EP 109: Dr. Bill Rawls Shares His New Book For Lyme Warriors

 Mimi:
Welcome to the Lyme 360 podcast for all things related to Lyme disease and other chronic illnesses. I'm Mimi MacLean, mom of five, founder of Lyme 360 and a fellow Lyme warrior. Tune in each week to hear from doctors, health practitioners and experts to learn about their treatments, struggles and triumphs to help you on your healing journey. I'm here to heal with you.

Mimi:
Hi, welcome back to Lyme 360. This is your host, Mimi MacLean. And today, we have on Dr. Bill Rawls and this is his third time coming on the podcast. He's a MD and he has been practicing medicine for over 30 years and he is also a Lyme warrior. And because of that, he has transitioned his practice into helping others with Lyme disease. And he has come out with his third book and we are excited to talk about that today, The Cellular Wellness Solution.

Mimi:
Thank you for joining in today. Please go to lyme360.com to sign up for our newsletter so you'll be notified of our next podcast and our weekly newsletter as well. And also, if you would like to help support our podcast, I have a shop page there with all the items that I use and suggest that a little bit of the profit goes to helping fund our podcast.

Mimi:
So Dr. Rawls, thank you so much for coming on again. This is your third time on Lyme 360 and I appreciate it.

Dr. Rawls:
Oh, my pleasure.

Mimi:
Yeah. And one of the reasons we're on is for your new book, The Cellular Wellness Solution, which is you've been busy because it's 500-something pages. It's like a health Bible.

Dr. Rawls:
Yeah, it kind of got out of hand there. It was a three-year effort that started out being, "Well, I'm going to write this little pamphlet." And it just ended up being more and more and more because I realized, "Yeah, there's just a lot to tell and a lot that people need to know."

Dr. Rawls:
So the first two years was really figuring out what I wanted to say and really researching the science to make sure what I was saying was legitimate. And then a year just to make that consumable for people to read, which was the hardest part of all.

Mimi:
But it is, it's very consumable and I don't think you left any rock unturned because everything is in there from menopause to prostate health to eating to the science and to the herbs. And one thing that struck home to me when I was reading it was, for me, personally, your journey about how you took the herbs, you got better because I feel like I'm in this cycle right now where I take the herbs, I do everything I'm supposed to and then I get better and you kind of forget. You don't want to be sick anymore, so you just forget about it.

Mimi:
You forget about what you're supposed to be eating, you forget about taking the herbs and the next thing to note, one too many nights drinking too many glasses of wine or having ice cream or forgetting to take your herbs because you're better now. Why do you need to take supplements anymore? Because you get tired of taking supplements and then you crash. So you do this yo-yo and that's what you did, right? And so maybe you could talk to that about what finally your aha moment was like, "Okay, let me just check the box and then I'm going to move on journey."

Dr. Rawls:
It has been a journey of refinement and evolution and learning, and there are a lot of really good parts about that whole journey. But truly, yeah, you get tired of taking handfuls of supplements and worrying about your diet and sleep and it's just like, God, every day.

Dr. Rawls:
But as I've gone through, I've refined my ability to do those things and here's the good side. At age 50, I felt my life was done. I was developing tremor, my joints were shot, I was worried about dementia, I was worried about the possibility of MS or Parkinson's or some dreadful disease or what was coming next. But I kept at it and I would fall off the wagon just like you and stop taking the herbs when I got a little bit better and then get back on it again.

Dr. Rawls:
But then I reached this place where it was like, "It's worth the investment to stay at it." And the more that I did, that just develop those habits of just, "Yeah, this is what I do. I get up in the morning and I take my herbs," I do that, "And here's what I do as far as my diet and I'm not going to break these rules and I'm going to be really particular about my sleep," and I got better at it so here I am.

