Decoding Disease with Dr. Rue
Learn to see your body through a different lens.
There comes a point where you begin to sense that what you are experiencing cannot be fully explained by symptoms alone. Patterns repeat, progress feels incomplete, and something deeper is asking to be understood. I’m Dr. Rue, a naturopathic physician focused on chronic illness and integrative oncology, where the work is not about chasing conditions, but about observing the terrain in which they arise.
In this space, we explore how the body adapts, how systems communicate, and how environment, metabolism, and lived experience shape what you feel day to day. The body is not random, and it is not working against you. It responds in ways that reflect its internal and external worlds. As you begin to understand those responses, your relationship with your health begins to change.
These are quiet, intentional conversations designed to bring clarity without removing complexity. If you have ever felt that your experience does not fit into a simple explanation, you are not alone. This is a place to listen more closely, to reconnect, and to begin seeing what may have been there all along.
Decoding Disease with Dr. Rue
The Spark That Changed Everything | Ep. 061
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The body depends on electricity every second of every day. Every heartbeat, every thought, every breath, and every conversation between cells relies on it. Yet despite its central role in human biology, we rarely stop to ask what happens when that electrical system begins to lose its resilience.
Decoding Disease with Dr. Rue
Decoding Disease with Dr. Rue
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There he was, standing outside in the middle of a thunderstorm, holding on to a kite. Now, if you saw someone doing that today, you'd probably think he's completely lost his mind and call 911. His name was Benjamin Franklin, and believe it or not, he wasn't trying to become famous. He wasn't trying to go viral. He was just simply trying to answer a question. Franklin had become fascinated by electricity. The more he learned, the more one question kept coming back. Was lightning really something completely different? Or was it simply electricity on a much larger scale? It was a bold question. And sometimes the questions that sound the craziest end up changing the world. So he came up with an experiment. According to the famous story, he flew a kite during a thunderstorm with the metal key attached to a string, hoping to find out whether lightning and electricity were connected. Now, before I tell you what happened, I want to hit pause just for a minute. Because over the last several episodes, we've been following the story of energy. We've talked about mitochondria, ATP, about where energy comes from. Now we're going to follow where that energy goes. And to do that, we first have to answer a simple question. What exactly is electricity? Most of us never think about it. We flip a light switch and the lights come on. We charge our phones before bed and expect them to work the next morning. Electricity has become so normal that we rarely stop and ask what it actually is. At its simplest, electricity is the movement of tiny electrical charges. As those charges move, they carry energy and they carry information. Now you might be thinking, hold on, Dr. Roo, I thought hormones were how cells communicate. You're right, hormones are part of the story. Just like neurotransmitters are also part of the story. Your immune system is constantly sending signals too. I'm not taking any of that away. I'm just asking you to zoom out for a second. Communication isn't just about sending a message. That message has to reach the next cell, and that next cell has to recognize it and know what to do with that information. That's where electricity becomes so fascinating. It isn't chemistry versus electricity. The body uses both. Without electrical communication, your heart couldn't beat in rhythm, your nervous system couldn't rapidly relay information, and your muscles couldn't respond every time you blinked, smiled, or took a step. Life depends on communication. Chemistry and electricity work together to make that happen. Now, everything we've been talking about starts coming together. Every electrical system has an energy source. Whether you're talking about your phone, your house, an entire city, or an entire country. Electricity doesn't just appear. Something has to produce it. The same thing is true inside your body. That's why we've spent so much time talking about mitochondria. They're producing the energy that allows those electrical conversations to happen every second of every day. You know, like Benjamin Franklin, I also did my own little experiment with electricity. The difference is I was about five years old and my experiment involved a butter knife and an electrical outlet. Let's just say his experiment changed history. Mine, on the other hand, just taught me to never do that again. Now, let's go back to Benjamin Franklin. According to that famous story, as the rain soaked the kite string, electrical charge from the storm traveled down to the quay. When Franklin brought his knuckle close to it, a spark jumped. That tiny spark helped show that lightning and electricity were connected. It completely changed the way people thought about electricity. Over time, we learned how to generate it, store it, transmit it across entire cities, and use it to power almost every part of modern life. I guess he earned his face on that $100 bill after all. But here's the question that fascinates me even more. Once we understood electricity in the world around us, what if life itself was electrical? That's exactly where we're going next.