Your Diagnosis is a Half Truth
Episode 259
In this episode of Integrative You Radio , Dr. Nicole Rivera discusses the subjectivity of medicine and healthcare, breaking down the myths surrounding its foundation in science and research. She reveals how personal biases, emotions, and experiences of healthcare providers can influence diagnoses and outcomes. Dr. Nicole emphasizes the critical role of self-responsibility, belief systems, and proactive decision-making in shaping your health journey. Through real-life examples, including a transformative story of an infant’s kidney health journey, she illustrates how mindset, strategy, and alternative approaches can defy conventional medical expectations. #IntegrativeMedicine #HealthEmpowerment #SelfHealing #MindBodyConnection #SubjectivityInMedicine #QuantumHealing #HolisticHealth #WellnessJourney #TakeControlOfYourHealth #BeliefSystemPower 3 Key Takeaways: Medicine is subjective: Despite being rooted in science, healthcare outcomes are influenced by human emotions, beliefs, and experiences, making it far from black and white. Empowerment through self-responsibility: Your health outcomes are not solely dictated by doctors or diagnoses—your belief systems, actions, and commitment play a significant role. The power of questioning and belief: Asking better questions, gathering diverse perspectives, and believing in your ability to heal can drastically shift your health reality. Quotes: "If you believe you can, or if you believe you can’t, either way, you’re right." "A textbook does not match the majority of humans and human experience—your health journey is yours to create." Find Integrative You Radio On: Website Youtube Apple Spotify 2 Doctors Committed to Innovating the Healthcare Experience. Integrative You Radio is hosted by husband-and-wife duo, Dr. Nicole Rivera and Dr. Nick Carruthers. With their voracious curiosity for Integrative Medicine, the Human Mind, Aligned Parenting, and Entrepreneurship, they bring a fresh perspective to the table. They aim to debunk
Topics: medicine, health, integrative, outcomes, unknown, healthcare, belief, truth
Key takeaways from this episode
- ## Your Diagnosis is a Half Truth
- Medicine, despite its scientific foundation, is inherently subjective due to human emotions, biases, and experiences.
- You are the most powerful agent in your health journey, with your belief systems and proactive choices significantly influencing outcomes.
- A diagnosis is not a definitive endpoint but a starting point that can be reshaped by questioning, seeking diverse perspectives, and holding strong beliefs about your ability to heal.
- The subjectivity of medical diagnoses and outcomes.
Pull quotes
This is the place where you become limitless. **Unknown:** We are covering the latest and greatest topics, of course, in a disruptive fashion around integrative medicine, mental health, and human behavior.
We will be sprinkling in some truth bombs for our healthpreneurs so they can join us in our mission to evolve healthcare.
If you are health curious and growth focused, you are in the right place. **Unknown:** But buckle up because this is real, this is raw, and this is disruptive.
Transcript
**Unknown:** Welcome to Integrative U Radio, hosted by Dr. Nick Carruthers and yours truly, Dr. Nicole Rivera. This is the place where you become limitless.
**Unknown:** We are covering the latest and greatest topics, of course, in a disruptive fashion around integrative medicine, mental health, and human behavior. We are also covering how those topics affect the human and family dynamics. We will be sprinkling in some truth bombs for our healthpreneurs so they can join us in our mission to evolve healthcare. If you are health curious and growth focused, you are in the right place.
**Unknown:** But buckle up because this is real, this is raw, and this is disruptive. This is Integrative U Radio. What is up everyone? Welcome back to another episode of Integrative U Radio.
**Unknown:** Got Dr. Nicole here. Uh, we have many episodes that are coming up that are going to be, uh, the Nick, Nick and Nick duo again. But for today, I wanted to talk about a topic that I personally feel very, very passionate about, um, so you will hear me get fired up as per usual.
**Unknown:** And really what I wanna bring to your attention is the fact that medicine and healthcare is so much more damn subjective than you may ever realize. And I think part of it is, is this myth, this, this half-truth that medicine is built on science, medicine is built on research, medicine is built on studies. And yes, there is truth to that, but overall, it's run by humans, and there is always going to be a level of subjectivity when it comes to humans that have their own personal life experiences, they have their own emotions, they have their own belief systems that are going to create a level of subjectivity when it comes to your healthcare, your outcomes, your diagnosis. And I know that a lot of us wanna think that this is not true, but it is.
**Unknown:** And I'm gonna share with you some very, very specific scenarios that I have experienced over the years, that my clients have experienced over the years, that are gonna help you to understand this. But I want you to understand my intention with talking about this. This is not about bashing conventional medicine, functional medicine or anything like that. This is because I want you to feel more empowered in your health journey, in your health outcomes.
