The Water Is the Medicine: Aqua Medical, Traditional Ecological Knowledge, and a Different Way of Seeing a Breakthrough
By Dean Newton
Member of the Patawomeck Tribe of Virginia and Chairman of Relevance Ventures
Steam, yes hot water, is the medicine. That's the part that surprises many Western medical and investment professionals. Their Native American counterparts, on the other hand, nod in agreement.
Aqua Medical uses steam delivered through an endoscope (technically radiofrequency vapor ablation delivered through a proprietary through-the-scope catheter) to pioneer the prevention and treatment of type-2 diabetes, the largest TAM in all of medicine. When I make that point to audiences of Western medical and investment professionals, I'm often greeted by an expression of shock:
"Who would have ever thought steam could be the key to solving one of our biggest health threats?"
The early human clinical data is striking. A 2.5 to 2.6 percent HbA1c reduction in oral antidiabetic patients at 12 months, exceeding the 1.9 percent achieved by gastric bypass. One hundred percent (100%) insulin elimination in a 20-patient insulin-dependent cohort at 12 months and counting, with 80 percent remaining insulin-independent at 12 months without escalation of other oral therapy. Zero device or procedure-related serious adverse events or counterindications. Instead of daily injections and lifelong pharmacological dependency, extended periodic 60-minute outpatient procedures reset the metabolic signaling pathway that drives insulin resistance. (Norton et al., DDW 2026 / ESGE Days 2026; NCT05887635, NCT06655740).
The mechanism, of course, is water.
Steam? Really?
Clean water is a foundational element of human life and makes up more than 60 percent of the human body. Even though type-2 diabetes is an existential threat to human health, affecting Native communities at more than twice the rate of the majority population, Natives are far more likely to find the role of steam in Aqua's solution self-evident. The Relevance investment committee did, and we invested in the company.
These two very different perspectives, the surprised Western reaction and the unsurprised Native one, demonstrate the importance of what is commonly called TEK, or Traditional Ecological Knowledge.
In some ways, TEK is the knowledge gained from generations of indigenous "clinical trials," all of which inform one overarching conclusion: the health of all living things is grounded in balance and in informed, responsible consumption.
The Pattern: Gifts Without Wisdom
Indigenous peoples introduced the Western world to tobacco and corn, plants our ancestors cultivated within systems of relational knowledge. Tobacco is ceremonial, to be used sparingly. Corn is best consumed as a whole food in a balanced diet.
The plants themselves aren't the problem. Consuming them without the TEK protocol is.
When our ancestors shared these crops, they were shared embedded in cultural frameworks of restraint, reciprocity, and balance. Tobacco was sacred, not recreational. Corn was a companion crop in the Three Sisters system, not an industrial monoculture stripped down into high-fructose syrup.
Westerners then did what colonial extraction does: they took the gift, removed it from its relational context, industrialized it, and maximized it for profit and addiction. The resulting health catastrophes from lung cancer and obesity to type-2 diabetes and broader metabolic disease, are arguably the consequence of extracting knowledge from wisdom.
For indigenous peoples, any plant, practice, or relationship has proper uses and excessive uses. It is the community and cosmological framework that governs which is which. Indigenous gifts were self-regulating within their original cultural context. Colonial systems were structurally incapable of self-regulation because they prioritized accumulation over balance.
The pattern repeats:
Coca leaf: chewed by Andean peoples for altitude adaptation, energy, and ceremonial use, relatively benign and functional. Westerners extracted cocaine, then crack cocaine. Two of the most destructive addiction epidemics in modern history came directly from industrializing a plant indigenous peoples had used sustainably for millennia.
Cacao: consumed as a bitter ceremonial drink, minimally processed, with genuine nutritional value. The Western world turned it into sugar-saturated chocolate, contributing meaningfully to the global obesity and metabolic disease picture.
Rubber: Native Amazonians knew how to use it. Western commercial exploitation produced the Congo and Amazon rubber atrocities and eventually a global petrochemical industry whose health and environmental consequences are still compounding.
