The Dr. Josh Axe Show - What’s Living Inside You Could Be Why You’re Sick | Dr. Bill Rawls

Episode Date: August 28, 2025

Lyme disease is one of the most misunderstood and misdiagnosed conditions in modern medicine, and millions may have it without even knowing. In this episode, Dr. Josh Axe sits down with Dr. Bill Rawls, a physician who nearly lost everything to chronic Lyme, to expose why antibiotics often fail, how stealth microbes wreak havoc on the body, and what it really takes to heal at the cellular level. If you’ve been struggling with mysterious symptoms or want the truth about chronic illness, this conversation could change everything. Watch The Dr. Josh Axe Show every Monday & Thursday on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@drjoshaxe?sub_confirmation=1  🎧 Early Access! Our listeners enjoy every episode before anyone else! Tune in below and join our exclusive group of listeners →  Spotify: https://bit.ly/DrJoshAxeSpotify Apple Podcast: https://apple.co/3JDvWcS Pre-order my NEW BOOK, The Biblio Diet → https://bit.ly/4oPEP3t Watch my free training on how to naturally balance your blood sugar and reverse your symptoms → DrAxeDiabetesClass.com  Discover practical steps you can take today to start healing your thyroid naturally →   DrAxeThyroidClass.com  If you’re ready to start feeling like yourself again and balance your hormones, take my free class → DrAxeHormoneClass.com  Uncover what’s really going on in your body with advanced biomarker testing for hormones, thyroid, and metabolism— plus a 1-hour consultation with a Senior Health Advisor! →  MyBloodWork.com  CONNECT WITH DR. JOSH AXE Instagram→ https://www.instagram.com/drjoshaxe/ Facebook → https://www.facebook.com/DrJoshAxe/ TikTok → https://www.tiktok.com/@thedrjoshaxeshow/ X → https://x.com/drjoshaxe/ LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshaxe Website →  http://thehealthinstitute.com Sign up for my newsletter → https://bit.ly/4oE9Jf3 Ask Dr. Axe → http://speakpipe.com/drjoshaxe   CONNECT WITH DR. BILL RAWLS Instagram→ https://www.instagram.com/rawlsmd/?hl=en Facebook → https://www.facebook.com/rawlsmd/ X → https://x.com/rawlsmd Website → https://rawlsmd.com/resources/ DISCLAIMER This content is strictly the opinion of Dr. Josh Axe and is for informational and educational purposes only. It is not intended to provide medical advice or to take the place of medical advice or treatment from a personal physician. All viewers of this content are advised to consult their doctors or qualified health professionals regarding specific health questions. Neither Dr. Axe nor the publisher of this content takes responsibility for possible health consequences of any person or persons reading or following the information in this educational content. All viewers of this content, especially those taking prescription or over-the-counter medications, should consult their physicians before beginning any nutrition, supplement or lifestyle program. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

About 90 to 95% of people who identified with chronic Lyme disease did not remember becoming ill around the time of a tick bike. Wow. So they were like me. Now, why is that? Yeah, because people aren't one day waking up and saying, I'm sick. It's a slow progression all of a sudden over a course of a year. So we realize this, wow, I feel like I'm aging too quickly. My body's falling apart, you know, and that's the same.

sort of thing that you're talking about there, right? Yeah, same thing with me. You know, it wasn't like I just suddenly got sick. Yeah, it was, it was over years that it just, my ability to function was gradually compromised to the point that I just said. Think about it from the cellular point of view. I mean, you've got every cell in the body bombarding the brain with distress signals. You know, all your cells are in turmoil. Every being attacked by microbes, everything is a mess. And your brain is just on fire. We haven't made any new antibiotics in. I graduated from medical school in 1985. Talk about antibiotics for a minute.

It's the most prescribed medication for Lyme disease today. Borrelia, the Lyme bacteria, the spirokee, in its most active phase, doubles every 12 to 24 hours. It's really, really slow, and that's the defense mechanism. So antibiotics, even an acute illness, aren't going to work as well. Most people don't have just one microbe affecting them. It's multiple. And there was a study I read recently on, this was shocking because I'd not read this before. One of the single greatest causes of cancer today is having a co-infection, specifically in the study, it was of parasites.

Like, if you have a parasitic infection long term, your risk of cancer goes up dramatically. It's literally one of the biggest causes of cancer period. That's kind of fascinating. Hey, everyone, Dr. Josh Axe here. Welcome the show. Today we're going to be talking about the epidemic of chronic infections, everything from Lyme disease, to long COVID, to CMV, to Epsteinvar, to parasites to mold, and how they are lying dormant

in many of our cells, causing us to be sick. And if you have issues like headaches, fatigue, chronic inflammation, multiple sensitivities, or you just don't know why you're ill, today I've brought on one of the world's leading experts in how to heal chronic infections like Lyme disease. It's Dr. Bill Rawls, he's a medical doctor. He's also been trained in herbs.

He's a best-selling author. And today we're going to be talking about how to heal the chronic infection crisis of Lyme and viruses, bacteria, and so much more. Dr. Bill, welcome the show. Hey, thanks, Josh. Glad to be here. Yeah, well, I'm excited about the conversation today. I know you wrote a book that I endorsed a few years ago where you really dive into how to heal the cells. Right.

