When experienced integrative physician Dr. Robin Rose discovered she had a kidney tumor and early signs of kidney disease, she was shocked—but determined. What followed was a deep dive into an often-overlooked aspect of chronic disease care: kidney health.
In this powerful episode, Dr. Rose shares how her personal health journey ignited a mission to bring kidney care into the spotlight within functional and integrative medicine. She highlights how kidney dysfunction is frequently underdiagnosed or misunderstood, even in root-cause-focused care models.
Through her own research and collaboration with a naturopathic kidney specialist, Dr. Rose developed a holistic framework for supporting kidney health—incorporating nutrition, lifestyle, toxin reduction, and innovative therapies like bio-regulator peptides. Her new book, Ology Peptides: Kidney Success with Bio-Regulator Peptides, explores this approach in detail.
🎙️ Tune in to learn:
- Why kidney function is the “silent factor” in many chronic disease cases
- The key lifestyle and environmental factors impacting kidney health
- How peptides—especially bio-regulator peptides—are being used to support kidney repair and resilience
- Why a proactive, systems-based approach is critical to reversing kidney decline
- How practitioners can better support patients before dialysis becomes the only option
If you’re interested in whole-body health and emerging tools in functional medicine, this episode will shift the way you think about kidney care.
👉 Listen now or wherever you get your podcasts.
James Maskell:
Hello ad welcome to the podcast. This week we are talking to Dr. Robin Rose. She is a seasoned, functional and integrative doctor who came. Hello and welcome to the podcast. This week we featured Dr. Robin Rose for the first time on the Evolution of medicine. She is a seasoned, functional, integrative doctor who has ended up learning a lot about the kidney, kidney function, kidney peptides, and it’s a deep personal story and it brings up a clinical topic that is actually very interesting and I think is underappreciated in our space. And she convinced me of that. And you can judge for yourself if you are interested in this topic, if you’d like to learn more about it or if you think she’s right that this conversation is overdue in functional integrative medicine, definitely let us know. So it’s a really great episode. Enjoy.
James Maskell:
So a warm welcome to the podcast for the first time, Dr. Robin Rose. Welcome doctor.
Robin Rose, MD:
Thank you so much.
James Maskell:
I am very excited actually today to talk to you about kidney because as you introduced me to, I think in our first conversation, it’s really not a topic that is talked about that much in functional medicine conferences and integrated medicine and I’m excited to jump into it. So why don’t we just start with the history. You are in beautiful Hawaii and tell us the journey to bring up this topic and to be living where you’re living.
Robin Rose, MD:
Well, I was a happy, holistic, functional, integrative doctor in Ashland, Oregon and came to a place in my life where I didn’t really want to live in the cold anymore. And we came here just as a prolonged visit and ended up staying. And in the process of that and packing and moving, I started spiking high blood pressures, like scary high blood pressures, 220 over 110 kind of thing. Having been the 90 over 50 gal for a long time. And I actually thought I had an adrenal tumor. It’s like, okay, let’s go check this out. I want to see a very new integrative doctor who was actually a specialist. And I have opinions about specialist topping into primary care as though it wasn’t a specialty itself and her foolishness, which I like to share because people are challenged in these situations. So here I was knowing something was wrong, health Food Harriet doesn’t have this stuff going on, something’s up.
And she got in my face and said, “Repeat after me Robin. I am healthy. Come on, say it. Say it.” And I used the Jersey girl word. I basically demanded a CAT scan, found out I had a kidney tumor, sizable one. How do you have a big blob without knowing it is still an unknown for me. So anyway, I was very clear I wanted this out and had a nephrectomy and came to my beautiful home in Hawaii and three months later went back to Oregon to have just a recheck and came to find out I was just on the border of stage four CKD. So the way that works is stage one pretty mild and just do smart stuff. Stage two is a zone that I am basically a mouthpiece for because in allopathic consideration that’s normal, it isn’t functional thinking can explain absolutely why stage three, a lot of bad stuff’s happening.
Four sick, ready for replacement therapy. So I was right on that border and got very ridiculous advice and came to understand that even me experienced, I was an RN, a family nurse practitioner, an MD. I didn’t know enough about kidney to guide myself. So I sat right here in this gorgeous place with my computer and started looking stuff up, reaching out to people, finding out even some of my most brilliant colleagues on the whole spectrum of things, really had mostly nothing to offer me until I found a naturopath whose focus was only kidney. And it was like, okay, you’re the answer to my prayers. Now I’m organized. And she just bought my book, which was really exciting and a big honor. So I basically had to figure this out myself. To get to specialists from where I live is a bit of a journey and every time I’d go, I’d just come home and cry for two days because the mindset was this negative failure, failure, you can’t get better failure, you won’t get better.
