AI is a Liar - So We Built A Health App
In this episode of Integrative You Radio, Dr. Nick and Dr. Nicole pull back the curtain on the healthcare industry's newest obsession: AI. While the world is rushing to outsource their health to censored algorithms, the Black Sheep of healthcare are doing things differently. Dr. Nicole shares a chilling encounter with a corporate lab executive that confirms what many of us have feared—human error in bloodwork and cancer diagnostics is more common than anyone wants to admit.
We explain why we built our own proprietary health 'brain' rather than relying on generic AI. For over 15 years, we’ve been boutique, concierge, and frankly, limited by the clock. By digitizing 500+ pages of clinical research and proprietary frameworks, we’ve created a way for you to access high-level clinical intelligence without the
0,000 price tag. Learn how we use data to confirm hypotheses rather than fishing for answers, and why the 'Black Sheep' approach to technology is the only way to maintain trust and clinical integrity in a digital age.
Topics: health, nicole, healthcare, intelligence, trust, clinical, guest, black
Key takeaways from this episode
- [00:00] - **The Trust Deficit:** Why patients value trust over speed and efficiency in the digital age.
- [02:15] - **The "AI is a Liar" Problem:** Why standard AI is censored and how it fails to address root-cause health issues.
- [04:45] - **Truth Bomb from the Airline Seat:** Dr. Nicole’s conversation with a LabCorp executive about the frequency of misdiagnosis and lab errors.
- [07:10] - **The 99% Rule:** Why a consultation should be so good that the lab work is only there to confirm what the practitioner already knows.
- [10:30] - **From Boutique to Accessible:** How we translated 15 years of "1-on-1" concierge medicine into a digital format for the masses.
Pull quotes
The reason why we are actually bringing this episode not just to our podcast, but also to our homepage of our brand-new website, Built for the Black Sheep, is we have put together these amazing new healthcare products.
Our goal over the past two years has been, how can we allow more people to have accessibility to what we do?
We have been racking our heads around how can we do it, and now we are in the era of AI.
Transcript
What's up, everyone? Welcome to IntegrativeU Radio. We are talking about a very fun topic today. The reason why we are actually bringing this episode not just to our podcast, but also to our homepage of our brand-new website, Built for the Black Sheep, is we have put together these amazing new healthcare products. Our goal over the past two years has been, how can we allow more people to have accessibility to what we do? Because everything we do is one-to-one. We have been racking our heads around how can we do it, and now we are in the era of AI.
One of our recent clients that went through our new program said, "Holy shit, this really blew me away, and it was so on point." They led with the positives. And they go, "But I probably would have never done it if I didn't know you, because I would never trust AI." And I was like, "Ooh, yes, this is huge. This needs to be talked about." So we are going to just drop some truth bombs on you in this moment. I'm going to tell you right now, we're not sitting here like, "Oh my God, this is the best thing. It's going to save the world." We're going to talk to you very pragmatically about how we have used AI and where you should be really careful with AI.
**Guest:** Well, I think, I mean, there's an old podcast, and it kind of blew our mind because that's not what we were thinking at all. And you don't even know where I'm going.
**Dr. Nicole:** I don't.
**Guest:** But the number one thing a client was looking for in their doctor was trust.
**Dr. Nicole:** Mm-hmm. Yes.
**Guest:** And because we were like, "Results, efficiency, how fast can I get better?" All these things. And it was trust. And I was like, "Well, shit, nobody..." I mean, yeah, 1,000 people. That's what their answer was. We're like, "Oh, okay." I was like, "Well, this is interesting." And then, you know, her saying, "These results blew my mind, but if it wasn't for you guys knowing this, I wouldn't have done it because I didn't trust it."
**Dr. Nicole:** Yeah. Which I just put that full picture together right now, which is pretty cool. But we never know what we're going to talk about, guys. So we are always winging it, and you get the real raw version of us and this conversation.
