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 Piece That Took Two Years To Find | Ep. 095
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Symptoms are information. Internal medicine is not simply about quieting them but about understanding what they may reveal about the terrain beneath them. Metabolism, inflammation, hormones, digestion, immune function, environment, and lifestyle are all part of the same interconnected story.
The goal is to recognize patterns, ask better questions, and understand why the body may be expressing illness in the first place. Because when we understand the terrain, we can make more informed decisions that support resilience and long-term health.
Decoding Disease with Dr. Rue
Decoding Disease with Dr. Rue
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I have a patient I've been working with for almost two years now. She came to me with mast cell activation. And if you've ever dealt with mast cell issues, here's what you need to understand first. There's no formula. There's no one size fits all protocol you can just apply. Mast cell affects nearly every system at once. So with her, it was GI issues, hormone issues, emotional issues, toxicity layered on top of each other. And the only way through it was figuring out her specific root causes and her specific drivers. Not the textbook version, hers. So that's what we did. Slowly. We chipped away at one piece, then the next, understanding her body a little more each time. And we made real progress. Almost everything responded eventually to the pieces we addressed, except for one thing. Whenever she had a sharp hormonal shift, she would get migraines. Severe ones. I'm talking twelve out of ten. We adjusted supplements, tried timing everything around her the hormonal changes, but nothing fully touched it. And then she came to me and asked if we could try acupuncture because someone had mentioned that they had tried it for their flare-ups and it had been so effective. So she started doing auricular acupuncture or ear acupuncture as you know it. So I want to actually explain what it is because it has a remarkable story behind it. Aurecular acupuncture is built on the idea that the ear itself is a complete map of the entire body, shaped roughly like an inverted fetus, head down near the earlobe. Every part of you in theory has a corresponding point somewhere on that map. Here's how we actually know this. In the 1950s, a French neurologist named Paul Nogier noticed something odd. Several of his patients had a small, similar scar on the upper part of one ear. When he asked about it, he found they'd all seen the same local healer, a woman treating sciatica by catarizing that exact same spot. She didn't know why it worked, she just knew that it did. Nangier decided to test it himself. First replicating her method, then testing acupuncture needles at the same point, and found the same relief in his own sciatica patients. That single observation sent him down a years-long path of mapping the entire ear, point by point, until he built a complete map, later adopted and refined in China as well. So when my patient came to me wanting to try auricular acupuncture, we were working from decades off that mapping, building off one heel's unexplained trick and one doctor's decision to actually investigate it. We started using it specifically for her migraines, and the difference was immediate. Her pain went from a 12 out of 10, completely debilitating, down to a five. From there, we started playing with the exact same points together, watching closely to see what shifted and what didn't. And she started noticing something remarkable on her own. The specific points that corresponded to her symptoms would actually start to ache, faintly, right around the time a hormonal shift was building. Almost like an early warning system, lighting off before the migraine itself ever arrived. To this day, auricular acupuncture has been the final missing piece in her case. Not the whole story. We did need to do everything that we did prior to this, but it was a piece that closed the loop on nearly two years of work. I'm telling you this story for a reason beyond just celebrating her progress. This is what I actually want you to understand about acupuncture and chronic illness. It's rarely one needle, one point, one session that fixes everything. It's patience, layered over time, watching the body tell you what it needs next. And if there's an agenda behind me telling you these stories at all, I'll admit it openly. I want you walking away from this series, understanding acupuncture, not just believing it works because I told you it does. I want the people who've experienced it themselves to hear this and think that's exactly what happened to me. And I want people who haven't yet to get curious enough to ask their own doctor about it. That's the whole point of opening this world up to you the way that we have. See you next time.