Why so many of us are sick today. And one of the reasons why I wanted to endorse your book and I was a big fan of the work you were doing is you think about cellular. health, overall health, and even chronic infections in a different way. One of the things I see so much today is both in the mainstream medicine and even some of the natural medicine community or most of it, it's like if somebody has Lyme or somebody has some sort of infection, we just need to go and bomb the body, right? Whether it be a conventional antibiotic or a natural antibiotic, that tends to be the philosophy. Your philosophy is very different than that. Tell me why that is and what your general philosophy is for healing the body. Yeah, you know, when we look at Lyme disease, everybody doesn't distinguish between

acute Lyme disease and chronic Lyme disease. You know, so an infection, I don't even use the word infection and chronic together anymore. So infection is when a microbe first enters the body, whether it's a respiratory infection, a tick bite, or whatever. And that is, you know, that's ongoing and it's a salt between the immune system and that microbe that's trying to invade the body. But if you have chronic symptoms that you think are associated with a microbe, it's often quite a bit more complicated. It's typically not one microbe. It can be a spectrum of microbes, and they often have been there in your body for a long time. And the mechanisms of how they do that are really fascinating. But what's happened is your body has lost,

the ability to contain those microbes. Because we all have microbes. You know, we're an ecosystem. And if you're sick because microbes are breaking down your body, your body has lost the ability to protect itself. Your cells have lost the ability to protect themselves. And that's priority number one is restoring your body's ability to keep these microbes contained. Because so often, it's not a goal of eradicating them.

You know, they become part of us, kind of an ill-fitting part of us, but they're part of us. And so I've been doing this journey for a long time. I've had robust health. Some of the best health I've had in my life over the past decade after having just this total assault. My body was a wreck by the time I was age 50. And now I'm in great health. What were some of the issues you were dealing with? Everything.

My whole body was falling apart. But, you know, it wasn't from a tick bite, and I think that's really important. I probably, you know, I had lots of ticks when I was a kid because I grew up playing in the woods. But it was 20 years of doing obstetric call every second to third night, every second to third weekend, for years and years on in. And I just basically didn't sleep for 20 years. and my body started breaking down by the time I was in my late 40s, but it wasn't just feeling fatigue because I hadn't had sleep.

And even after I stopped doing obstetric, I was forced to quit that practice and had more time to sleep. My sleep didn't come back, but I had cardiac symptoms. You know, my heart was skipping beats every second to third beat. I had chronic chest pain. My joints were a wreck. I had brain fog. I mean, basically everything.

My gut was a wreck. Everything was a mess. And, yeah, it was a bad place. And why was that? Why were you dealing with all those issues? Because, well, that really gets into the idea of what's going on. You know, when we look at chronic illness, chronic Lyme or really anything else. You know, so when I first came out of the gate, I really didn't know what was going on.

I went to my conventional colleagues. I did all the standard testing. I did thyroid functions. Some test it was abnormal. Some test it was normal. Tried thyroid hormone did nothing. You know, neurological evaluations had a cardiac cath, you know, and they said, well, your vessels are clear. We're not really sure what's going on in your heart.

here, take this beta blocker, you know. And I was just not satisfied with that. So I eventually became certified in holistic medicine, started gravitating toward, you know, alternative therapies. And did a lot, you know, changed my diet, changed a lot of things about what I was doing, did a lot of nutrient therapies, but it was helping. I was functional, but I was far. from being well. And I started a primary care practice just to make ends neat because I had to have an income. And so I kept grasping at this idea of there's got to be something going on. And what made the most

sense was, is it a microbe? Have I got some kind of microbe that's just affecting my system? and did testing, Lyme test was negative. There wasn't much out there. I identified with fibromyalgia because, you know, when you don't, you know, it wasn't bad enough to be MS. I had a lot of those symptoms, but the testing wasn't enough to quite get you over the line for that diagnosis. And so I kept looking.

I finally found with more other testing that I was carrying one of those microbes, I was carrying Borrelia. Probably had a lot of other things, but back 20 years ago, we weren't testing for a lot of other co-infections at that time. Sure, I had Bartonella, looking at my past history. So talk about define what are those, Borrelia, Bartonella. And where do you think you got those? Tick-Borne. You know, and those are the classic things.

Ticks carry a lot of stuff, right? Ticks carry a lot of different. Microbes Borrelia is a corkscrew bacteria called a spirochete that we refer to as the Lyme bacteria. But, you know, as we've been doing this over the years, we found that people have a lot of other things, too. So Bartonella is very common, but most people probably don't get Bartonella from ticks. They pick it up from cat scratches and, you know, interactions with animals. Bartonella exists in every mammal on earth. Even whales have bartonella.

So a lot of these bacteria, and I thought, you know, that's what's making me sick. If I do antibiotics, I'll do, I'll get well, you know. And I think a lot of people are in that place that they have all these crazy symptoms. They don't have a diagnosis like MS. They end up in the category of fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue or something like that. And we're seeing a lot of chronic Lyme because if you have a lot of, all those symptoms in the conventional medical world, it doesn't get you much, but treatment of symptoms. That's it. Yeah. That's all they have to offer. Yeah. You don't know what's causing it.

We have these drugs that can help your symptoms a bit, but you're not going to go well. Yeah, and that's what I was talking about earlier is really it's just the treatment of symptoms. And one of the things that you have done, I know, in your work, is said, you know what, we're going to stop treating symptoms. And listen, I've noticed this with interviewing, you know, hundreds of people here on the show and a lot of doctors is that most doctors discover how to do things differently because of their own illness or the illness of a family member. Right. Yeah, it's true. We all have a story, right? Yeah. And so it's like, well, treating symptoms isn't working. So I need to find something else. And for you, it seems like part of that has been healing and fixing cellular issues.

Yeah. And so walk me through a little bit about how you look at the cell, maybe some parts of the cell you want to heal. And maybe why treating symptoms is an, is an, is an, enough, but getting the cell well is enough to help people heal. Yeah. It, you know, this concept seems so simple, and it took me 20 years to get here because our opinions and how we think are so biased. You know, in conventional medicine, really, I look at two sides of conventional medicine. There's acute intervention.

That's what I was doing mainly in obstetrics and gynecology. Things happened acutely. someone has a tubal pregnancy or an arrested labor, we can fix that. We do a great job with that. But when someone becomes chronically ill, it's a different thing. So in acute intervention, it's typically one thing. It's a tubal pregnancy, a broken leg, a blocked artery. And we go in, and we have interventions to change that. But when you look at chronic illnesses, just about virtually every chronic illness, they defined as multifactorial. There comes from a lot of things, and we just don't really know what causes it.