Dr. Rawls:
I thought, "60, I'd be lucky if I wasn't demented and crippled." I'm 65. I have been avidly kitesurfing for years now that I didn't think I was going to do. And now I'm learning how to kitefoil, which is this really intricate form of the whole thing. I'm 65, I'm doing this stuff. I don't have joint pain. My brain works great. All of it is good, so it is refinement.

Dr. Rawls:
I am picky about diet and sleep and I do take the herbs, I don't take the quantity of herbs that I've used to. I've gotten it down to just once in the day, a big load of herbs in the morning, that's it. And other support service supplements like krill oil and glutathione and things like that. But I just get them in and some days I do smoothies and add a little bit extra here and there, but I don't go without them.

Mimi:
Yeah. And you talked about this in the book about when you have this revelation about the microbes and is that one reason why? Because they're living in our tissues and they kind of hide away. You kind of have to keep up on the herbs.

Mimi:
So can you talk a little bit about that and your revelation about how you came to changing the thinking of Lyme and other chronic illnesses?

Dr. Rawls:
Yeah, this is big. I mean, this is really big. It's going to change how we think about chronic illness and it's going to take another 20 years from the conventional medical community to catch up with this, but the science is there now.

Dr. Rawls:
And it started with my journey with Lyme disease. It's like, "Okay, I think I have this microbe called Borrelia that's making me sick." And then you find out, "Well, it's not just that and there're different forms of it and we have co-infections and there's Bartonella. Is it Borrelia or is it Bartonella or is it Babesia?" We dance around with these different microbes and then it's like, "Oh, well, I've got reactivated Epstein-Barr and now COVID's coming at me and realizing that we're hit with things all the time.

Dr. Rawls:
So in the course of the research for this new book, taking illness down to the cellular level, looking at illness at the cellular level was a real breakthrough for me. Because right now, how we look at illness is we compartmentalize it. You've got your endocrinologist and your pulmonologist and your gastroenterologist and your cardiologist, so everybody takes care of their own little part. And what I found is it's all connected and it's all cellular.

Dr. Rawls:
Our bodies are made of trillions of cells. We have about 200 different types of cells in the body. And what chronic illness is is when our cells become chronically stressed and they can't do their job so we end up with dysfunction. And different cell types in the body can be affected different ways, so we have many chronic illnesses. So it puts you on a different playing field, it's saying, "Well, okay, if illness is cellular, what's the stress factors that are driving this cellular stress, which is different from what's the diagnosis and how do we suppress the symptoms with a drug?"

Dr. Rawls:
So you start looking at how diet and toxins in the environment, mold and petrochemicals and chronic stress and not sleeping are affecting us at a cellular level. And tying that all in with Lyme disease, what about the microbe component? Well, we get things through life and I think most people think, "Well, I've had an infection and the symptoms are gone, therefore I've eradicated that microbe from my body." And that's the big thing with Lyme disease with the infectious disease experts, "Nope, we gave you an antibiotic. That microbe is gone from your body. You don't have Borrelia anymore," but I've got all the symptoms.

Dr. Rawls:
And now we're seeing... Long COVID has brought out a lot of new research too. It's like, "No, people got better or they just didn't get better. And now we've got long COVID that has all the symptoms of fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue." And I saw a study yesterday looking at other protracted viral illnesses that do the same thing. And then really digging into the research, I started coming upon articles and investigations about the dormant blood and tissue microbiome. And it's like, "What the heck is that?"

Mimi:
Say it again, dormant?

Dr. Rawls:
Dormant blood and tissue microbiome. Sounds crazy, right?

Mimi:
Yeah.

Dr. Rawls:
So what it turns out is when you look at Lyme disease microbes, Epstein-Barr virus, all the bacteria, chlamydia, mycoplasma, they're all intracellular. So everything that gets inside of us in our tissues gets inside of our cells. And they do that because cells offer protection from the immune system of food source and a lot of different resources. So Borrelia, Bartonella and everything we've talked about has the ability to inner cells and take on a different life inside a cell.