**Unknown:** I want you to know that your belief system around what your outcomes can be is the most powerful thing, that you taking everything that you get from your doctors with a grain of salt is key because most of it is a half-truth. And again, half of it is true. Maybe your labs say X, but just because your labs say X does not mean that your outcome is X. Your outcome is based on you.
**Unknown:** It is based on your belief system. It is based off of the work that you put in. It's based off of the data that you have. It's based off of the questions that you ask.
**Unknown:** It's based off of the strategy that you use in your journey. It's based off of the commitment to your journey. It is based off of a lot of different variables that are in your control. It is not the doctor or anyone else's job to help you heal.
**Unknown:** You need guidance. They're there to give you a map. They're there to give you data that you can't get yourself, but it's up to you to be the creator of your outcomes. So, with that being said, one thing that I wanna point out is perception.
**Unknown:** I have been working with an infant, um, working with the family for a while, and she was pregnant, had a baby, and the fear started within the last trimester. We see cystic kidneys. We see that there is kidney disease. There's a probability that your child will be born with one kidney.
**Unknown:** Your child will be born with cystic kidneys and eventually go into kidney failure. Like, it, it, it was the snowball going down the mountain, going, going, going, faster, faster, faster, more and more fear. And we were looking at the information, we were looking at the data, but at the end of the day, looking at imaging of a growing fetus, a growing baby inside of a person, there's a lot of variables. And there is a lot of times that what you're being told is completely inaccurate.
**Unknown:** I have had my clients been, been told that their baby stopped growingAnd that their baby was going to be tiny, you know, maybe five pounds, and the baby came out as ten pounds, which is a very large baby. And it's like, how do you get that wrong? How do you mess that up? And I've heard these stories over and over and over again of this non-necessary fear of this is what we see, this is what we think is going to happen, this is the worst-case scenario, and then it ends up not being the case at all.
**Unknown:** So let's get back to the kidneys. So the baby is born, and there was definitely some cystic development in the left kidney specifically. So the kidneys were-- or the cysts were measured, and then we were working together immediately. A lot of what we were doing was we were administering different types of supplements to the mom, and those were getting delivered to the baby via the breast milk.
**Unknown:** And then we were doing a series of different therapies with the baby as well. For those of you that are like, "Oh, you know, don't you have a virtual telehealth model? Like, how does that work?" We ship equipment to people's homes, and they use it under our very, very specific and strategic guidance. The great thing about it is that they can use the, the devices and the technology up to a few times a day.
**Unknown:** So this is one of the reasons why people are getting such quick results is because it's a compounding effect. So we were doing some very specific therapies with this baby. We were having, uh, a series of, of supplements that were working specif-sp- specifically on kidney function and also detoxifying the toxins that were already inside of the baby's body, specifically in the kidneys, which can be a complete surprise for people that babies are being born toxic. But again, if you want to look at studies that are done, they have found up to-- not up to, they found over two hundred chemicals in the amniotic fluid, the amniotic fluid that the baby is sitting in for the entire duration of the pregnancy.
**Unknown:** So most kids are being born toxic, let alone if they have a series of interventions upon being born. So we were leveraging some very, very strategic things, and in a few months, we then saw that the biggest cyst reduced by seventy-five percent, the second biggest cyst reduced by forty, forty-five percent, and the smallest cyst reduced by twenty-five percent. So here's the kicker. So the doctor responds, the nephrologist, "I've never seen this.
**Unknown:** I don't know what's happening. I don't know how this reduced. This doesn't happen." Sadly, a lot of times my clients, they feel exhausted with the idea of even trying to share what they're doing alternatively with us because, one, the doctor doesn't care. Two, they're never going to understand.
**Unknown:** Three, if anything, they'll find a way to spin it to say, "This is bad. Stop doing it." So they just stay hush-hush, and they are like, "Mm-hmm. Yeah. It's so-- It's a miracle, huh?
**Unknown:** You know, we, we can't believe the, the cysts have, have reduced so much." So still, even with that change, the doctor is like, "Well, you know, essentially it's inevitable that the left kidney is going to have complete loss of function. So I'll see you in a couple of months, and we'll do another ultrasound because chances are the left kidney won't have function by then." So again, more, more fear, more fear. Goes back, and so they do ano-another ultrasound. They do not provide the same report.
