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Brain Health

An Amen Clinic Alternative: Understand Your Brain Without a Four-Figure Scan

Dr. Nicole Rivera·August 12, 2026·8 min read

The short answer

What is the Core Values Report?

It's an assessment of your true character — what genuinely drives you, why certain things delight you and others enrage you, and how to use your values as fuel for career, finances, and relationships. It also maps your shadow-sm side: the pattern that holds you back and how to convert that challenge into an opportunity.

Your Integrative Life Compass · Free

By 3pm on a normal day, you feel…

10 questions · 4 minutes · report emailed to you

If you left the scan without a plan, you're in the right place

We meet a lot of people who did everything right. They took their brain seriously. They paid out of pocket. They got imaged, labeled, and prescribed. And they still feel exactly the way they felt before — foggy, flat, wired, stuck.

That is not a failure of effort. It's a failure of sequence. The testing came before the understanding.

Here's the other road.

Step 1 — The intake that nobody has run on you

Ninety percent of the clarity that produces outcomes comes from a highly detailed, investigative intake: your symptoms, your timeline, your family system, your work, your relationships, your purpose. A series of questions nobody has asked you, assembled by someone whose job is to find the pattern.

Precise enough that by the end we're 99% sure what's driving this — and any test after that is confirmation, not exploration.

Step 2 — Your Core Values Report

This is the piece most brain programs skip entirely, and it's the one that changes lives.

  • Your true character — who you actually are underneath the adaptations
  • Why things delight you or infuriate you — both are values signals
  • Values as fuel — for career, money, relationships, and decisions
  • Your shadow-sm side — the pattern that holds you back, and how to turn that challenge into an opportunity
  • Borrowed values — the "supposed-to" list you inherited and never audited

What this buys you is decisiveness. Stay in the job or leave it. Start the business or admit you don't want it. Stay in the relationship because it serves your values, or go because you were only there for values pushed onto you. No more "maybe I'm overreacting, maybe it's just a bad day."

That relentless second-guessing is a brain state. It responds to clarity faster than it responds to a prescription.

Step 3 — Your communication profile

How your mind takes in information, how you process conflict, how you connect. This explains the drain: the meetings, the marriage arguments that loop, the feedback that lands like an attack, the social battery that empties at hour two.

Change the inputs and the nervous system changes. That's mind-body, running in the direction people forget.

Step 4 — The life-event timeline

Limits and stucks have dates. Something happened, at an age, and you made a decision about yourself. That decision is still executing.

We map it. Not to relive it — to find the exact place where the pattern got installed, so the 90-day plan can target it instead of guessing.

Step 5 — What's biochemically altering you

Then, and only then, biology:

  • Foundation — assessment-driven. No labs. Foundational wellness of mind and body.
  • DNA Precision — epigenetic testing: stress on your DNA and your organ systems, read against your intake.
  • Private Concierge — doctor-selected blood and urine panels, dictated by intake and DNA, never a template. 1:1 with Dr. Nicole.

Step 6 — The 90-day implementation plan

This is the deliverable. Not a picture. A sequenced, personal plan with what to do first, what to do next, and who's walking it with you.

Our promises, plainly

  • We never give up.
  • We have your back.
  • We always find the root cause.
  • We look at all of you.
  • Precision or nothing.
  • Clarity produces outcomes.

Expensive testing isn't the enemy. Testing without understanding is. Understand yourself first, confirm with the right data, then implement — that's the order that produces outcomes.

Start with the free Integrative Life Compass →

amen clinic alternative
brain health
core values
mind body connection
cluster:amen-clinic
Dr. Nicole Rivera

Medically reviewed by

Dr. Nicole Rivera

Last updated August 12, 2026

Dr. Nicole Rivera is the co-founder of Integrative You and host of the Integrative You podcast. She has spent 15+ years in root-cause clinical practice, working with hormonal collapse, Lyme, mold, gut and autoimmune patterns.