So we default instead of treating the underlying causes to treating the manifestations of the illness. So we're treating inflammation. We're treating hormone imbalances. We're treating the symptoms. And so, you know, looking back 15 or 20 years ago, I was going. what are the causes? You know, how can we get to these root causes? And I started looking at categories like diet. That was an obvious one. Stress, that was a big one. Toxins in the environment. That was huge.

And just, you know, a toxic environment, including abnormal radiation, not exercising or physical factors like trauma. and then the micro factor, which I was still figuring out. But as I progressed, I've started looking at that idea of the body as cells, which I think is a really different way of looking at it. In conventional medicine, we divide the body up into compartments. And we have specialists. So we have cardiologists and pulmonologists and gastroenterologists and all of these different people. And really, when you look at the body, if you want to simplify something, take it down to its smallest functional unit.

And that's a cell. So our body is made up of cells. Everything that happens in the body is due to the actions of cells, absolutely everything, whether that's your thyroid, producing thyroid hormone, your heart beating, muscles contracting, brain and Fults is firing? It's all cells. Every single bit of it. So when you look at a cell, each one of our cells is an independently functioning unit. Now, all of our cells came from one cell, of course. So when you look at that idea, they're all structurally the same. Now, the structure has been changed so they can do different jobs, but they're all like little biological, independently functioning machines.

And so if you look at your cell mechanically, functionally, like it was a little machine, every machine has operating requirements, right? So our cells need the right nutrients. And if you look back at our historic, our history through time, you know, that's a whole food. diet, weighted in vegetables and meat, you talk about these things, our natural foods, that's

what our cells are programmed for. That's the nutrients. And if you're eating a whole food diet, you're eating a whole cell diet. It's like an apple isn't just carbohydrate. It's carbohydrate contained inside cells. So when you're in an apple, you're getting all the parts of the cells, and those are nutrients for your cells. You eat a couple of cookies.

That's raw carbohydrate and fat extracted from a seed source. It's not going to have the same thing, even though it may be exactly the same carbohydrate. So the right nutrients, cells need a clean operating environment. That's really important. So when you look at our world today, all of the petrochemicals and pesticides and plastics and all of these things, they're organic chemicals, but they're unnatural organic chemicals. They readily get in our body, but when they get in our cells, they basically clog up the works. Our cells don't function as well. It compromises their function.

Cells need downtime. You know, some cells, like our heart cells, have to rest in between beats. But, you know, when we talk about that process of autophagy, then I know that you talk about a lot. that happens most at night when cells have downtime. So me getting two to four hours of sleep at night, you know, I was starting every day with cells that haven't recuperated from the day before. And eventually that adds up. Yeah.

So our cells need downtime during the day, but that good eight hours of sleep at night really important. Yeah. Cells need good blood flow. So when we talk about exercise, there's such a long list of benefits. But one of the biggest things is it increases blood flow. So the spaces between cells that they have to get nutrients and oxygen and purge waste are very, very tight. So when you have cellular stress, you have cellular die-off, and that congest those spaces.

And just the pollution and junk that your cells are having to purge, it clogs those spaces up. So when we exercise, we increase blood flow. And that basically flushes those spaces, flushes all that junk into the lymphatic system. So cells have to have that. We have to move every day. And it doesn't necessarily have to be extremely vigorous movement. It can be just walking or doing yoga, chagong, or whatever. And the last thing is our cells arch enemy are microbes, and that's a big thing.

And what the damage, you know, we talk about infections and everybody thinks, I have symptoms, it makes me feel bad. But really, what microbes want is food and resources, and our cells are food and resources. And they do damage by harming our cells. So all the microbes in our gut and on our skin and out and in these locations are basically outside that cellular space. They're protected. We have barriers in the immune system to protect our cells. So, but we're constantly, not just when we occasionally have an infection. We are constantly breathing in microbes right now while you and I are talking.

Microbes are bacteria crossing from our gut, from our sinuses, from our gums. to get at our cells. So it's this constant struggle that our immune system has. And if our cells are healthy, then we're in a pretty good place. And this is something that I learned. This is really interesting. That process of autophagy, it's also a defense mechanism. So when cells, when microbes, viruses, bacteria, protozov, when they invade our cells, our cells, if our cells are healthy, then they can actually use that process of d'etopathy to basically digest the microbes. Yeah.

So that's part of our defense system that I don't think is talked about very much. That's really valuable. But, you know, so it's, yeah, that is really important. So that's really the formula of wellness right there. Yeah. So as you're talking about, and just kind of track back and kind of help you everybody fully understand this, there are multiple causes of cellular sickness. And so your belief in philosophy very much is you aren't well, people are not feeling well, whether they've been

diagnosed with everything from MS to a Lyme diagnosis to fibromyalgia due to cellular sickness. And really the key to healing people is addressing the cell. There are several things you mentioned I want to pick up on was one is cellular toxicity. All of the toxins were exposed to everything from sugar to glyphosate to environmental pollutants. Those are contributing deficiencies. That could be blood deficiencies. It could be nutrient deficiencies, but there are things that the cell needs to function properly.

And if we're missing those via typically poor diet, lack of absorption, that's going to cause an issue. And then there's the issue with these microbes, these foreign invaders that are coming in and sort of threatening us. And you talked about the cellular mechanics, And there's a few things you mentioned there. I just kind of wanted to bring out.

And I loved to hear maybe you talk about some of these different areas. One was autophagy, and this is really related to lysosomes, right? These lysosomes of the cells come in with autophagy. They're like the waste management system. They're the recycling system. They are getting rid of the senescent cells, the zombie cells, the chemicals, the things that your body has to get rid of. The other thing is the mitochondria. This is something I'm excited to hear you talk about.

about is sort of the cellular energy that is so critical that we kind of need to build up while we sleep. You talked about the importance of that. And then there's the nucleus. There's the cell membrane. There's the receptor site. So there's all these areas of the cell that are almost like the organs of the cell, right? We've got our liver. We've got our lungs. We've got our reproductive organs. Our cells have organs of their own that function. And we need to make sure those are functioning properly. And so when you take care of patients, Dr. Raw, and they come in with, let's say, an issue like, I know you're an expert in Lyme disease primarily, but also other infections. But when they come in, what are some of the things you start to do? Is there testing?