And at a point I stopped listening to that and stopped going. And in time I began to rise and function from a GFR of 30, which is about 25% function. No I’m not. All right, thank you. To basically rising up to 50, which I felt much better most recently into stage two at 68. And so I had to do a lot of soul searching and realize that we really haven’t talked enough about kidney. And I reached out all around the world to places where they don’t have the money to dialyze their population of kidney failing people and they have more useful suggestions. And so slowly, slowly I began to create a supplement concept, a botanical concept, and then I discovered peptides and that was like this guy opened up for me and then I discovered bio regulator peptides even more amazing. And so it’s all of it. What I realized was with kidney decline, lifestyle medicine is the platform,
All the things that we talk about just as general health are utterly critical. It’s not optional kind of stuff with kidney. And then you start adding the other stuff and each case is different. A lot of routes into kidney decline. It isn’t just, well, it’s kidney, there’s autoimmune issues, there’s cardio issues, metabolic issues, there’s toxic issues, oncology, a lot of reasons that people in this, what I call the kidney demic, start having decline. And if you know that it’s helpful, you can’t always, not all cases you really can clarify this is it. But often you take a real history and get a sense of the pathway in and then you just start. I have my own list of the ology, ours, and it’s a long list of reversal and reconciliation and restitution. I mean there’s a lot to do. And that was the thing is I wasn’t given anything. Don’t worry on one hand or when will you be ready for us to install plumbing?
James Maskell:
Yeah, well this is particularly interesting to me. My father has actually lived 80 years with only one kidney. And so I’ve been kind of interested in it along the way. And I guess when you start working with this naturopathic doctor, she starts educating you. What would you say are some of the foundational things that you discovered that were new to you then that you think that maybe most of our listeners might not know?
Robin Rose, MD:
Well, it really clarified the diet for me, which a lot of things that I believed were universal aren’t quirky kidney. And so the acknowledging decreased intake of protein 0.6 to 0.8 grams per kilo, that’s actually not a whole lot of protein, especially in this realm of big protein pushing these days. And not with her guidance, but really from Facebook kidney group companions, I came to understand, especially for me with some of my snips and own uniqueness to really step back from eating animal food and do a plant dominant protein diet. And so that was something sleep huge affected by kidney, the endothelial aspect, more attention exercise, I mean all these things that we know about and you can write an encyclopedia about. How does the decline in kidney uniquely do that? You mean uremic dysbiosis is one thing that I learned early on. In fact, my oncologist just said, wait till you get a load of what the microbiome does to kidney. And that was a portal into a long time of looking into this and understanding what uremic toxins means.
James Maskell:
So what are some conditions that you think are actually dependent on the kidney that most people don’t recognize are where the kidneys involve, where they might be overlooking the kidney as a cause or something that they should be looking into?
Robin Rose, MD:
Yeah, good question. I mean family history for one. I mean I had a mom who died from complications of kidney disease, but it was missed until she was basically at the end of her life, any kind of cardio issues, the kidneys, this blob of blood vessels. And so there’s this intimate connection. Cardiorenal is a real thing and whatever brain inflammation is involved, kidney is involved. Autoimmune diseases pretty much always have some renal component to it. Diabetes is one of the major things to be aware of. And somebody who’s diabetic, whose kidneys are okay, protect them. There are strategies to use because in time, maybe not on your watch 10 years later, that person’s having decline. You could have 10 years before paved the way to protection because really a lot of it is protect toxins. Anybody who’s working with occupational nasty stuff, it’s worth a conversation. Again, there’s tools to protect. And so ultimately,
James Maskell:
What are the main tools that you use on tests or understanding apart from history that you would use to get a real clear picture of what’s happening in the kidney?
Robin Rose, MD:
Basic labs? The panel that we get for utterly everything, A comprehensive metabolic panel has a lot of tidbits that you can weave into kidney thinking. I mean obviously the EGFR is of value. It’s not a perfect test, but if you follow it over time and there’s changes, that’s pretty helpful. Creatinine is helpful. Again, not perfect, but if you see it rising, it’s worth looking. It’s like having a higher index of suspicion that kidneys are vulnerable. Calcium, phosphorus, sodium, potassium. The CO2 is really helpful to me because in time kidney decline will contribute to a metabolic acidosis that’s really easy to deal with. And when you do some of these other things, PTH, vitamin D, magnesium, uric acid can all be actually improved by maintaining a more alkaline terrain.
