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
Acupuncture Shouldn't Work... But It Does | Ep. 092
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Acupuncture is one of those therapies that, at first glance, seems like it shouldn't work. Yet after thousands of years of clinical observation and a growing body of modern research, it continues to challenge our assumptions. Not because it asks us to believe in something mysterious, but because it consistently produces outcomes that demand our attention.
Sometimes the most important discoveries in medicine are the ones that first force us to question what we think we know. Acupuncture is one of them.
Decoding Disease with Dr. Rue
Decoding Disease with Dr. Rue
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In 1971, a New York Times journalist named James Reston was in Beijing covering a historic diplomatic trip when he developed appendicitis. He had emergency surgery in a Chinese hospital, and afterward, in a real post-operative pain, his doctors used acupuncture needles to manage it. It worked well enough that Reston wrote about his experience for the Times when he got back home. That single article is largely credited with introducing acupuncture to the American public. A year later, President Nixon made his own trip to China, cameras followed, and what had been an obscure practice to most Westerners suddenly had a name and a face. But to understand why those needles actually helped rest in that day, you have to go back a lot further than 1971. Thousands of years further. People in ancient China were practicing some form of acupuncture at least 2,500 years ago. And there's real archaeological evidence suggesting it goes back much further than that, possibly into the Neolithic period. And here's the detail that genuinely. And here's the detail that genuinely stops me every time I think about it. The very first instruments used weren't needles at all. They were sharpened stones. They're called beyond stones, and archaeologists have actually found them. Small work pieces of flint and other hardstone shaped with a fine point or edge, dating back thousands of years before anyone had the ability to work with metal at all. Early healers used these stones to press, prick, or lay specific points on the body long before there was a word for meridian, and long before anyone was writing anything down. Think about what that actually means. Someone thousands of years ago sat with another human being who was in pain, took a piece of rock they had carefully shaped by hand and pressed it into a precise point on the body. Because somehow, through trial and observation passed down before writing even existed, they already knew that spot mattered. From there, the tools slowly evolved along with everything else in human history. Stone gave way to sharpened bone and bamboo. Eventually, as Chinese mythology advanced, bronze needles appeared, then iron, then even needles made of gold and silver for the wealthy, believed at the time to carry different therapeutic properties depending on the metal. It wasn't until much later that the fine stainless steel needles we associate with acupuncture today became the standard. So the actual timeline runs from a piece of chip flint in someone's hand all the way to a sterile needle in a clinic. Same idea, carried forward for thousands of years, one material upgrade at a time. And here's what I think is genuinely remarkable on top of that. This isn't some obscure historical footnote. Acupuncture is practiced today in nearly 200 countries and regions around the world. It's recognized by the World Health Organization. In the United States alone, millions of people receive treatment every day and is covered by insurance in places like South Korea, Germany, and Australia. A practice that started with a sharpened rock is now sitting inside modern hospital systems on nearly every continent. So here's the question I actually want to sit with. A practice built on a chipstone and observation. No microscopes, labs survived. Not only survived, it spread and is still being used on nearly every continent on Earth today. Does it actually work? And if it does, why? That's exactly where we're headed next.