Dr. Rawls:
Turns out, virtually, all bacteria and all viruses have that capability. And what some of this research is showing is that through our lifetimes, bacteria from our gut trickle across into our bloodstream, bacteria from our skin trickle into our bloodstream, from our gums, from our sinuses, from our nasal passages, and it's just a little bit of a trickle. And when they get there, they infect either red blood cells or white blood cells because that's a vehicle that carries them around to other parts of the body, like into the brain. And then it happened upon other studies that we're suggesting that we actually have a microbiome of the brain, bacteria that live in our brain.

Dr. Rawls:
But the gist of all this thing is we've got this happening. So we're picking up things from the outside, but also microbes that are part of us are trickling into our bloodstream, trickling into our tissues. I mean, our insides are kind of like a freeway for microbes and nobody really thought that. And the suggestions that that's a possibility are fascinating.

Dr. Rawls:
But the deal is this, if your cells are healthy, if you're eating a good diet and getting plenty of sleep and don't have excessive exposure to toxins and your cells are healthy, the microbes can enter the cell and go into a dormant state, so it's a defense mechanism.

Dr. Rawls:
So our cells, we talk about the immune system, but our cells have the ability to expel microbes or kill microbes that enter them. So a process called Autophagy, that you're hearing a lot more about, it's a housekeeping mechanism that cells can clean up bad proteins, bad DNA, create new mitochondria, but they also use those same processes to expel these intracellular microbes, viruses, bacteria, everything.

Dr. Rawls:
But this tug of war that goes back and forth, sometimes microbes from all these different directions, things that we don't even know the names of yet can become dormant in our cells. And even a suggestion that maybe some of these bacteria possibly are even symbiotic and important for our cells to function properly. So this isn't all the cells in the body, it's just kind of scattered about in all of our tissues. And if you're healthy, your health cells are healthy, you go about life and you don't ever know it.

Mimi:
But when you have that perfect storm of either stress or not eating well, boom, that's when it triggers?

Dr. Rawls:
Or just the aging process, cells get weaker as we age, these things start to come out. And the body shifts from an internal environment that favors cellular health to one that favors micro growth.

Dr. Rawls:
So if you can imagine these things start reemerging and they start breaking down cells which releases nutrients, which makes it favorable for other microbe growth, and this starts happening in your brain, in your joints, in your heart, and you can kind of start visually thinking of how that might equate to symptoms that we associate with chronic illness.

Dr. Rawls:
And because we all pick up different microbes through our lifetime, then we all pick up a different risk for different kinds of chronic illnesses. So these are still theories that are being formed, but the science is out there and I find them fascinating. And when you look at plausible explanations for why chronic illness and why the symptoms of chronic illness occur, man, it just explains it on the hit.

Mimi:
Is there something you can do to prevent them from even entering this cell to even getting to that point?

Dr. Rawls:
Well, other than just good hygiene, washing your hands, all of those kinds of things and never getting bitten by a bug.

Mimi:
But once it enters the body, it's going to go into the cell? It's doing that no matter what, once it enters?

Dr. Rawls:
Well, we have our defense mechanisms and the first defense is barriers. The skin, the intestinal lining that keeps microbes inside the gut, linings of our sinuses, linings of other body cavities, so that's the first defense. But those barriers are leaky, we know that. So the backup system is your immune system. So your immune system, anything that comes across, it's trying to get rid of that thing, it's trying to neutralize it.

Dr. Rawls:
But I found one study from 2015 that found that we all have a trickle, we all have some microbes that cross from the gut into the bloodstream. Take antibiotics for a long time or eat really bad food and develop dysbiosis, that trickle becomes a flood of pathogens. And they documented that these pathogens were immediately infecting our red blood cells. So again, we're in the early stages of this, but when you start looking at the research, oh man, is it interesting?

Mimi:
So if you knew you just got bit by a tick, what would you recommend? I mean, would herbs be enough at this point right away, just flood your body with herbs or would you ever recommend doing the two weeks of antibiotics right when you found out you had a tick?