**Guest:** Always.
**Dr. Nicole:** Sometimes it's good, sometimes maybe a little less.
**Guest:** Yeah. But the very cool thing about what she said, which triggered me, is, well, it actually comes back to intelligence, trusting intelligence. Because, you know, she was partly meaning us because of just our clinical experience and everything that we do to get awesome data and how we use that data. But it's more of she didn't really have the trust with AI.
**Dr. Nicole:** Mm-hmm.
**Guest:** Which was my, maybe my interpretation on it. And that got me thinking of, like, okay, well, it's intelligence because there's a lot of human doctors out there, and human coaches, and human everything that maybe don't have the intelligence that we maybe thought they did. They had a great website, they had a great elevator pitch, they had great things, but when it came to what they actually delivered, ugh. That's a lot of products in the world, unfortunately. So I guess that was where my first went was, okay, well, you don't trust AI, which is, you know, maybe we'll get there later. But first of, you know, trusting humans.
**Dr. Nicole:** Mm-hmm.
**Guest:** And is humans better than AI? What's the difference? How do we go about this transition just in the world? How do we go about that in healthcare, of what we've created? How can we capitalize off of understanding intelligence, whether it's human intelligence or artificial intelligence?
**Dr. Nicole:** Mm-hmm. That was-
**Guest:** Are you asking?
**Dr. Nicole:** That was the question.
**Guest:** Oh. That was... Yeah. I was like, "Wait, what?"
**Dr. Nicole:** Well... I swear, guys, when you're married, it doesn't matter if you're in business or a relationship. They just nod at you and like, "You're pretty, everything's great." Uh-huh. And then like, "Oh shit, you were talking? You were asking me a question?" That's pretty accurate.
**Guest:** You usually go off on tangents, so I usually wait.
**Dr. Nicole:** Some things don't change. So anyway, rounding... Going back, going back. The main points that I wanted to bring to this is that, one, as you said, there is a lot of opportunity for human error, especially when it comes to healthcare. There have been some really bizarre experiences that I have personally been through in my 15 years as a clinician, and I have seen blood labs run twice, same blood, tell me two different scenarios. One telling me that this young girl had active Lyme disease, the other telling me that there's not even one shred of Lyme disease in the body. And then the lab tells me, "I don't know what to tell you."
I've sat next to someone on a plane who worked very high up in corporate in the division of cancer for LabCorp, who told me that essentially human error happens all the time. And I said, "Can you expand upon that? What do you mean? Are you saying that people can be diagnosed with cancer when they don't really have cancer?" And he looked at me and said, "Yes." So we have to be very conscious that there is a lot of error that's happening in the processing of blood work, in the processing of different samples, et cetera. So this is one of the reasons why we have always preached that you need a variety of data points.
And one of the things that I found myself on repeat, which is a huge catalyst to why we've created what we've created, is that when I would teach practitioners and clinicians and doctors about integrative medicine, I said, "Your initial consultation and your questions that you ask should be so good and so precise and so specific and so investigative that you are 99% sure you know exactly what's going on, and anything you do after, any labs you run, DNA testing, blood work, et cetera, that's just confirming your hypothesis that you're 99% sure about."
And when I started to think about that idea, I go, "Holy shit, this is really how we could possibly lean into this era of AI on our terms." Because for us, the reason why we've had a smaller practice... We had a big practice at one point, but we've slimmed down, and our practice has been small, boutique, concierge, and it's because there's only so much time in the day, and we have a family now, and that's our priority. And it would take us hours to put together the reports and the data points and everything for people, and then create this very robust plan of, you know, how we're going to help them heal.
And so in the past two years, I would say, we started using AI just to help speed up our reports. Because we would dump everything, and it would just clean everything up, put everything in charts, make our grammar better, make Nick, what he actually has to say, understandable. And so we were racking our heads around, you know, the world is changing. How can we make what we do more accessible to more people, more affordable? And we leaned into the idea of your consultation and the questions. If you have good questions and you get good information, that's step one, and step two is how do you then assemble it in the right way?
