Wellness is built especially with millennial and Gen Z Black women in mind, women in their late 20s through early 40s, often deep in demanding careers, often raising kids, often quietly managing PCOS, irregular cycles, weight that won't budge, or a general sense of just not feeling like themselves anymore. Women who are so stretched between work and family that they barely have time to talk to a friend, let alone sit in a waiting room for an hour to get seven rushed minutes with a provider who's already halfway out the door.

I built this practice to be the opposite of that.

That said, Karmi isn't only for the person I picture when I close my eyes and think of who I'm fighting hardest for. Every membership tier, every service, every bit of care here is open to anyone who wants a provider who will actually listen. If my own story resonates with you regardless of your background, you belong here too.

What I Actually Want

More than clinical outcomes, though those matter, and I take them seriously, what I want is simple, and maybe a little bigger than "healthcare" as a category. I want to be the person people in my community think to call, medical or not. I want "just ask Taylor" to mean something. And I want what I've built here to outlast me, to become a blueprint flexible enough to keep growing and changing, ideally carried forward by someone who came out of this very community, maybe even one of my own kids.

I didn't get the chair I needed when I needed it most. So now I spend my days making sure other people get theirs.

If any part of this sounds like your story, being dismissed, being rushed, being told your pain wasn't as bad as it felt, I'd love for you to come sit down with me. Not just as a patient. As someone I'm genuinely glad to know.