Dr. Rawls:
I think the CDC recommendations are very reasonable, all right? In other words, if we gave antibiotics to every person that ever got a tick bite, symptomatic or not, man, we'd be using a lot of antibiotics. And then you start thinking about that problem of bacterial resistance.

Dr. Rawls:
So people who are symptomatic automatically that says, "Well, you either got a big load of microbes or you've got microbes that are more threatening than others," because there's that concept of virulence that some microbes are worse than others. They are more of a threat like Rocky Mountain spotted fever is a bigger deal than getting Lyme disease or your cells aren't healthy and your immune system isn't healthy, so those three situations can add up to symptoms.

Dr. Rawls:
And so if you have acute symptoms when those bacteria are coursing through the bloodstream, they haven't really become deeply embedded in tissues. I think taking antibiotics is a very reasonable thing just to knock down the numbers. But prolonged antibiotics disrupts the gut and we all know that and that can become a problem. And looking at these studies with the dysbiosis, it's even more reason to be careful about antibiotics.

Dr. Rawls:
The difference in herbs, herbs, all plants have antimicrobial properties. So some herbs have some really good antimicrobial properties, but it's more like a system instead of a specific targeted entity like an antibiotic. So an herb is going to have hundreds of chemicals that affect a lot of different kinds of microbes, but there's a certain intelligence about it, which is pretty cool. And actually, for the book, I found a study that they actually looked at this and they found it to be true, that taking an herb doesn't destroy normal flora, it has a preference for pathogen.

Dr. Rawls:
So when you take an herb, it doesn't disrupt your gut, it actually balances your gut. And again, I found a study that they actually looked at this and found it to be true. So when people do get that symptomatic tick bite or any tick bite, if I went hiking tomorrow and I got a tick bite but it wasn't symptomatic, I'd double up on my herbs for several months. So I think someone symptomatic, I would do the antibiotics but then do three to six months of antimicrobial herbal therapy too.

Mimi:
Now most people... I shouldn't say most. Some people who have prolonged chronic Lyme tend to have parasites, mold, other things going on. Are those covered under herbs, can treat them as well?

Dr. Rawls:
Yeah, herbs are really nice for that. You have to remember that all of your antibiotics, it's not something that we just make up in a lab. All of your antibiotics come from a natural source. So all antibiotics, antivirals, antibacterials, they all come from either a plant source, a bacterial source, or a fungal source.

Dr. Rawls:
And so what you're doing is pulling a chemical from that organism's defense system and then typically they take that chemical and potentiate it to make it stronger, but it hits one targeted facet of the microbe and that's it. But it's like ivermectin, came from a swampy water, a golf course in Japan, they found a bacteria that had some strong antimicrobial properties. So they pulled what they thought was the most active chemical out and it became ivermectin. And they tested it in a lab and they found that it had antiviral, antibacterial and antiprotozoal and antiparasitic properties, but the antiproperties were by far the stronger, so that's what it became.

Mimi:
And then the guy went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize, but then all of a sudden it became condemned medicine after that.

Dr. Rawls:
Yeah. But you're just getting one thing, you're not getting that organism's whole system. So when you take an herb, you're getting a system and with that certain intelligence about it. And you may not quite get the potency of an antibiotic, that is sometimes really important if you've got a newly invasive bacteria so that's a big difference. I think a lot of infectious disease doctors treat all infections the same. And there's a lot of difference between acute Lyme disease.

Mimi:
Yeah. If you have sepsis or if you have whatever, you're going to treat it with antibiotics, bits of time.

Mimi:
So you touched on this a little bit a while ago and you also talked about it in the book, but how the mitochondria is so important in cell health. And you broke it down, I think it was five different ways. You touched on it a little bit, but can you just break down the five things that really kind of affect the cell health and spell it out for people? Because I do think it's super important of just getting to the basics and I don't want to say it's simple, but in addition to the herbs, there's things in our life that we need to really focus on and clean up.