So we essentially took these intake questionnaires that we use with our private clients that are very robust. People are like, "Oh my God, this is a lot of paperwork." So yes, the same thing is happening if you join any of these new programs that we have, Foundation, DNA, Precision. Yes, it's a lot of questions, but we need the data. That's how we're able to help you get results. And then we took all of our intellectual property that we've compiled in our brains over 15 years, all of the things we've seen work and not work, and we put it together, and that's what we're doing with AI, is that it's literally 90 to 95% our brain, our frameworks, our proprietary process, and that 5% is just AI cleaning it up, formatting it, and making it make sense to you.
**Guest:** A lot faster than we could do by ourselves also.
**Dr. Nicole:** Yes, and allows us to make it accessible and affordable to people. And so essentially, we agree that AI can be a liar because it's censored if you don't ask the right questions, and it's not-
**Guest:** Well, it's, it's... Ours isn't censored.
**Dr. Nicole:** No. But I mean, you only have-
**Guest:** But there's people-
**Dr. Nicole:** If you ask a question to our AI brain, it's limited. I mean, it's primarily health. I mean, there's some metaphysical and aspects in there you could get into, but, you know, it's not going to teach you all the stuff that you should be asking maybe ChatGPT or et cetera. Like, it's a completely different structured brain.
**Dr. Nicole:** Well, it's, it's literally our brain. Yeah. It's completely our clinical database that we've compiled because, you know, I have a 500-page document of all of my research over the past 15 years that was sitting in the Google Drive, and Nick's like, "Are you going to do anything with that?" I'm like, "I don't, I don't know. Maybe." And it's, you know, it's been, it's been... We've had so many things that we use personally in our lives, we use with our clients, and we just haven't had the right tools to bring it to the public. And we feel like with AI, this has just given us the opportunity to bring so much value to so many people because it, it's all these things that have been sitting in our brains and sitting in our Google Drive that we were able to compile into a very specific process to help people get more information about their body and their minds than they ever have, get more information about who they are, like at their core, their character, that can help them to communicate better in their relationships, help them to make really bold decisions around their career, around their partner, around all the important aspects of life.
And we've even actually... I, I don't know if many of you know, but I took, because I'm a crazy person and I was committed to being a good business owner, and I decided to get two business courses, or I'm sorry, business certifications during COVID because the business was suffering. And I went through this very robust program called Scaling Up, and I went through another program called Metronomics, and I did it to save my business. And I also really enjoy helping business owners, but business owners, it's not just about saving your business. It's about who you are. It's about your own personal growth, being the best version of you as the visionary for your company. And so one of the other things is sitting in the Google Drive was all my proprietary processes to help CEOs and founders become the best version of themselves, and then lead the best version of their business, which we also created. So it's been a wild ride.
**Guest:** And what I love is that AI's process is so fast that we have the blueprint of pretty much how to be your best self. We call it the black sheep, you know? Not be a number, not be treated in a protocol. Like, everything's designed specifically for you. Nobody's going to get two matching reports. Nobody's going to get anything that's ever the same, because it's just you're unique, just like a business. You know, everything that she's talking about with her business certificates coaching, learning how these... And it's not for small mom-and-pop business coaching. Like, the coaching certificates is for Fortune 500 businesses. It's like, you're a huge business. You've got a lot of data. How do I use all this data? How do I manage people? How do I manage money? But what's interesting is one of your, um, mentors, authors you really-
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About Integrative You Radio
Integrative You Radio is a root cause medicine and integrative medicine podcast hosted by Dr. Nicole Rivera and Dr. Nick Carruthers — two integrative doctors who build personalized wellness protocols from your DNA, minerals, hormones, gut, and nervous system rather than from a population template. Looking for an integrative doctor who reads your labs together instead of in isolation? This is the show.
Further reading
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