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 Science Behind The Needle | Ep. 093
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For many people, the biggest question isn't whether acupuncture has been around for thousands of years. It's how a tiny needle could possibly influence pain, immunity, inflammation, metabolism, and so many other aspects of health. The answer is far more fascinating than most people realize.
This conversation explores the science behind acupuncture, what those needles are actually doing, and why this ancient practice continues to earn the attention of modern medicine. If you've ever wondered how acupuncture works and why it works, this is the episode that explains it all.
Decoding Disease with Dr. Rue
Decoding Disease with Dr. Rue
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Hi everybody! Before getting into today's episode, I'm excited to announce that I'm going to be introducing a new podcast series where I'm going to be focusing on metabolic dysfunction. This new series will continue to run concurrently with the mitochondrial series because we still have so much more to unpack with the mitochondrial series. I'll give you more details in the upcoming episodes. Alright, so back to our mitochondrial series. Last episode I left you with a question. After we talked through what acupuncture, qi, and diagnosis actually mean, a practice built on chipstone and quiet observation thousands of years before anyone had a microscope, is still being used on nearly every continent on Earth today. So, does it actually work? And if it does, why? I told you back in prior episodes where I started, skeptical, trained to trust evidence over tradition. So let's actually look at the evidence because there's more of it than most doctors realize. For a long time, the honest scientific answer to does acupuncture work was something happens, we're just not sure what. That changed with a researcher named Dr. Helene Langevin. In 2002, Langevin mapped where acupuncture points actually sit in the body and found something nobody expected. Close to 80% of them line up directly with the planes between muscles, the sheets of connective tissue called fascia. That's not a coincidence. Anyone could dismiss anymore. It means that the ancient map and the anatomy textbook were pointing at the same location, thousands of years apart. But finding the location is only half the question. What actually happens there? This is where it gets specific. So let's name it and walk through it properly. It's called perinergic signaling. Here's what that means. When a needle enters and twists in that connective tissue, it physically stretches the cells living there, called fibroblasts. That stretch triggers those cells to release a molecule directly into the surrounding tissue. And that molecule they release is wafered, ATP. The exact same ATP we've been talking about throughout the series. Once that ATP is out in the tissue, it doesn't just stay ATP for long. It breaks down into a related molecule called adenosine. And adenosine binds to receptors on nearby nerve endings, receptors that calm pain signals and reduce local inflammation. Researchers have even measured this happening in real time, watching ATP spike in the tissue around the needle within minutes of insertion. So here's the honest answer to why acupuncture works. It isn't magic, and you don't have to believe in an unseen life force to explain it. The needle placed in the right connective tissue plane triggers a measurable local burst of the same molecule your entire body already runs on. And that burst changes how your nervous system processes pain and inflammation right at the source. Tennant would tell you this fits his model perfectly. That this is voltage restoration happening in real time. A jolt of energy poured directly into a circuit that's gone quiet. Western research and a 2,000-year-old practice are describing the same event. One measures it in ATP and adenosine, the other found it by hand, needle by needle, patient by patient, for centuries before anyone had a microscope that could see a fibroblast. That's not two competing explanations. That's confirmation arriving thousands of years apart. All of this is science, but I want to show you what it actually looks like in a room with a real patient because the data is one thing and watching it happen is another.