James Maskell:
Awesome. Well, I’m really interested in finding out about the peptides and you have this book that you’ve written, which I think is pretty interesting and exciting, ology peptides, kidney Success with bio regulator peptides. I’d love to dive into some of those, but I guess before we get into the peptide stuff, what are some of the key therapies that you recommend if someone comes to you, they’re dealing with this kind of things, what are some of your critical tools in your toolkit for reversing these kind of issues? And what have you done to go from a 25 to a 62?
Robin Rose, MD:
Well, 68, it was the year I graduated from high school, so it’s a good omen. One thing that I didn’t say, a urinalysis is also helpful. And often the labs that we have tell us about the glomerulus, right? Glomerular filtration rate. But one thing that’s really important to know that I didn’t know, and I’m still really learning and weaving together, is that the tubules, which are as elegant as the small intestine in terms of discernment, I’m writing up a paper on the biblical kidney and there are organs of discernment and the tubules go first, whatever the cause. It could be glucose, it could be sodium, excess, whatever, inflammatory mediators damage, these delicate little structures that are what determines what to keep and what to get rid of. And I’m also working on a presentation in regards to some newer urine testing to tell us early, early, early something’s up with the tubules.
So then you start thinking kidney, you don’t think kidney, it’s like they’re invisible until oh my God. And that’s not uncommon. This like, oh my God thing. And so it really depends on where somebody presents when somebody comes to me in stage two and they were like, well, I’m getting older. My GFR used to be in the eighties and now it’s in the sixties. I love that because that’s more of a frank prevention. It’s like let’s look at what you’re doing that could be harming things and see how we can improve, get some of the toxic load out. So that’s one case, the case where I’m in stage four and I just found out about it and nobody’s even bothered to tell me, not uncommon, which was the part that just blew my mind. It’s like that’s not uncommon. And it’s like what? I mean at least stage three you can figure it out.
So that’s something, where are they? Because then you want to know, well how you get here. And so I like to start looking at stresses. Stress matters. It’s actually an interesting condition because the body reacts to this kidney injury with catecholamines and so it’s actually a sympathetic nervous system, excess condition. So right there, do you know what to do to go to Vegas? Can you get vagal because that really matters. It’s free medicine. Are you sitting and repose? Are you taking time to do breath practice? All that stuff. There’s that. I really like to look at the asset based balance. If I see a CO2 under 25, I’m looking to see what and why. Plus it’s an easy fix with bicarb. I mean it’s unbelievably easy, cheap fix. I like to look at the gut. The uremic dysbiosis is fascinating and the literature has a few uremic toxins.
Oh, there’s been research about it, but in fact there’s hundreds and things that aren’t toxic for people who have normal kidney function can be a burden to somebody who’s in decline. And so that becomes a uremic toxin plus heavy metals, glyphosate, microplastics, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The entire list. And I like to share this that I was on a call at one point some years ago now with a nephrologist from UCSF, and the comment was made, well, people get older, their kidney declines. And what Joe said was perfect was that not so fast that it’s not aging, it’s toxins, lengthy toxin exposure is going to cause this decline. So all these things are part of the lengthy history taking. It makes a difference. I like to know what are you taking? Are you taking anything that could hurt? Kidney phosphorus is a huge issue. I wrote a lot about it in the book because it’s been minimized and yet it’s what when it goes bad sucks calcium from the bones and puts ’em in the arteries. Stripe two, you’re ready to be on the download. And so it’s not that simple. And yet it’s very simple stuff. What are you doing to exercise? How are you maintaining your muscles? You can use the book as exercise equipment.
Robin Rose, MD:
It’s big thick and the diet is enormous. And I usually ask people to use chronometer and start documenting because you say, well, how much protein are you supposed to eat? The recommendation is a piece of meat the size of your palm. I mean, that’s absurd, useless because each person’s unique. There are people who need a little bit more protein. Some people are really acutely ill. You drop their protein levels and things get better because there’s several factors from animal foods in particular that can be challenging to kidney. It doesn’t mean forever you get better. You can start being more flexible. But I really think organic food matters. Each person’s unique. Is that person really sensitive to oxalates? Then you got to look at those veggies is the person diabetic, other issues. But still there’s general idea like don’t eat toxins, don’t eat glyphosate and don’t eat too much protein and don’t eat too much salt.
James Maskell:
Yeah, interesting. I’d love to get your take on before we get into the peptide stuff because I’m really interested in that, but talk us about through the standard of kidney care, right? The DaVinci Center’s doing kidney dialysis, obviously that’s a huge industry and a huge what’s happening there. Why are all these kidneys going sideways and what do you think of the large scale use of dialysis in society?
