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
What I've Watched... | Ep. 094
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Over the years, I've watched acupuncture become one of those therapies that challenges certainty. I've seen people find meaningful relief where I didn't expect it, and I've also seen others experience little change. Those moments have taught me humility. Medicine is rarely about absolutes, and healing rarely follows the same path twice.
That's why this conversation matters. Acupuncture is not a miracle, and it is not a one-size-fits-all solution. But dismissing it because it doesn't help everyone means overlooking the very real difference it has made for some. In this episode, we'll explore what I've witnessed as a physician, where acupuncture may have a place, and why every decision deserves to be guided by the individual, not by ideology.
Decoding Disease with Dr. Rue
Decoding Disease with Dr. Rue
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I had a patient with melanoma who was on dialysis. His kidneys and liver were failing. He had extensive edema, fluid weighing down his whole body, and he was deep into cancer treatment that was hard enough on its own without his kidneys giving out on top of it. Acupuncture was part of his broader treatment protocol, and by his fourth session we were focusing specifically on his kidney meridians. In TCM, traditional Chinese medicine, there's a concept called damp, and another called qi stagnation. Damp refers to a kind of heaviness, fluid that isn't moving the way it should, pooling instead of flowing. Chi stagnation is exactly what it sounds like. Energy that's supposed to circulate, getting stuck instead. He had both. And there was showing up in his body as edema and failing kidney function. By continuing to work that meridian, moving what was stagnant, he eventually came off dialysis. Not just improved numbers, off dialysis entirely, and his depression, which had been significant, lifted right along with it. I think about that case often, because it's not a small claim to make, and I don't make it lightly. Here's another one. A patient of mine with lung cancer had severe arthritis on top of it, bad enough that she couldn't even make a fist. Acupuncture wasn't even primarily about her joint. We were focused on the cancer. But by her eighth treatment, she had full mobility back in that hand and no pain. I've had patients come out of depression through acupuncture alone. I've had patients break into sweat the moment a needle went in them. Their body responding so immediately and so visibly that there was no question something real was happening. Now, I want to be just as honest about the other side of this. I've also had patients where we did everything right and there was no response at all. Nothing. And that's exactly why I don't believe in cookie cutter medicine. What moves one person's chi, what restores one person's voltage, might do absolutely nothing for the next person sitting in the same chair. That's not a flaw in acupuncture. That's just true of every single tool we have in medicine, conventional or otherwise. It's why having a variety of treatments available actually matters, instead of betting everything on one approach for every person who walks through the door. If I bring this back to the framework we've built all series, here's how I think about it. Every patient walks in with a different starting voltage, a different set of pillars already drained before they ever sit down with me. Needling the same point on two different people isn't asking the same amount of their reserves to respond. One person's system might have just enough charge left to answer that call immediately. While another person may be so depleted that one input isn't enough to move the needle, so to speak, on its own. That doesn't make it less real for the patient who got off dialysis. It just means healing was never going to be one size fits all in the first place. Next episode, I want to tell you about one more patient, the relationship that took almost two years to fully understand.