Dr. Rawls:
Yeah, it does help simplify things. Again, taking all of this down to the cellular level makes it easier, not harder. So in conventional medicine, how we look at a chronic illness or symptoms of a chronic illness is in terms of diagnosis. So we add up the person's symptoms, we get labs and we pursue a diagnosis to find this specific thing that we've got that the person has. And we do that to define the drug protocol because what the drugs are doing is basically blocking manifestations of illness artificially so it doesn't address that cellular stress component.

Dr. Rawls:
And so a long time ago in my journey, I started asking the question, "All right, what causes chronic illness?" And when you take it down to the cellular level, it's what causes cellular stress? And so there are five variables, categories of things that can affect how our cells function and the health of our cells.

Dr. Rawls:
So the big category is food, what we eat. And there are a lot of levels of each one of these categories, but if you're eating a high carbohydrate diet that's low in vegetables and low in fiber, you're affecting the cells in your intestinal tract, you're affecting the nutrients that are being absorbed. All those carbohydrates disrupt your insulin levels at the cellular level, they cause glycation.

Dr. Rawls:
So glucose is a really energetic molecule, glucose is what comes from carbohydrates, it's what your blood sugar is. Glucose is a really energetic molecule that has this thing of sticking to proteins and it sticks to proteins throughout the body. So the more carbohydrate, the more glucose you consume, the more you have this protein sticking effect that we call glycation.

Dr. Rawls:
So if you think of your cells as little microscopic machines doing a job, whether that's pumping blood or creating thyroid hormone or nerve impulses being fired, every cell in the body has a job. So there are little machines that do these little jobs and collectively, it makes our body work. Well, glycation, eating too much carbohydrate is like pouring molasses into machinery, it's just going to gum it up.

Dr. Rawls:
And so glycation, but also too much carbohydrate, basically, I like to think of it as if you had a steam locomotive that uses coal to fire the steam engine and you dump coal in that steam engine but you kept the brakes on and you keep firing this engine hotter and hotter, but you weren't using the energy, sooner or later it's going to explode. And that's basically what we're doing to our mitochondria with an excessive carbohydrate load and it generates excessive free radicals. So all these other components of what we eat and whether we're feeding our cells like they're designed.

Dr. Rawls:
So humans ate a forage diet that was low in carbohydrates. In fact for hundreds of thousands of years, our cells just aren't designed. We're not meeting the design specifications with what we're eating for our cells.

Mimi:
Is that why sugar and alcohol fall into that same category?

Dr. Rawls:
Alcohol kind of falls into the second category, which is toxic substances and toxic environment. So you do have a lot of natural toxins, mold, we're all exposed to some of that. And alcohol is a toxic substance, it's toxic to our cells.

Dr. Rawls:
But now we live in this world where humans are being exposed to unnatural levels of toxins like never before. And in that category, unnatural levels of radiation, electromagnetic radiation, but also ionizing radiation from all the things going on around us, so toxic environment.

Dr. Rawls:
Third category is unnatural mental stress. We run schedules, we run deadlines. We're just pushing that stress button all the time and we keep our bodies in an alert mode all the time. Well, our brain senses, "Hey, there's a threat going on all the time." It's like we're running from a tiger, so it sends messages through the body to that keeps all of our cells on high alert. So they're kind of doubling over time, they're constantly being primed for stress.

Dr. Rawls:
Cells need downtime. So again, they're little machines, they're microscopic machines. But what's unusual about our cells unlike a manmade device, our cells are constantly repairing themselves using that process of autophagy that I mentioned. Cells are constantly pruning bad proteins and bad parts and worn out parts and bad mitochondria and burned out DNA and rebuilding and recycling. They need downtime. If your body's in high stress alert mode all the time, and especially if it cuts into your sleep, because sleep is when your cells have downtime to repair and regenerate for the next day so that affects cellular wellness.