Is there a way of diagnosing? What sort of issue you think they have? And how do you start to go about starting to fix some of the cellular issues? Yeah. You know, I went through a phase in my practice that I did a lot of testing and was very much like most functional providers. But I learned over time to do something that people just don't do anymore, and that's talked to the patient. By the way, the average doctor visit is seven minutes. Right. That's the average.

Yeah, yeah, I really failed clinical medicine because, you know, part one of my practice was OBGYN, and that went 20 years. And then part two was this building out this concept of a wellness practice really before functional medicine was in vogue. But I was in a small town, so I really didn't have the option of not taking insurance. But I really just felt a need to help people. You know, you have this tremendous experience and you get your life back and you want to do something. And I was spending more and more time.

with patients, like up to an hour or more per visit. I was seeing like 10 patients a day, which really is hard to make ends meet that way. And later, I started doing online consults that were much more like health coaching consult, so I wasn't really managing medications. But just looking together, piecing together, why that person became ill. I found to be so valuable. And so my first question would always be, what was your life like? Can you tell me about what your life was like before you started having symptoms?

You know, what you were eating, what kind of stresses you were having. Sometimes that would go all the way back to childhood. Yeah, yeah. And just worked from there. And it included questions like, you know, were you on a lot of antibiotics when you were a child? do you have infections, various kinds, and just piecing together that puzzle with those five factors in mind. You know, what are you eating?

What kind of environmental toxins have you been exposed to or other environmental stress factors? What has your stress level been? What was your, you know, what is your capacity for exercise? Or have you had other physical issues, traumas, that sort of thing? and what kinds of microbes might have you been exposed to in life. So I'd like to come back to the micro part because it's really fascinating. I think it's a key part of understanding chronic illness. So just stepping people through that, and many of these people identified with chronic Lyme

disease. And interestingly, what I found talking to really thousands of people over the past 15, years is that about 90 to 95% of people who identified with chronic Lyme disease did not remember becoming ill around the time of a tick bite. Wow. So they were like me. Now, why is that, do you think? Yeah.

Because these bacteria are stealthy and they're not highly virulent. This is interesting. and just putting together this concept. So when we talk about that word virulence, the capacity of a microbe to make you sick, is actually more about your immune system than it is about the microbe. And it has to do whether we have built-in immunity.

Now part of this is due to, when you use this terminology, when you said what you just said, It's that people aren't one day waking up and saying, I'm sick. It's a slow progression all of a sudden over a course of a year. Somebody realizes, wow, I feel like I'm aging too quickly. My body's falling apart, you know, and that's the sort of thing that you're talking about there, right? Yeah, same thing with me.

You know, it wasn't like I just suddenly got sick. Yeah, it was over years that it just, my ability to function was gradually compromised. To the point that I just said, I can't do this anymore. I have to do something. And that's true with most people. And so in my case, yeah, tick bites, I had a lot of them when I was a kid. But there's that question of where were they in my body?

What was happening? But this idea of virulence, you know, when Ebola is really bad, right, it makes people sick. Anybody exposed to it gets sick. And it's because we don't have built-in immunity. And it's because humans have never been exposed to that virus. It's relatively new, and it has happened very rarely in time. So we don't have any built-in defenses. So when that thing hit us, it was devastating.

But the value, you know, one of the good sides about Ebola, because everybody gets very, very sick and you can look at someone and say, you've got Ebola, you can quarantine those people. So it's usually contained. Can I give a modern day example of this for everybody? COVID. You know, I mean, when I started seeing patients with COVID, it was presenting unlike most viruses, right? Most of the time, and I have a lot of friends in the Asian medicine community, and they sell the very same thing where it was typically you have this infection, it's respiratory related. When we started seeing COVID was really affecting the blood, you know, in a really profound way in that same way.

So it's like, why were people, especially with COVID-19, having these major, major symptoms and some people not recovering. I think it's the very same thing you're talking about with a bull, to a lesser degree, but still that same thing in terms of this is a new thing the body is not fully adapted to yet. Right. You know, and that's when bad things happen as they skip over from an animal host, which the origins of COVID, I guess we don't, we're not sure where SARS. came from, but it was relatively new, but in the same respect, it's a coronavirus, and we're

exposed to coronavirus. So we had some immunity. So it's like mortality with Ebola, which we really don't have any immunity for, is 30 to 60 percent. Yeah. The SARS virus, it was maybe around 1 or 2 percent, so it wasn't as bad. When you look at lime, though, and all these other microbes, we talk about Borrelia, Bartonella, and scores of many others, they don't really kill people, especially acutely. And we do have built-in immunity. So ticks have been biting humans since the beginning of time.

So we've been exposed. As long as humans have been around, we've been exposed to these microbes. But they're very stealthy, and this give and take, this tug-and-take, this tug-we. war between these microbes that we've been continually exposed to and our immune system, you know, it's just been going on for a long time. So there's, you know, kind of one upmanship that's been going on. And that kind of puts us in a place where we have a very odd and interesting relationship with these kinds of microbes. And this is where it gets really fascinating. So, So what I found is that Borrelia and all the others that we're talking about have the ability

to enter the body generally without a whole lot of fanfare. A lot of people don't even realize that this microbe is trapped, this bacteria is traversing through their bloodstream. But it, you know, its strategy isn't overwhelming us and making us sick. That isn't really what it wants to do. It wants a presence. That's it. All it needs is a presence inside a body so it can go on and spread to other hosts.

And if it makes us deathly sick, it doesn't get that opportunity to go and affect more host. So all it wants to do is just have a place to hang out inside of our body. So it enters the body and it's trying to get through the bloodstream as quickly as it can. And it does that in very interesting ways, one just moving through. and getting the tissues as rapidly as it can, but also invading our white blood cells, including natural killer cells, virtually all of our cells.

