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 Cost Of Anxiety | Ep. 084
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The body was never designed to separate voltage, mitochondrial function, emotional health, and disease into different conversations. They're part of the same story, each influencing the other in ways that shape resilience, adaptation, and the body's capacity to heal.
Anxiety is far more than a state of mind. It has the potential to influence the body in profound ways. In this conversation, we'll explore those connections and why understanding them may change the way you think about health altogether.
Decoding Disease with Dr. Rue
Decoding Disease with Dr. Rue
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So let's pick up where we left off. In the last episode, we had talked about the immune surveillance system and how that requires a tremendous amount of energy to function at full capacity. We also had spoken about how chronic stress, anxiety can affect how much energy is dedicated to that system. That's not speculation. That's published research in cancer immunology, and it's exactly the kind of connection this scenario exists to make. Voltage, mitochondria, and disease were never three separate conversations. They were always the same one. And hers is the clearest example I've ever seen of it playing out in one single body. This isn't only about cancer. That same chronically activated stress pathway has been tied to a long list of chronic conditions, autoimmune flares, cardiovascular disease, insulin resistance and diabetes, as well as chronic inflammatory conditions that never seem to fully calm down. Different diagnoses, different organ systems, but underneath so many of them, the same exhausted mitochondria, the same immune system running short staffed, and the same body that never got the signal to stand down. I think about this every time I sit with a mast cell patient. Actually, like the one I told you about a few episodes back, if you live with mast cell activation, you already know the cycle intimately. Even if nobody ever named it for you out loud. You never know exactly what's going to trigger the next flare. A food, a scent, a change in temperature, sometimes nothing you can identify at all. So your nervous system stays on permanent alert. Scanning constantly for the next thing that might set you off. Not because of one memory like it was for her, but because the threat genuinely could be anywhere at any time. And here's the cruel part. That constant vigilant itself becomes fuel for more flares. Stress hormones activate mast cells directly. So the anxiety about triggering a flare becomes its own trigger, which produces more anxiety, which produces more flares. A vicious cycle feeding itself, and every loop of it pulling more energy away from actual metabolic repair, the same mitochondria cost we've been tracing through her story, just running on a shorter, faster fuse. This is exactly why mind body medicine has stopped being something whispered about on the edges of real medicine and started becoming a genuine growing field of serious research. It's not because it's trendy, it's because the data keeps confirming what doctors like me have been watching happen in the exam room for years. Every year, there's more research connecting chronic stress, unresolved emotion, and immune function directly to disease outcomes. The science is finally catching up to something patients like her and patients living with mast cell, chronic disease, autoimmune conditions, you name it, have been living out in their bodies the whole time. I'll say this again because I need you to hear it clearly. I'm not telling you her anxiety caused her cancer. I will never say that. But what I'm telling you is that a decade of unresolved fear was quietly asking her mitochondria, including the very ones meant to protect her, to spend their energy somewhere other than defense against disease. Next time, I want to name the actual chemistry behind all of this, one pathway at a time, and then bring this whole detail back to exactly where we started.