Dr. Rawls:
Physical factors, trauma can certainly damage cells, but being sedentary can be just as bad. And why we need to move, why we exercise more than any other single thing is to move blood. That's the most important thing we do with exercise. And we talk about endorphins and balancing hormones and there's a lot of other stuff, but the big thing is we move blood. And when we move blood, when we get out and exercise, we dilate blood vessels and we pour fluid into the spaces around ourselves which delivers a higher degree of nutrients. But more importantly, it's washing out debris and congestion.

Dr. Rawls:
So everybody talks about detoxification and they're talking about the liver and all that and that's important. The first step in detoxification is mobilizing the toxins. And we need to do this continually every single day. So the toxins, where they're doing the harm is in our cells. And how they're doing harm? Substances that are toxic do harm because our cells end up with these things and they poison cellular processes so the cells can't work as well. And the cell is constantly trying to expel these things and get rid of them.

Dr. Rawls:
But if we're not exercising, we're not moving blood and the cell can't purge them. So the space around the cells gets congested with debris and junk and waste materials and toxic substances, so it's all in that cellular space. So if all you're doing is taking products in your GI tract to detoxify yourself, you're not doing anything. Binders, they don't do anything unless you mobilize the toxins out of your cells.

Mimi:
And how much exercise? Is walking enough or does it have to be aerobic exercise? And how much a day would you say?

Dr. Rawls:
Anything, I try to hit a minimum of three miles a day. Now there was a time that I couldn't even do that.

Mimi:
Walking or running, when you say three miles?

Dr. Rawls:
Walking, yeah, running. It's that balance of too much exercise, too much physical strain wears things out. It increases friction and can just help wears your cells down, so it's finding that balance.

Dr. Rawls:
So I like to do a lot of variety of exercises. I go to several yoga classes a week. I've tried to hit that minimum of three miles a day walking. But years ago, I couldn't walk at half a mile. I was in really bad shape. And that's where infrared sauna was really beneficial because sauna moves blood and dilates blood vessels without causing friction and increasing inflammation.

Dr. Rawls:
So either exercise or if you can't do that, infrared sauna can be really important for that initial step of detoxification of just mobilizing and helping cells purge all that stuff.

Mimi:
Because I definitely feel like with myself, I can walk, but as soon as I have enough energy and I try to do a class or something a little bit more exertion, it almost puts me back into bed. It's too much. My body is like, "Well, I don't know if it's the chemicals that's being released or just too much friction like you said," and then that's it, it puts me back.

Dr. Rawls:
It's cellular resiliency and fitness. And the more resilient and fit your cells are, the more that you can do. And I have a couple of times just let all my kitesurfing equipment go and that sort of thing because I thought, "I'm just not going to be able to do this anymore." And over the past five years of just really refining my health habits, it's like, "Yeah, I can. Yeah, it's coming back. Yeah, it wasn't gone. This is really great."

Dr. Rawls:
So now I'm 65, I'm not 35, I recognize that. And part of aging is we lose functional cells. So I'm hitting a lot fewer cells now, especially after Lyme disease than I was 40 years ago, but it's just been amazing how much I've gotten back.

Dr. Rawls:
I don't run anymore. That's kind of beyond my capacity and I'm going to take good care of my joints at this point because I'm 65. But I do walk every day and some days I walk a lot, but I am getting out and doing these probably more elite things like kitesurfing and things like that.

Dr. Rawls:
Now, when I was in my 30s, I could go two or three hours. Now, hour's good enough but an hour's awesome. So it is amazing how much you can get back just by continuing to refine that formula of cellular wellness.

Mimi:
That's great. So do we hit all five or do we hit four?

Dr. Rawls:
We hit four.

Mimi:
Yeah, we have one more, right?