It invades the cells, and it has sophisticated mechanisms of actually creating a vacuole and staying alive. But it can enter our cells, our cardiac cells, our heart cells, our brain cells, and it can go dormant. And it can stay that way.

So this concept of intracellular dormancy is just fascinating that these microbes can actually enter our cells throughout our body, just pepper our cells. And just take up residency. And just take up presence. Wow. Wow. And if our cells are healthy, you know, that process of autophagy, sometimes the cell can get rid of them.

But a lot of times it just stays there and the cell keeps right on working like it was normal. Yeah. We've had a good friend of mine who I know you know, Dr. Chris Motley. He's been on a few times. We've talked about this to where, you know, and sometimes some of these different microbes, they'll take residence in different organ cells specifically, you know, and take residence there. What have you seen in your practice in terms of what are some of the organs or systems that things like Lyme and these microbes most like to take residence in?

Yeah. Well, that's interesting, too. And, you know, when we look at this concept of microdormancy, I found that it's a lot more widespread than we appreciated. I've documented it for Bartonella, which is a completely different kind of bacteria. Intracellular dormancy, does it. I've documented it for, it's been documented for Babesia, but also mycoplasmas, chlamidias, and then all the viruses like Epstein, Barr, and many, many others. but things that would surprise you like streptococcus, and we hear about pandas, I actually found a study that one of the varieties of streptococcus that invades our tonsils and makes kids sick, it can actually

go dormant inside cells, and it can invade white blood cells, which allows it to be carried into the brain and other areas. And all this has been documented for streptococcus, which starts to explain, well, why kids with pandas are resistant to antibiotics. Well, it just goes dormant inside cells. Yeah. But different microbes invade different tissues. So they have preferences.

So Borrelia likes tissues that are associated with collagen. It invades the cells called oligodendrocytes that surround our, that basically insulate our nerve cells. It likes to scavenge myelin. So it's all about food and survival. You know, we've had, I remember having a patient in the past who came in with an MS diagnosis. And after some treatment, we discovered they also had mold issues. And when we started treating them for mold, completely healed out of wheelchair. where MS is completely gone.

And this happens all the time. There are so many people out there today that think, I've got hypothyroidism, I have infertility, I have fibromyalgia, I have chronic fatigue, and they don't realize a microbe is behind it. Yeah. You know. What are some of the most common conditions you see? Maybe give me your top three, top five,

where people think this is what I have, but it is actually a microbial issue. Yeah, I don't even think in terms of diagnosis anymore. Yeah. I've really gotten away from it because diagnosis is, you know, when you, the purpose of a diagnosis in conventional medicine is divining medical therapy. And the medical therapies don't get to the root causes. People don't get well. Yeah. So, you know, MS and chronic Lyme disease are pretty nice examples to use.

So MS, a lot of people test positive for Borrelia. but it's also been associated with Epstein-Barr, Chlamydia. So there are other microbes that invade oligodendercites in scavenged myelin. And that basically is what's going on in MS. So your nerves, if you think of your nerves like copper wires, and you've got a bundle of copper wires, if they're not insulated with plastic, they short out. So their nerves work the same way. They have to be insulated.

So there are cells called oligodendrocytes that wrap around, and it's like a plastic coat. So a lot of microbes, Borrelia, chlamydia, others like that myelin is a fatty substance that they use as a resource. So they invade these cells, and then they can reactivate and start breaking down that cell. And it's like if the copper wire was partially stripped from the copper wire and things began shorting out. And we see this with that mess with loss of function of so many things. Yeah. So, but demilination, that same process happens in chronic Lyme disease, just not to same degree. So you got a lot of crossover.

And I actually found a study looking at microbes and causes. for MS. And interestingly, the article went through the dietary factors. It went through the toxin factors. It went through stress. It went through a sedentary lifestyle. Got to the microbes and listed M.A. It listed Borrelia, Comedia, several others that I had already knew about. So it was like, it was basically that same formula. And but interestingly, they were able to find some genetic mutations that were more prevalent in multiple sclerosis. So in other words, genetics isn't necessarily a cause of disease, but it may be a factor that sets the stage

that puts you more at risk. And that's why some people may get a little bit worse. Yeah, it makes it. I mean, you think about it. Everybody's built differently. My five-year-old daughter and I just did a genetic test, like swab test to see, you know, what she's going to be good at.

athletically like it kind of will tell you she's going to have better endurance or better strength or better stamina so there's some pretty amazing things we can see with genes but it's the same thing some people have stronger more robust liver some people are born with stronger more robust lungs and you know one of the things that i really appreciated about you wrote this amazing book it's called the cellular wellness solution and and one of the things i've noticed the way you think is very similar the way that i've been trained to think and that is we don't look at the body in terms of of a diagnosis, we look at the patterns, we look at the environment. And this goes all the way back to Chinese medicine, Ayurvedic medicine, and looking at we can't treat the symptom, we have to change

the environment. And if you look at something like Chinese medicine, they would say, they don't say you've got a mess, they would say, oh, your body is too damp and there's too much stagnation, your blood isn't moving enough, or it's too cold and there's wind invading, which is actually microbes and that's the issue. And so, you know, we just need to change the environment. And so I would love for you to just kind of share your thoughts on the differences in how you would treat somebody. Conventional medicine says this. Let's bomb the body. Let's treat the symptom. Let's just let's do that versus the way that you treat the body is saying, no, we want to strengthen the organ systems. We want to change the environment. And your own body will kill the virus, right, or the bacteria or the parasite.

But we've got to change the environment there. Share your thoughts on that. And then how do you go about doing that with patients? Like what are some of the strategies, the practices and things you do? Chronic issues like Lyme disease often go hand in hand with other underlying conditions. One of the most common being thyroid or autoimmune problems. And if you're constantly tired, gaining weight for no reason or feeling mentally foggy, these could be signs of a thyroid issue like hypothyroidism or Hashimoto's.