**Unknown:** But my client is very smart, and she took a video of the ultrasound, um, as they were doing the ultrasound. And if you've ever done an ultrasound, depending on what they're looking at, they will do measurements during the ultrasound. Like, they did that with my pregnancy, measuring, you know, the limbs and measuring the fingers, measuring the, uh, the aorta, the blood vessels, et cetera. So they were doing the same thing with the kidney.
**Unknown:** And so, uh, she sent me the video. I was able to play it, analyze it, look at the measurements that they came up with. And so essentially this was about eight months from birth and eight months from the first ultrasound. And we had the s- the smallest cyst completely gone.
**Unknown:** So we're down to two cysts. One was reduced by ninety percent, and then one was reduced about eighty, eighty-five percent. So essentially these-- th-there was almost a complete resolution to the cysts in the kidney. So I was very happy with this information and, you know, being able to analyze the ultrasound and deliver this information to my client.
**Unknown:** And obviously, you know, we're not just looking at these, these results, we're looking at, uh, how is this child doing? You know, is this child functioning? Is this child having normal urination? Is this child having pain?
**Unknown:** Is this child having any type of issues, or is this child growing and developing and, you know, um, progressing the way that we want to? And of course, all of those aspects were really great. You know, we had virtually no symptoms in the child. We are seeing normal growth.
**Unknown:** We're seeing normal development neurologically and physically.So obviously all of that is a huge win. And then on top of it, being able to see that there are positive changes happening to the actual organ, you know, it, again, it's, it's just even better. So then there is-- my client reaches out and says, "Are you going to produce a report the same as the last one to tell me the, you know, give me the, the exact measurements of the, um, cysts?" And they're like, "We can't give you that, uh, because there are so many cysts that the... And the, the kidney is shrinking, and the kidney is pretty much going to completely disappear within the next few weeks because of how cystic it is." That is what they said to her.
**Unknown:** Meanwhile, we have a video of the ultrasound showcasing the exact size of the kidney and the exact size of the two remaining cysts. And they, they pretty much responded with, "Here are the recommendations for medication and surgery." So to know why this is-- that happened, it, it, it is virtually impossible to understand why. Um, of course, did I say, "Did I mess up?" You know, "Do, do I need to relook at something?" But it's black and white. And, you know, r-really what it comes down to is that there's a diagnosis that happens.
**Unknown:** The textbook and the training tells you, based on this diagnosis and these measurements and, you know, this coming up in imaging, this is the prognosis, which is black and white, but there is no black and white because of what we just said in the beginning. There are many variables. One of those variables, the type of work that I do, in addition to the will and the belief system of, in this scenario, the parents and the child. If the parents say, "Fuck that, this is not gonna be my child's outcome.
**Unknown:** We're gonna, we're gonna heal," chances are that kid's gonna heal. And for those of you that are like, "That's not how this works," why-- how do you think like pl-- why do you think placebo exists? They've proven over and over and over again that placebo is always better than the pill or the surgery. Because if you believe that pill is gonna help you, and then you take a sugar pill, your body changes, your brain changes, your symptoms change.
**Unknown:** So read about placebo if you, if you're just like, "That's not possible." If you believe you're going to die, if you believe you're going to get worse, if you believe you need the surgery, if you believe you need to be medicated, then that's your reality, one hundred percent. But if you believe you're gonna be able to get through it with some specific tools on your own, if you believe that you're going to survive your cancer diagnosis, chances are you are. But if you believe the opposite, chances are that's also your outcome. So if you believe you can or if you believe you can't, either way, you're right.
**Unknown:** So understanding that a prognosis is some person put a prognosis in a textbook and trained all practitioners to say, "This is the gold standard." But I wanna take this a step further because you might be thinking, well, you know, why? Why is there so much fear inside of, you know, medical diagnoses? And you can use the high level of saying like, "Oh, well, if there's enough fear, then, you know, there's gonna be more profits through medication and surgery." Yeah, I'm sure. But think about it this way.
**Unknown:** If there is a problem, and now we have a diagnosis, it's better legally to give worst-case scenario than to provide hope, and then it's a negative outcome. So let, let me rephrase this. You get told that you have a diagnosis of an autoimmune condition, and they say, "Based off of what we can see, based off of your labs, there's a probability that you're going to have, um, a deterioration of your bowel, and you will probably need to have part of your bowel removed by the time you are of this age." And so they are more comfortable saying this worst-case scenario because if they said, "If you do this and you do this and you do this, then you could have complete resolution of your autoimmune bowel condition," and then you don't have a complete resolution of your bowel, now you can sue for malpractice or negligence because you said-- because they said you could heal, and then you're like, "But I didn't heal, so you provided me with poor information, and this is negligence, and you're part of the reason why I'm sick," et cetera.So this is happening in long-term diagnoses. This is happening in hospitals.
