Outside Well Centered Wellness in Sanford a sign reads, “Get your brain and body back,” and for Derrick Bieller and his staff, that is their mission.
Bieller recently took over the practice from Dr. Allison Puja Peters and John Peters and hosted an open house at the facility, 1013 Carthage St.
“It’s great to have an option … without having to go out of town,” SAGA Chamber Director Susan Gomez said.
Mayor Rebecca Salmon said she’s talked to some of Bieller’s clients. “You can tell … what you offer has benefited their lives,” she said.
Bieller thanked his wife, Rochelle, and their children, before speaking about Dr. Peters and her husband.
“This was their building — their clinic — and they granted me the opportunity to take this through their vision and expand it,” he said, nothing that Dr. Craig French, chiropractor, has been a big help.
“We do functional medicine. We do holistic medicine. We work on treating the body and the mind,” Bieller said.
“Through Dr. Allison’s mentorship, we’ve taken the holistic, and we’re going to be the only outpatient management for psych, mental health in Sanford.”
Bieller was born in Maine and raised in Dallas until he joined the Army.
He served in the Army for 20 years with the last 10 years as a physician’s assistant.
He attended the University of Nebraska Medical Center and graduated at the top of his class.
He has a variety of clinical training and rotations, including family medicine, pediatrics, OB-GYN, emergency medicine, behavioral health and general surgery.
He moved to North Carolina in 2020, retired from the Army in 2023 and has been seeing patients locally since 2022.
He said he believes in an individualized patient care approach with appropriate patient education and counseling.
“We bought a house locally, and my kids go to school at Grace Christian, where they have for the last five years,” he said.
“As I was retiring, I started to work for civilian practices, and through that, I met Dr. Allison (Peters). She’s had this practice for 17 years, seven years in Sanford and 10 up in Apex. Through her mentorship and guidance, she granted me an opportunity to purchase it — and I did. I’m going to continue to be in wellness medicine. I also have a large background in mental health and psychiatric care, and I’m going to blend that into the practice.”
Bieller said they have the tools to diagnose things when it comes to psychiatric care.
“Bipolar, depression, anxiety, ADHD — we have a unique method of treating those that most psychiatric clinics don’t,” he said.
He noted that the business has Spravato, a ketamine nasal spray that treats treatment-resistant depression.
“That is [for] somebody who has been on several different antidepressants — usually three to seven different ones — and they continue to be depressed. They may have been inpatient several times or had suicide ideation — Spravato is for them. It is an extremely powerful tool for depression.”
Bieiller said the Spravato treatment is done twice per week for four weeks and after that it is self-administered once a week.
“It’s non-pharmacologic, so your liver isn’t breaking it down or it’s not being excreted out of your kidneys or doing extra damage to the body,” he said. “I’ve never had a patient on Spravato that it did not help.”
Bieller said the approach is for mind and body.
“We have a lot of people right now with an abundance of folic acid — it’s the most abundant nutrient in our country — it’s sprayed on everything,” he said.
“White pasta, white rice, white bread … when you get that in the body, it’s unable to be broken down in a usable form. Folic acid is not organic — it’s made in a lab, and it’s sprayed on our food.
“A great example of that is pregnant women — they’re given a prenatal vitamin with folic acid and nine months later they have postpartum depression. The only reason for postpartum depression is the folic acid that is in the prenatal vitamins. We educated patients about that. Yes, you should be on prenatal vitamins, but you should be on natural ones.”
Bieller said there are many environmental factors, including many supplements, that people take that can affect them.
“It may be something that you thought was good, but it may actually be contributing to some of these mental health issues,” he said.