Dr. Rawls:
So eat bad food, do you live in a toxic environment? You let stress get the best of you and you sleep that average six and a half hours that most of America sleeps and you don't get out and exercise or really do anything to promote blood flow. Your cells get weak, your cells get stressed. And then all these microbes, not just from ticks, but everything that you've been exposed to that are dormant in your tissues start to reactivate. And that's what I think chronic Lyme disease is and I think that's what all chronic illnesses are.

Dr. Rawls:
So that's where the herbs can help us because it is hard to have a perfect diet. It is hard to avoid all toxins. It is hard to, in a lot of cases, exercise consistently. That's what I found myself in writing the book. There were so many days that I would spend 10 hours on the computer and I had to take breaks from them from time to time because it was a lot, but we have all these things.

Dr. Rawls:
So what the herbs are doing that is so important is we look to drugs for one specific purpose, "I'm going to buy this drug because it treats this specific symptom." And I think people think about herbs that way, "I need to buy this herb because I'm going to fix this particular problem." And I've realized that that's not the way the herbs work. There are herbs that have some more drug-like properties, St. John's wort would be one. And I tend not to use those quite as much. But we have this huge spectrum of herbs that what you're getting is all these protective chemicals that the plant is producing to take care of its own cells.

Dr. Rawls:
So plants are multi-cellular organisms just like we are. They get hit with free radicals, toxic substances, radiation and microbes of every variety constantly every day, radiation from the sun. Plants have a lot of stress. I mean, think about what would happen if you left a multicolored shirt out in the yard for a month. It would be faded and beat up by the time you went back to look for it again because the sun is harsh. Plants are dealing with that every day and rain and weather and everything.

Dr. Rawls:
Plants are the most sophisticated chemist on the planet. They solve problems with chemistry. So all the sophisticated chemistry that the plant is producing is to protect its cells from stress factors. Most of the same stress factors that we're getting help with, so certain plants don't mesh with our biochemistry. Nobody would make the mistake of eating poison ivy twice.

Dr. Rawls:
But all these things that we define as herbs are things that humans have been taking for hundreds, sometimes even thousands of years. So we've selectively already figured out that they mesh with our biochemistry pretty darn well. So when we take them, we're getting this protection.

Dr. Rawls:
Writing the book, I was aware of two or three herbs that you could use to bring down your blood sugar and normalize your insulin. Turns out there are hundreds of them that I found a study where they looked at literally a couple 100 herbs that they found antidiabetic properties. So they're protecting you, they're giving you extra protection when you're not being as vigilant as you should with your diet. They're protecting you against free radicals or protecting your cells against free radicals, against toxic substances, against radiation and against every variety of microbes.

Dr. Rawls:
Now, will they eliminate all the dormant microbes in your tissues? Nah, I don't think anything that can do that. I think that is a fact of life. And what we're finding is it's inherent to every organism on earth. Virtually every organism has dormant microbes in its cells, so plants have that too. But what it does do is it keeps cells healthy and it can provide antimicrobial protection when microbes start to emerge or if you're overcoming that situation where they've already emerged. And that's why I think the herbs were such a wonderful match and ultimately were how I recovered from chronic Lyme disease.

Mimi:
Mm-hmm, that's great. I'm so glad that you're doing this, right? I mean, you're helping so many people out. And what's great about... I have people that call me and say, "What should I do? I can't go to a doctor, I don't have the money to go see these expensive Lyme doctors." I defer them to you because your program is very reasonable and you can just do it right online and you can buy it and you can start taking that either while you're waiting for the doctor for the couple months that takes to get into a doctor or if you just don't have the means to go down that route because nothing's covered by insurance, right?

Dr. Rawls:
Yeah. Sometimes life just kind of places where you need to be and pushes you through even though you don't see it at the time. And my situation, I got sick because I had been doing OB call and living a really stressful life for 20 years and it just got the best of me. And no doubt I had the Lyme microbes and plenty of other things in my system.