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Yeah, it's hard. I struggled with it. Yeah. Changing my diet, changing everything in my life. I mean, it was hard. Yeah. You know, and then you have things that are unexpected. So I had this really nice practice, but I had to leave my OBGYN in practice.

And the only office building that was available to start this new office. that I was pretty bad off at that point, but, you know, a small town you can't tell people. So I got this little office who was a 50-year-old building. It was full of mold. So I found all about mold. Oh, wow. Everything I learned the hard way. So, but it's, but looking at it, trying to put people through a pathway that we step them through.

And now at this point, instead of doing a clinical practice, I build, protocols and pathways for people. And I've spent the past year building a new one, but recognizing that when someone is chronically ill and they're grasping everywhere, there's a lot of fear and a lot of anxiety, this sympathetic overactivity that is a big impediment toward moving forward in recovery. And, you know, and you think about it from the cellular point of view, I mean, you've got every cell in the body bombarding the brain with distress signals. You know, all your cells are in turmoil, everything is a mess. And your brain is just on fire.

And you activate that fight or flight response. So, you know, we spend a couple of months calming that down through brain retraining exercises, yoga, chagong. Some herbs, calming herbs, Aschwaganda. Yeah, I was going to ask some of your favorites for that. Yeah, there are a lot of great herbs out there. Ashwaganda is a really nice herb just for helping to calm some of the stress hormones, some other Chinese herbs as far as calming herbs like philodendron magnolia species. Elthianine is really nice.

Some of those kinds of combinations, getting people on. that and you know and and and everybody comes in you know people with chronic Lyme especially it's like I've got to kill the microbes to get my body better and it's it's like no we're going to take care of that calm down yes they're driving everything you know so okay I'm so happy you do this first because I truly believe that the number one the most commonly missed thing by doctors today is not taking care of the stress component yeah because it's 50% of of the issue with most patients or something close to that. So it's just, I'm so glad that you do that.

Yeah. That's great. But we start them out on a tincture product with an herb called Cryptolepus and Houtonia and Neem and several other herbs. And it's kind of a gentle formula that most people tolerate. So we want to start calming that microbe stress going on in our body. You know, when we look at chronic illness, whether you're talking about chronic Lyme, MS, anything else.

How I see chronic illness now is that we all pick up microbes. So we talked about the tick-borne microbes, right? So there's Borrelia Bartonella, and now the list is growing. My last count was like over 100 microbes. There's so many possibilities. But then you'd start looking outside of that, and there's evidence that things crossing from our gut, from our skin, from our sinuses, they're invading our cells too. And some people, some researchers are starting to call it the dormant blood and tissue microbiome. You know, there are studies

that find that we actually do harbor some bacteria inside our red blood cells that are dormant. And that, you know, I don't know if we'll get quite that deep, but it starts to explain why some people have that coagulation system that goes on with chronic illness. that we've seen in COVID. Yeah. So all of these things are there, and it's just, it's like this reservoir that's just waiting. And so then you go for years that you're not eating a great diet and your own, you're not

sleeping like you're so, you're staying too much, you're doing too much alcohol or you smoke, or, you know, you have exposure to various kinds of environmental toxins, you're not exercising, and your stress, your cellular stress, your cells become weakened. So you reach a point where these microbes start reactivating. And when they reactivate, they start breaking down those cells and start invading other cells. So your body switches from a state of cellular health to a state of your microbes breaking down cells to create, basically turn your body into a food supply. Yeah. And so really step number one is you're sharing.

We need to optimize sleep. We need to reduce stress. In order to sort of recharge those batteries, so your body has the energy it needs in order to heal as well. It's not overstimulated. What's step two when you start taking care of? Yeah, once you move to that point, then you can start, you have the person in a place where you can start talking about detoxification. And I don't, you know, when I look at detoxification, it's protecting the body's detoxification systems, but it's detoxifying. their environment too. You know, somebody needs a really clean environment. And there's so much that we're

getting through our food and water and skin products and especially our air that we're not recognizing cleaning up that so that they have a clean environment to live in. And then, to me, detoxification starts at the cellular level. So when you have all this turmoil in your body, you are breaking down more cells. So when cells are stressed, they burn out faster, they die, and that creates debris and congestion that clogs up those really narrow spaces between cells. So it obstructs flow. So cells not only aren't getting nutrients and oxygen like they're supposed to, but they are also not being able to purge toxic substances. They've absorbed heavy metals and all these things that we're all exposed to, they can't get rid of it.

They're stuck with it. That space is clogged. So you need to start clearing that out. The solution to pollution is dilution. And exercise is a great way to do that, but when you've got somebody who's super inflamed, exercise is often not a great option. You know, getting them to do basic chagong or yoga or those kinds of things. That's really important.

But that's where something like sauna can be really. really important because it increases blood flow and that flushes out those spaces and starts clearing that congestion. And then once you're mobilizing it, protecting the liver. So using herbs like milk thistle and dandelion and and agrippist to actually help protect liver cells from that very toxic process. And you've talked about the kidneys too and using herbs to protect the kidney cells because if we start pulling this stuff out, we need to protect the cells that are processing it. And a lot of people just don't have great processing capacity. It's, you know, 25% of Americans have fatty liver. You know, you burn out your liver cells and replace them with fat cells.

Yeah. And that's not good because we live in a really toxic world. And I think that, you know, You hear about people their cholesterol grows up as they age. It's not because they're eating more cholesterol. It's because they're losing the ability for their liver to process it. Yeah, yeah. And, yeah, I've been taking milk thistle for, oh, 15 or 20 years, and my cholesterol is better than when I was in my 40s. You know, I don't think most people realize to the extent of what your liver does.

