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
Mind-Body Medicine in Cancer and Chronic Disease | Ep. 089
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Can the effects of chronic stress actually be measured by science?
Stress is far more than an emotion. Research has shown that prolonged stress can influence hormones, immune function, inflammation, metabolism, and even the way our cells communicate. What begins as a protective response can, over time, become a biological burden that affects nearly every system in the body. In this episode, we explore what the science reveals about stress and why its effects reach far beyond what we can feel.
Decoding Disease with Dr. Rue
Decoding Disease with Dr. Rue
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In 1975, a psychologist named Robert Ada ran an experiment that should have never worked. And when it did, it terrified him. He was studying taste aversion in rats, giving them a saccharine solution paired with a drug called cytoxan, which suppressed their immune systems and made them nauseous. The rats learned to associate the sweet taste with getting sick, exactly as expected. To confirm how strong that aversion was, Ada force fed some of the rats that saccharine water alone. No drug this time, just the taste. The rats started dying. Cytoxan is toxic, but not at any dose those rats had actually received. They hadn't been given the drug at all. The immune system had been conditioned, the same way Pavlov's dogs learned to salivate at a bell. Except in this instance, the rats learned to suppress themselves at the taste of saccharin alone. And for some reason, that self-inflicted suppression was severe enough to kill them. Ada had accidentally proven something the medical establishment considered impossible at the time. The brain and the immune system were not separate, isolated systems. They were talking to each other directly, powerfully, in ways precise enough to be trained like a reflex. He coined a name for this new field, psychoneuroimmunology. And for years he was met with real skepticism and scorn for suggesting the mind could do this to the body. Fifty years later, this field is infringed. It's the actual scientific foundation underneath everything we've covered in this arc. And I want to spend this episode showing you where the real evidence stands. Not anecdotes, actual trials. Mindful-based stress reduction, MBSR, is the most heavily studied mind-body intervention in cancer care specifically. A meta-analysis pooling 13 randomized controlled trials, primarily in women with breast cancer, found large effects on psychological health and medium effects on fatigue, quality of life, and psychosocial well-being. In other words, mind-body medicine plays such a significant role when it comes to disease as well as cancer. Large and medium are real statistical terms here, not just encouraging. This is measurable, replicated effect, not a single study. So suffice to say, just from this analysis alone, we're saying there is concrete evidence that supports the effects of stress, anxiety, and depression on the immune system. I'm saying this again because I really want to emphasize how important this is. Because this is a field, especially when we talk about conventional medicine, that does not get as much emphasis as it should. It does not get as much attention as it should, and this is something that is so important as it is pivotal to true well-being and wholeness. Beyond mood, researchers have measured MBSR's effect on immune markers directly in breast cancer patients. They managed to track changes in the immune cell activity as well as inflammatory signaling before and after treatment. Evidence that this isn't just about feeling calmer has been discovered. Something measurable, shifting in the actual immune system, the same system Ada accidentally proved was listening to the brain 50 years ago. Fatigue deserves its own mention because one of the most common list addressed symptoms in chronic disease and cancer is actually fatigue. And while they were studying the effect of MBSR, they actually also found that symptoms associated with fatigue were reduced as this was addressed in patients. There is so much more we could cover concerning fatigue as well as the effects of mind and body medicine on cancer and chronic disease. But unfortunately, we are out of time in this episode. That being said, we are going to revisit all of this in future episodes. And I look forward to sharing more about that. Until then, see you next time.