  • Doctor of Chiropractic (DC)
  • IFMC certified
  • Training with IFM, Klinghardt, Kresser and Shoemaker
  • Member of the clinical medical board for Applied Functional Medicine
  • Clinical focus: epigenetic and DNA precision medicine
  • Clinical focus: hormonal health and women's medicine

Topics she covers

Mold illness & CIRSLyme diseaseHeavy metalsAnxiety & the nervous systemGut healthHormones & thyroidAutoimmune & skin

Sources

  • Stress and your health — NIH/NCCIH
  • Caring for your mental health — National Institute of Mental Health
Full bio and credentials Hear her on the podcast

High-intent questions

Frequently asked

See the intake & precision testing steps

Where to take this next

Four ways to go deeper

Foundation

Assessment-driven, no labs required. Core Values Report, communication profile, and a 90-day implementation plan.

DNA Precision

Everything in Foundation plus epigenetic testing — stress on your DNA and your organ systems.

Private Concierge

Doctor-selected blood and urine labs for complex, treatment-resistant cases. 1:1 with Dr. Nicole.

Still Googling symptoms at 2 AM?

Take the free 4-minute Integrative Life Compass — 10 questions, report emailed to you. Find out which root-cause blind spots your doctor isn't checking.

100% free · 4 minutes · No email required

Your Next Step

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The INNSPO app · $19/month

Your report found the pattern. INNSPO makes you act on it.

Reading about the root cause changes nothing on its own — doing something about it daily does. INNSPO gives you the day's practice, tracks what you actually did, and shows you the pattern over weeks. Free for 14 days, then $19/month. Cancel in one click.

Included at no extra cost with Foundation, DNA Precision and Private Concierge memberships.

Today · Week 6

Your practice is ready.

From your report

Down-regulation breathwork · 8 min

Morning binder
Mineral drink
18 day streak
PART OF THE MINDSET CENTEREvery article, episode and webinar on mindset, in one place

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We don't guess. We test.

Precision or nothing.

90% of the clarity that produces outcomes comes from a precise, investigative intake — a series of questions no one has ever asked you. Testing follows the hypothesis: epigenetic DNA in DNA Precision, doctor-selected blood and urine panels in Private Concierge. Nothing gets recommended that the data can't justify.

  • We never give up

    Complex, weird, and "nothing worked" cases are the ones we take.

  • We have your back

    You are not managing this alone between appointments.

  • We always find the root cause

    We keep going upstream until the pattern explains every symptom.

  • We look at all of you

    Mind, body, exposure history, genetics, and the life you are actually living.

  • Precision or nothing

    No shotgun protocols. If we cannot justify it, you do not take it.

  • Clarity produces outcomes

    When you understand why, implementation stops being a willpower problem.

See the intake & precision testing steps
Foundation — assessment-drivenDNA Precision — assessments + epigenetic DNAPrivate Concierge — + doctor-selected labs

Where to go from here

Four ways in. Start at whichever rung is honest for you.

You don't have to commit to a full workup to make progress. Every rung below feeds the next one — nothing you do at the free end gets thrown away when you move up.

  1. Free · 4 minutes

    Your Integrative Life Compass

    10 questions, report emailed to you. Shows which systems are driving the rest, so you stop guessing which protocol to try next.

    Find your root cause
  2. Entry

    Root Cause Snapshot

    A written read on your pattern from the intake you already filled out — what to investigate first, and what to stop paying for.

    See the Snapshot
  3. Most chosen

    DNA Precision

    200+ biomarkers plus your DNA, translated into a 90-day protocol with named brands and doses. Includes the INNSPO practice app.

    Start DNA Precision
  4. Hands-on

    Private Concierge

    A standing clinical team on your case — reachable, proactive, and coordinating the whole family. For complex or multi-system cases.

    See how it works

Still unsure which rung? Book a call to get started with the doctors — they'll tell you if none of them fit.

A black sheep in a tin-foil hat — the Integrative You YouTube channel

Prefer to watch?

Search "Integrative You" on YouTube for the video version of this episode — plus our full library of root-cause walkthroughs, decoded supplements, and Black Sheep rants.

Subscribe to @integrativeyou
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Root-cause medicine for people done with normal labs and surface-level answers. Integrative testing, honest reports, real protocols — built by the Black Sheep team.

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