Pharmaceuticals: hundreds were derived from indigenous plant knowledge without consent or compensation, often in an attempt to mitigate the very harms caused by prior unbridled exploitation.
Land management: controlled burning maintained ecosystem health for thousands of years. Westerners misunderstood it, banned it, and the result is the catastrophic wildfire seasons now seen across the American West and Australia.
Three Sisters agriculture: inherently biodiverse and self-sustaining. Colonial agriculture replaced it with monocultures that require industrial chemical inputs, drive topsoil collapse, and are seemingly unsustainable at today's civilizational scale.
The structural dynamic is consistent. Indigenous peoples developed these relationships with plants and practices over centuries or millennia of trial, error, and accumulated wisdom. That wisdom included constraints: the when, how much, by whom, and under what conditions. Western and colonial extraction took the active ingredients and discarded the relational frameworks. The harm scaled in direct proportion to how thoroughly the original context was stripped away.
Western civilization has been running the control group with the same inputs, but no protocols. The results have been catastrophic by comparison.
Our ancestors gave of themselves. The gifts were real. The wisdom was always attached. The separation of the two was entirely a Western choice driven by greed, arrogance, and gluttony over balance.
Why Aqua Medical Is Different
Aqua Medical's solution uses vapor delivered through a proprietary catheter in an endoscope to treat a small section of the small intestine in an outpatient procedure that takes roughly an hour.
The initial clinical data, again:
2.5% to 2.6% HbA1c reduction in oral antidiabetic patients at 12 months (exceeding the 1.9% achieved by gastric bypass)
100% insulin elimination in a 20-patient insulin-dependent cohort at 12 months, with 80 percent remaining insulin-independent at 12 months without escalation of other oral therapy,
Zero device- or procedure-related serious adverse events or counterindications
60-minute outpatient procedure, no general anesthesia, same-day discharge
Instead of daily injections and lifelong pharmacological dependency, extended periodic procedures reset the metabolic signaling pathway that drives insulin resistance.
The mechanism is water.
Vaporized saline applied with control, a naturally occurring, biocompatible substance doing the work that GLP-1 injections, SGLT-2 inhibitors, and bariatric surgery have all attempted with greater cost, greater complexity, and greater risk.
Why This Matters in Indian Country
The implications for Native communities are particularly significant.
Native Americans have the highest rate of type-2 diabetes of any U.S. demographic group. The Indian Health Service is funded at roughly 56 percent of need, roughly half of per-capita need (per NCAI and NCUIH analyses). Monthly GLP-1 injections at $800 to $1,200 per month arguably are not viable in tribal healthcare contexts.
A single ambulatory procedure every 18 to 24 months is structurally compatible with how care is delivered in Indian Country. The underlying mechanism resonates with cultural preferences for natural treatments.
Clean water as the lynchpin of a potential type-2 diabetes breakthrough? Ironic, perhaps, but only in the absence of a TEK framework.
For seven-generation thinkers, the perceived irony itself is, well, ironic.
A Recap of the Breakthrough, By the Numbers
Largest TAM in medicine: 589 million patients globally, $1T+ annual spend
2.5% to 2.6% HbA1c reduction vs. 1.9% for gastric bypass and ~1.0% for direct endoscopic competitors
100% insulin elimination at 12 months in insulin-dependent cohort
60 minute outpatient procedure in an ambulatory surgery center
Zero device-related serious adverse events or counterindications across patients in the Chilean first-in-human studies
FDA Breakthrough Device Designation secured for type-2 diabetes
U.S. pilot study actively enrolling at UNC Health, Mayo Clinic, Honor Health, and Hoag Hospital
Save lives, Aqua Medical. We got you.
About Relevance Ventures
Relevance Ventures is the first Native American privately owned and operated venture and early-growth capital firm in the United States, with more than $125 million under management. The firm invests in high-growth companies across the four pillars of human health: personal health, community health, digital health, and financial health. Founded by Cameron and Dean Newton, Relevance is headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee, with an expanding presence in multiple U.S. growth markets.
Learn more at www.relevanceventures.com.