Dr. Rawls:
And I crashed and I ended up turning to herbal therapy. But part of that is I had to give up obstetric call and leave my group practice, but I didn't have a diagnosis at the time. I really didn't have any way of filing for disability, so I had to work and the only option I had was starting a medical practice and I started just with gynecology and primary care. So I didn't have to do the call and I could control my hours so that I did reduced hours.

Dr. Rawls:
But I was in a small town so as it evolved, everything that I learned, I started incorporating into my practice, the herbal therapy and all of this sort of thing. But in a small town, I didn't have the luxury of defining myself as a functional or integrated medical doctor and starting charging fees outside of insurance. So I had to pretty much take what insurance would give me and I realized that it just wasn't practical for a lot of people. It wasn't practical for me to go pay all that money outside the insurance system.

Dr. Rawls:
So I started developing programs that people could do themselves and that evolved into creating a supplement company, creating programs and protocols for helping people get through this thing that didn't have the ability or the resources to have access to a provider that could do that. That ended up being really valuable, I think we've helped a lot of people.

Dr. Rawls:
But it was interesting, in researching the book I was looking through for studies just on recovery from chronic illness and I found one that made the statement, "90% of recovering from any chronic illness is self-care." So it's what you do outside of the physician's office that makes more difference than the actual provider. Now, providers are important. I'm not knocking that. I think there are a lot of great people that help a lot of people in wonderful ways, but not everybody has access to that and not everybody can afford it.

Mimi:
But also, it's a mindset thing, right? Because it took me a while to change my mindset where you kept thinking, "Oh, I'm not going to get better until I go see that doctor," or, "That doctor is the one who's going to get me better." Until you change that mindset and you're like, "No, it's what I do day-to-day and me taking ownership of my health, this is all on me," it's hard because we've been trained that you just go to the doctor, take a pill and you're going to get better. And until you make that change and be like, "No, I'm the ambassador of my body and my health," you're not going to change.

Dr. Rawls:
It's true. It's how society has trained us and that's not new. It's a matter of knowledge. What's changed is how we disseminate knowledge and the downside of that is there's a lot of misinformation out there, but we've never had access to knowledge like we have today.

Dr. Rawls:
Cultures through time, people got sick, they went and saw a shaman or later a doctor because that was the person with the knowledge that might be able to help them. And we've entered into a new age that anybody can access the information.

Dr. Rawls:
So what's wonderful, one of the research that I would just be helpless without is the PubMed search engine put out by NIH. I think it's one of the best services they do. So through PubMed, anyone can access virtually any scientific article in any journal worldwide. Anything that's published in English and beyond is on PubMed.

Dr. Rawls:
So it's just fantastic that anybody can do that and that has allowed me to have access to all this scientific knowledge that I can translate in and write a book like my new book, Cellular Wellness. It has 75 pages worth of references of stuff that I went through over a three-plus year period and translated that into information that could be digestible by anyone. That would've been impossible 20 years ago, I could not have written this book 20 years ago.

Mimi:
That's great. Well, congratulations on your book and people can find you at rawlsmd.com, your last name with md.com, right? That's the best way. And then it could take you from there to... And I'll put the link below as well in the show notes. But thank you so much for your time and congratulations on your book.

Dr. Rawls:
Yeah, thank you very much. And you can also find information about the book at cellularwellness.com and the supplement company is vitalplan.com. But rawlsmd is lots of information for people who are struggling with various kinds of health conditions and it's like a public service we maintain to try to get as much information as we can out there.

Mimi:
Thank you so much.

Mimi:
Each week I will bring you different voices from the wellness community so that they can share how they help their clients heal. You will come away with tips and strategies to help you get your life back. Thank you so much for coming on and I am so happy you are here. Subscribe now and tune in next week. If you want to learn how I detox and you want to check out my detox for Lyme checklist, go to lyme360.com/detoxchecklist. You can also join our community at Lyme360 Warriors on Facebook and let's heal together. Thank you.