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.
Episodes
62 episodes
The Frog That Changed Biology | Ep. 062
If life is electric, how would we know? We cannot see the current itself, yet every heartbeat, every thought, every muscle contraction, and every signal exchanged between cells depends on it. From the moment life begins until the moment it ends...
The Spark That Changed Everything | Ep. 061
The body depends on electricity every second of every day. Every heartbeat, every thought, every breath, and every conversation between cells relies on it. Yet despite its central role in human biology, we rarely stop to ask what happens when t...
The Most Important Structure Nobody Talks About | Ep. 060
Every second of every day, your cells are making decisions. They decide when to grow, when to repair, when to adapt, and when to hold back. Yet few people ever stop to ask the obvious question: how does a cell know what to do in the first place...
How Does an Emotion Become Biology? | Ep. 059
Grief is one of the most natural experiences we will ever have. So is sadness. So is fear. When loss arrives, the emotions that follow are not evidence that something is wrong. They are evidence that something mattered. We are meant to feel the...
What Hormones Tell Mitochondria To Do | Ep. 058
A football coach never touches the ball, yet every play changes because of the signals coming from the sidelines. Hormones are much like that coach, directing messages throughout the body. ATP may fuel the players on the field, but mitochondria...
Why Are You So Tired? | Ep. 057
Fatigue is often misunderstood. We tend to think of it as simply feeling sleepy or needing more rest. But true fatigue is something much bigger. It is a state where the body no longer has the same capacity, resilience, or reserve it once had. T...
Who Has The Hardest Working Mitochondria? | Ep. 056
Quick question: We have a bodybuilder, a marathon runner, a chess grandmaster, a pregnant woman, and a baby. Whose mitochondria are working harder?
It's More Than Muscle | Ep. 055
Many people think of mitochondria as little more than the body's energy factories. But that description barely scratches the surface. If mitochondria were only responsible for powering muscles, their importance would end when movement stops. Ye...
The Most Underrated Mitochondrial Therapy | Ep. 054
What if one of the most powerful influences on mitochondrial health isn't hidden inside a supplement bottle, a laboratory, or an advanced technology? What if it is something so fundamental, so deeply woven into human biology, that most people o...
Why Your Body Builds More Mitochondria | Ep. 053
Why would the body invest precious resources into building more mitochondria? The answer is surprisingly simple: because it anticipates a greater demand for energy. The body is constantly paying attention to the world around it, adapting to the...
Why The Body Needs Challenge | Ep. 052
Stress is often portrayed as the enemy, but not all stress is harmful. In fact, life depends on the ability to respond to challenge. Moments of demand, change, and adaptation can serve as powerful signals that encourage growth, resilience, and ...
When Quality Control Fails | Ep. 051
Eventually, the body can no longer compensate for accumulated burdens such as chronic stress, environmental exposures, unresolved inflammation, and poor sleep. What was once resilience becomes exhaustion. Energy declines, recovery slows, and se...
Apoptosis: Why Healthy Cells Sometimes Choose Death | Ep. 050
Health is often described as a process of building. Building strength. Building resilience. Building energy. But there is another side to the story that receives far less attention.Sometimes healing is not about adding more. It is about ...
Fission and Fusion: The Mitochondrial Network | Ep. 049
What if some of the most important decisions happening inside your body are being made by structures too small to see?This episode explores the remarkable balance between mitochondrial fusion and fission, two processes that constantly sh...
How Mitochondria Rebuild | Ep. 048
Mitochondria are not static structures. They are constantly sensing, adapting, and responding to the environment around them. Even after periods of stress, dysfunction, or decline, the body retains an extraordinary capacity for renewal. When co...
How Mitochondria Live and Die | Ep. 047
Mitochondria are more than energy producers. They help coordinate communication, adaptation, and resilience throughout the body. When damaged mitochondria are not properly cleared, they continue consuming resources and sending signals that no l...
How Long Does a Mitochondria Actually Live? | Ep. 046
In this episode, we explore the fascinating lifecycle of the mitochondria and the vital role these remarkable structures play in health, resilience, and energy production. How long do mitochondria live? What determines their function over time?...
The Generic Rewrite Part 2 | Ep. 045
As the body adapts to a changing environment, lactate can begin to accumulate as part of the story. But what happens next? The body is not passive. It is constantly sensing, responding, recycling, and attempting to maintain balance in the face ...
The Generic Rewrite: Part 1 | Ep. 044
The body is remarkably adaptable, but every adaptation comes with consequences. In this episode, we discuss the relationship between oxygen, glucose, and the systems that depend on them to maintain balance, resilience, and energy production. As...
Why Oxygen Matters More Than You Think | Ep. 043
When most people think about oxygen, they think about breathing and little more. But oxygen is involved in far more than simply keeping us alive. It plays a central role in how cells communicate, adapt, produce energy, and respond to the world ...
The Warburg Effect Explained | Ep. 042
Few concepts have influenced our understanding of cancer as profoundly as the Warburg Effect. Nearly a century after its discovery, it continues to shape conversations about metabolism, cellular adaptation, and the unique ways cancer cells gene...
The Man Who Saw Something Impossible | Ep. 041
When we begin asking different questions about oxygen, inflammation, mitochondria, and the terrain surrounding the cell itself, an entirely new perspective starts to emerge. The focus shifts beyond isolated symptoms and toward the conditions th...
A Cancer Cell Learns to Survive | Ep. 040
What if one of the most important questions in cancer is not how a cancer cell grows, but how it learns to survive? Cancer is far more than a collection of mutations. It is a dynamic process of adaptation, resilience, and survival within a chan...
Vis Medicatrix Naturae | Ep. 039
In this episode, we explore the healing power of nature and the profound relationship between the human body and the world around it. For generations, people have looked to nature not only for survival but for restoration, resilience, and renew...
The Observation That Refused to Die | Ep. 038
In this episode, we take a journey through the history of recovery and humanity’s enduring desire to understand healing. Long before the invention of the world’s first microscope, people were searching for answers, observing patterns, and tryin...