Robin Rose, MD:
Good questions. Well, my personal experiences were crazy. I felt neglected, not heard, dismissed and came back empty-handed. Pretty much one of the things that I learned, and the fifth of the nephrologists I saw actually said this to me, that the international guidelines say that if your GFR is over 30, in other words, stage three and above, stage 1, 2, 3, see your primary care, but primary care doesn’t know what to do. That’s a little bit of a challenge. If you ask me now what, and I faced that from self and others, and the last person I saw basically looked at me, my GFR had gotten up to 51 at that point and she said, why are you even here? We don’t want to see you till your GFR is under 30. I was just like, whoa. There are some functional nephrologists who I admire who are thinking and practicing differently, but the majority really, they have sick patients.
I mean, God bless them, they have really, really sick patients. Long ago before we had any labs, people got really sick before you even thought about kidney. So the history is of use. Well now we have labs, we have ways to look at early intervention. So I don’t think there’s as much of an excuse as there used to be, but I feel bad for these docs who are seeing sick, sick, sick people and they don’t have a tradition to jump in and spend the hour with the patient to tell ’em what to eat and how to live and what’s stressful in your life. I mean, as a family doc, that’s what I did and my patients got better.
We had an intimate connection. I was always behind, oh well, people who didn’t like that one somewhere else. And so it’s really sad because I mean I’ve been ridiculed for my interest in toxins. It’s like the literature is enormous. I mean, I have this big fat textbook on toxins and kidney and yet in practice that’s a huge history to take not happening. It’s easier to say, well, when will you be ready for dialysis when you’re 95? How about when you’re 85? How about when you’re 75 was nephrologist number three. And I found myself hypersensitive, I can’t deal with this and had a medical degree so I could sit here and learn stuff. Most people are really vulnerable to these attitudes that diminished the enormous benefits of making these changes. I had a group for a while on Facebook. They didn’t know I was a doctor, I was just a kidney patient. It was for stage three. And many people argued with me, oh, they had to have their Pepsi, they had to work in their toxic job, whatever. Some of those people are dead. The ones who were like, wow, a lot, you should go to medical school. Thanks. Many of them are doing way better.
And then in time I was like, well, now I’m feeling better. I can say now I I’m practicing. Yes.
James Maskell:
Very interesting. Well, I really admire the journey and owning it yourself and bringing back the lessons for everyone else. I mean that’s the real hero’s journey. So I salute you, honor you for that. Let’s talk about the peptides because this is the cool sort of interesting cutting edge stuff. It must be interesting enough for you to write that big thick book. Tell us what you learned and what you think that practitioners, why they should get into this.
Robin Rose, MD:
I started, it was Beth Shirley, hi Beth, who was mentioning to somebody else in one of the Facebook groups who had some gut issues and couldn’t get his nitric oxide level up, which was me. Nitric oxide is an issue in CKD that you want to deal with. And there’s many, but that’s certainly one because it’s vascular. And she mentioned BPC 1 57 and I had a moment where it was just like this, what is this? I want this. I didn’t even know what it was. I just got this clarity. This is really important stuff. So I got some and spent a month reading about it through the lens of kidney. Is this okay? People don’t know. So my job was like, is this safe or not? That’s the kidney discernment. Should I take it or not take it? So I had an amazing personal like oh my god, wow experience with the first BPC shot, which is a subq just like insulin, which also is a peptide by the way.
And it got me going. I started taking everybody’s courses and again, being that I eye on kidney in the conversation, which very few people have more. So since I’ve been doing this, I mean I’ve been doing this now for about a decade and there’s more and more people talking kidney. So as a way to say this is good, the kids are hearing me. And so basically I started exploring the different ones. The thymus peptides amazing for kidney because immune system abnormalities and blood cell abnormalities are real for kidney disease. The mitochondrial peptides really turned me on and MOT C was the first one I explored. SS 31 is lovely, a really useful one. And then there’s an whole array of these larger peptides, meaning up to 50 amino acids. And then one day I found out about Otax, which is a bioregulator peptide. Again, it was like, what is this?
And another deep dive. I was very blessed to be introduced to Phelan Atrophy, who’s the pediatrician wife of the man who discovered all of these, a Russian researcher who was forced by the Soviet military to discover ways to protect their soldiers from American toxic warfare. And once he was out the military, he got lots of Soviet research money and had an institute with a great deal of research. That’s pretty fascinating. I mean thanks to Google Translate, I was able to really read a lot of the papers. And so basically after realizing it would take me the rest of my life to put together ology peptides with all of the peptides. So that’s when I decided, okay, I’m going to limit it. This is just a bio regulators. So what are bioregulators are tiny, like two to four amino acid’s up to seven. Some of them have other things hooked onto them, but basically the active is tiny.