**Unknown:** It is safer to give you worst case scenario and be right than give you a best case scenario and be wrong, because there is going to be legal implications if you give best case scenario and it doesn't pan out that way. And unfortunately, you know, we're living in a world where people are very sue happy, and this is a, a route that a lot of people are going and, you know, in all transparency, really what it comes down to, it's the, it's the victim mentality is, you know, people think they're a victim to their external circumstances or to external people, external input, but at the end of the day, there's no responsible-- responsibility being taken for the fact that we are the creators of our reality. You're the creator of your sickness as well. As much as that could be a hard pill to swallow, but sickness is multifaceted.
**Unknown:** It's not bad luck and bad genes. It's a series of decisions. It's a series of habits. It's a series of stressors that we stuff under the rug.
**Unknown:** It's a series of compounding things that create illness. It doesn't come out of nowhere. You have a decision every single day. You have an opportunity for a decision every single day.
**Unknown:** And there are many people in this world that don't want to think about what they put in their mouth, what they put in their bodies, what they put on their bodies, what they feed their minds through TV and, and media and news and social media. And all of those things are either making you healthier or making you sicker. And so there is a self-responsibility when it comes to your sickness. But the empowering part of this is that there is equal as much opportunity and responsibility when it comes to the healing process.
**Unknown:** But you can't believe everything that you're told. You can't just subscribe to the idea of the textbook prognosis. This is a matter of asking better questions, getting better data, getting a different perspective, dabbling in something that you know nothing about. Something that I've said that I didn't necessarily apply to health in the moment is you hit certain points in your life where you've exhausted the knowledge, tools, and skill set that you have, and you get stuck.
**Unknown:** And really all that it's showing you is that it's time to gain different knowledge, new knowledge, a new skill set, and sometimes this requires a level of guidance or mentorship. So you could either learn it on your own or you can have someone teach it to you that's already surpassed you in that part of life. And so as much as we should be our own advocates in our health, and we should be making quality decisions for our health, at the end of the day, you know, if you are an architect, if you are an interior designer, if you are an accountant, you know, you've dedicated most of your learning to other things. If you're an investor, if you're a hedge fund person, you know, you have skill sets that I don't have, but I also have a skill set that you don't have.
**Unknown:** And so you cre-- you find the person that you can have the most trusted and dynamic relationship with that has the knowledge and the experience and has surpassed the current place that you are stuck. They surpassed it in a way that when you look at that part of their life, you're like, "That's what I want." So if you look at me and my family and our health and you go, "Wow, that's what I want to create for myself. I want to create that for my family. I want to have a level of confidence in health.
**Unknown:** I want to be able to live a life where I don't need medication. I don't need surgery. I don't even need health insurance because I know that I have exactly what I need in order to navigate my health for me and my family." And if that's what you want, then you know who your mentor is. It could be us.
**Unknown:** And the same thing that I do is when I get stuck, if it's business, if it's finances, if it's other things, I'm going to look for the individual who has surpassed this level of stuck, meaning stuck at this level of life, and they have achieved what I would like to be my ideal outcomes. Because everything is figureoutable, as Marie Forleo says. I love her. And everything is doable.
**Unknown:** Everything, you know-- Some of the, the biggest challenges are our biggest opportunities, but it's all how you think about it, it's how you approach it, and it's also how-- the tools to get through it. And sometimes those tools are tools that are given to you by someone who is more knowledgeable in that area. There's nothing wrong with asking for help. There's only, you know, we-- you could be so good at certain things in your life, but it's difficult to be so an expert and a master at everything in life.
**Unknown:** You know, I think that's our, our goal, some of our goals as we age. You know, once you're in your, in your eighties is, like, being able to feel like you're a master in all different parts of life. But that's also such a commitment to your own personal growth. So the moral of the story is, is that we need to take everything that we hear when it comes to our health outcomes, our health prognosis, our health diagnoses, take it with a grain of salt because it's a half-truth.
**Unknown:** And you are in the driver's seat of your outcomes, and it's about what you think, what you believe, the better questions you ask, and the better data you gather. And with that being said is that you have the opportunity to surpass anything that you're being told about what your outcomes should be, because a textbook does not match the majority of humans and human experience. We thank you so much for being an avid listener of Integrative U Radio, formerly known as Integrative Wellness Radio. We appreciate all of your support.
**Unknown:** We love your comments. Please visit us on social media as well as our website to see all of the fun things happening behind the scenes and the new amazing content and courses that is being rolled out on a monthly basis. We hope to see you there.
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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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