I mean, you know, I mean, I think about this because I take care of a lot of people. patients with hormonal issues, Hashimoto's, hypothyroidism, infertility, PCOS, diabetes, and also menopausal symptoms. And, you know, your liver is so critical for estrogen, you know, stabilization and the right levels of estrogen. So, so it does a lot. And again, milk this was one of those amazing herbs. I read a study once on, on it being able to, maybe better than any other herb, regenerate actual liver tissue. Pretty extraordinary, yeah. Yeah, so, so powerful. So I love that. And I love that you've got a process of, number one, we want to strengthen up the system. We want to strengthen the organs, strengthen the cells, sleep and stress

are some of the keys to that. And then now, as you're talking about, we've got to move things. We got to move them. You know, in Chinese medicine, they call that like a liver blood stasis or blood stagnation. You got to move it. That is a chief thing to heal. And I love that you talked about a lot of those herbs. You know, one of the things that's so interesting is most of these herbs that have their mechanism of action oftentimes is based on sometimes their flavor you know Andrew Grafus I know I'm sure you talk about this in your amazing book but King of the Bitters right oh yeah so we Jordan Rubin and I own a farm just south of here in our south and we grow herbs and so we tend uh I like to play kind of a trick on people when we go out there I make them this mix of

holy basil with mint and goji and it just tastes amazing and then I say hey try this one and it's And they're like, that's the worst thing I've ever, it's the most bitter thing I've ever had in my life. So it's, but you know, this bitter action is so good for releasing bile, moving things. And so I love that you do that. So once you start to move the blood, once you start to heal the liver and then support the kidneys, are there any steps after that in terms of helping people heal? Well, you know, including in that is just getting their GI track working again. And so many people have food sensitivities.

I mean, in my journey, I was sensitive to 75% of the foods that I was eating. Yeah. Juggle all of that because I had leaky gut and my gut was a wreck. But the gut thing, I also realized that when you look at the fundamental thing happening with gut dysfunction, and this is why the calming things first comes first, a lot of it is slow motility. You know, we have bacterial overgrowth because things are slow. When we have sympathetic overactivity, our brain is programmed to take care of a threat, like running from a tiger. And then when that tiger never goes away 24-7, their brain is just activated.

And we shut non-essential things like digestion down. So part of that is slow gut motility, and that's a big contributing factor to gut dysfunction. So we have to calm that sympathetic overactivity before we can actually address the gut dysfunction. Well, you know, and why your protocol is so good is that most doctors completely skip the most important first step, which is the stress and getting you more in a parasympathetic state. I mean, I would say 95% of doctors, 98, just completely skip that step. Oh, sure. Well, it takes time. Yeah.

Because there are herbs that help, you know, a lot of times. you know, if people don't want a medication, they want a supplement to fix it. And there are good supplements for what you're talking about moving things. Like, I like Trafalah. Like, I think that's a great herb for some of gut motility and benefits. But you can't just take Trafalah and live in this stressed out state and think, oh, well, that pill, that herb is going to fix it. Yeah. Yeah, truly, it's, you know, it's actually slow motility that are creating a lot of the bacterial imbalances, right? And S-I-B-O, it's a big reason because, you know, bacteria grow as long as food is present. And one of the reasons we need to keep things moving through is because the bacteria

will keep growing and we need to move that to slow down that growth. So if you've got slow motility, you've still got bacteria in your small gut. And if things aren't moving, they're going to keep growing, keep fermenting, keep producing bacteria, keep producing gas. And so that's a big part of it. So, yeah, getting that done, but then getting them on a reasonable diet. You know, so many people just really don't understand what a good diet is. And, you know, I know you do a lot on diet, and I think you and I are very, very close of what we recommend for people to eat. And it's just getting back to those roots, you know.

I would love to hear from you because I have one myself. Like when you started learning about how to truly heal people at the cellular level, what was maybe something you'd believed in the past that you really had an epiphany on in terms of diet? Maybe, hey, I thought this was good for people. This isn't or something like that. Yeah. You know, it's getting back to our roots, but there have been a lot of, bad nutritional advice over the years so I can remember, you know, I grew up in the fast food generation

and ate all of the wrong things. My mother was pretty good at getting vegetables in me, so I learned how to like vegetables, but, you know, you kind of default to the things that taste good. And so my diet was not that great, but once I became a physician, I wanted to get my patients good dietary advice. And I struggled with slow motility, high stress, constipation a lot when I was younger. And the advice was at that time, well, you need more fiber. And, man, I was packing in bran and raisin bran every day, all grain fiber and thinking, yeah, I'm following this advice. This is good advice. And I was eating all this stuff.

and I was gaining weight in my 30s and actually getting worse. My bowels were getting awful. And I just, you know, and you started reading about the paleo diet and started leaning more toward that. And did one thing early on that made an enormous difference is I cut out all bread and flour products. And my weight went back down to where it was supposed to be. My gut cleared up. Just that one thing. Just stop eating bread and flour products.

So, and, you know, but it took time. It took years to give up cookies, and it's like labor and delivery, you miss a lot of meals. You know, there's just no food around, but there were always cookies and juice and donuts, and you eat that stuff because you're hungry, and that's all there is. And finally, you know, work that out of my system and everything cleared up and got a lot better. And started exploring diet, lean more toward a pale, diet, just looked at our ancient past as far as what humans ate and gradually gravitated toward that.

And, you know, I really got it down to four basic guidelines that I follow now. Wow. And it's, and this would be right in line with what you're doing too. Yeah. So eat whole foods as much as you can. Yeah. Most of my food I make from scratch from whole food. Not to say that I make my own mayonnaise or, you know, but most foods that I eat, I go to the grocery store and I'm buying whole foods and I'm making them from scratch.

And I really enjoy cooking and making my own food. So that's number one. Number two is I try to eat more vegetables than anything else. I think vegetables are just really important. Vegetable fiber, not grain fiber, is really, really important. and then just kind of divide up everything evenly according to what works for you. So I eat meat. I actually think it's a little bit healthier to eat lean protein sources.