They don’t need a receptor to get into cells. So energy-wise, they’re very thrifty. Get into the cell with only a transporter. They get into the nucleus and then they actually lodge in DNA, stretch it open and have the ability to work with his stones and repair epigenetic damage, which is stunning. And the research has shown they’ve taken people over a long period of time and they reverse the aging markers, reverse illness, markers, reverse. And so that really caught my attention because there’s a whole lot of ’em. There’s brain and pineal and thyroid and thymus and eyes and stomach, pancreas, adrenal muscles, bones, parathyroid, ovary, testes, prostate. I think that’s all of them thymus. And so what I did was realize kidney decline is a syndrome. It’s really a root cause when you start looking at it, it affects all other cells and once it’s in decline, other things start declining. You hear about the progeria nature decline.
I mean I’m aware of that a more accelerated aging. And so peptides show up as this miraculous hand up. And so I’ve basically looked at the whole array of these bioregulators in relationship to things we see with kidney. In other words, the kidney brain axis is very real. A lot of what they’re doing really is similar to what I’m doing with kidney and they interact little bits of difference but not that much different. I decline. I just had cataract surgery for the first time since 1959. I’m not wearing glasses. It’s just like, wow, that’s amazing. But I saw the decline really fast before I figured out things. There were things that I saw happening in my body that were like, oh, this is very real. And so we have a way to really cycle through the whole body. Some people have more liver effects from kidney disease. Well, there’s liver bio regulators, and I’ve seen labs improve. I’ve seen energy levels improve. In other words, I have better executive function doc. I am more able to do my housework, I can do my lifting. I mean a lot of things that fall by the wayside when people are too toxic.
James Maskell:
Robin, I really appreciate you doing this and diving in and bringing back all these lessons. I think that for most practitioners who are listening to this and participating in their practice, this is something that has been a bit overlooked. It’s certainly something that’s not on every other conference, and I’m really appreciative for you to let light a match here that can hopefully bring other practitioners to learn about it. And this can be part of a really holistic understanding of how the body works. And I think it’s such a critical part of the detoxification systems and the primary monies. I think that you’re doing an amazing job in getting the word out and I was excited to have you on the podcast and I hope if you’re listening to this, if you feel like kidney education has been left out of the medical education and the functional and integrated medical education that you’ve got, send me a message. Let me know. Did this resonate? And if you want to get hold of Robin, check out her book Ology Peptides. You can find it. If you just Google that, you can find it and we’ll have all the other details in the show notes. Robin, thanks so much for convincing me to do this. I think it’s really valuable and I know that you live a happy and simple life there in Hawaii and I hope that this is an exciting new stage of your career to be on the cutting edge of educating physicians about the importance of the kidney and all the cool things that you can do to help
Robin Rose, MD:
Indeed. I mean, one thing I want to say is my website is new to me. I still have training wheels on with it, but it’s one word ology is kidney success. Keep saying that. Kidney failure, goodbye. And I’m putting blogs on when I do these podcasts, I put that on and resources slowly, slowly, I’m getting agility with it. And so there’s a way to contact me as well and someone talk to me. I mean, I’m happy to chat with clinicians over cases. It’s something I’ve been doing as a way to educate. And there’s a conference happening in August in Atlanta that Ellie Campbell is putting on, which she said was in honor of me encouraging her to consider kidney. So go check that out.
James Maskell:
Amazing. Yeah, we’ll have all those details in the show notes. Ellie is an old friend. I’ve known her since I think 2010. And yeah, she was one of the leaders of doing the local functional forum meetups back in the day in Atlanta and has had a meetup there forever and is a great thinker and a great doctor. So you’re in good company. Well, thank you, doctor. Thanks for being part of the Evolution of Medicine podcast. We’ve been talking kidney with Dr. Robin Rose. We’ll have all the details there. We’ll have the details about the conference in Atlanta in August, and we’ll have the blog and all the other details mentioned in the show notes. Thanks everyone for tuning in. This is the Evolution of Medicine podcast. I’m your host, James Maskell, and we’ll see you next time.
Robin Rose, MD:
Thank you. Aloha everybody.
Thanks for listening to the Evolution of Medicine podcast. Please share this with colleagues who need to hear it. Thanks so much to our sponsors, the Lifestyle Matrix Resource Center. This podcast is really possible because of them. Please visit goevomed.com/lmrc to find out more about their clinical tools, like the Group Visit Toolkit. That’s goevomed.com/lmrc. Thanks so much for listening, and we’ll see you next time.
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