Agreed. But I think you can get by being a vegetarian, but I just find that I feel a whole lot better. I eat meat. I eat nuts. I eat a little bit of fruit. I eat some grains like oats, but generally whole grains or whole rice. Don't eat much weed or bread. Occasionally, I'll eat something like at a restaurant or something like that, but not very often.

So I just divide up everything else evenly. Then the third thing is I try to keep my carbohydrate count below 150 grams, which isn't quite ketogenic, which gives me the ability to have some carbohydrate, which I think makes your life more comfortable. Yeah, I mean, I actually don't think that being in ketosis is good for people most of the time. I think if somebody has MS or epilepsy, there's a period of time where it can be good. But I don't, yeah, I don't think it's ideal, especially when you're trying to heal. So that 150 mark, and sometimes I go a little over or a little under, but generally,

and I don't carry it around a little book. It's just that I know, like, okay, an apple, that's about, 25 grams of carbohydrate, maybe a half an apple, you know, and that sort of thing. And then the last thing that I'm sure you can relate to is just trying to narrow my eating window. So I'm not as good as my son. My son eats one meal a day. He's really good at this. But, you know, I usually eat something light kind of late in the morning. The favorite for me is frying an egg and then I'm doing like salad greens and mushrooms and artichoke and olive oil. And I had, you know, I cook an egg and then I put that in the pan.

And so that'll be a light breakfast. And then, you know, even in summertime, we're trying to finish our last meal by five or six. Same here. And then not eat after that. Yeah. Man, I feel so much better doing that. Yeah. And, you know, if everybody were doing those four things, we'd all be in a

pretty good place. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. You know, I agree with all that. I think one of my biggest epiphanies was, you know, when you're in school early in practice, you hear somebody saying, I'm doing paleo, I'm doing keto, I'm doing vegan. And at first I was trying to figure what's the best diet? And one of the things I realized was there's not. Right. All patients are different. All people are uniquely different and designed. And so I need to find the diet that's best for this person or this condition because I would have somebody come in with irritable IBSD and their diet would be very different than if I had a cancer patient come in because IBSD I'm having them do mostly soups, mostly cooked foods, right?

Versus this person, I might have them maybe even doing some juicing or some raw salads and vegetables and things like that. So, you know, I think that was one of my biggest epiphanies. But overall, I think the rules that you talked about apply to pretty much everybody in terms of getting rural whole foods. You know, I'm not an actual big believer for if people are sick to doing a lot of intermittent fasting in terms of the very narrow window. I think men do better with it than women generally speaking. But I think that doing at least a 12-hour or a 10-hour eating window, as you're talking about, works for pretty much everybody. So, but yeah, those were,

those were some of my epiphanies. You know, one of the other things I wanted to ask you about, and actually, I want to make sure that you finished your process. So we started up talking about if you want to heal from Lyme or chronic infections, you got to lower the stress, you got to get out of fight or flight, you got to get good sleep. You got to charge those batteries. That's step number one.

Step number two, you got to move the blood, right? You got to support the liver in that. You got to support the kidneys. And then the next step was the gut microbiome. You know, here's one of my other epiphanies that was, making me, I was having a little bit of leaky gut in practice because I was just working all day. Yeah. Even though I was eating really well, I had this issue. And part of it for me was overeating. You know, I'm a really thin body type and I want to have, you know, maintain a certain

level of muscle mess, but I was really eating until I was 100% full. And in Chinese medicine, they say, eat till 70 or 80%. Don't go over that. And with some issues like SIBO, that's a really big deal too. Cancer, dementia, heart disease, they're coming for so many people. And it's not just because of what most people think, which is that it's bad luck or bad genetics. The truth is your daily choices are either creating health or setting the stage for disease and your doctor is probably reading your blood work all wrong. They're missing the cellular issues behind the symptoms. I'm currently offering a simple at-home blood test that actually test for the right things. And just as importantly, it comes with proper interpretation of the results.

This new test flips the script. The future of interpreting test results is here. If you want to check it out and grab one before they're gone, just go to mybloodwork.com now. Oh, I agree 100%. And that's another thing that I've done is, yeah, that 70% rule, it applies to so many things, you know. Exercise, eating, everything. just go to that 70% of your full capacity, and you're going to be a whole lot more comfortable in life.

I was talking about, you know, Mark Sisson, he started a primal kitchen, and he's got, so he was on here last month. And he actually just moved to Frank Nashville area here, so we're going to get together here soon. But he was, we were talking about this to where, when I was younger, I'm 43 now, but when I was in my 20s, I was,

even in my 30s, I was like, okay, when I go and work out, I'm going 100%. Like every set I do is to wear like absolute fatigue. And then, you know, and I injured myself that way a little bit, my back and then having other issues. And so, but to your point, it's the same with exercise. It's you want to go until, hey, maybe it's hard, but don't go until you fail. Right.

Especially as you get older because all your ligaments, all your tendons are when the muscle fails, you're starting to start to harm your, you know, your ligaments and tendons. And I see people in the gym all the time now. I go to Lifetime Fitness here in Tennessee. And a lot of these, everybody's doing everything until they're just like, you know, absolutely failing. And it's not how this. That's why people are getting hurt and CrossFit and a lot of these. Well, cellular health.

You're really doing some cellular damage at that point. That's right. So, you know, looking at those five stress factors, the fourth one I define it as physical stress. And so being sedentary is a physical stress. But other kinds of physical stress, just pushing your body to. card can be a really significant thing too. And reading outside magazine for years of, you know, they periodically have articles on extreme athletes and having something that sounds basically like Lyme disease. So when you look at chronic illness in any way, it's all based in cellular

stress. And you can push yourselves too hard to the point that they can't recover. They They lose that recovered at that capacity. But I'm also in a place that I think there is this component of reactivated microbes in every chronic chronic illness. And I think that's a big part of it. So we pick up a lot of different microbes. From the time we're born and we start picking up mycoplasmas and just an enormous range of things. and they can become dormant inside our cells, inside of our tissues, and when we're stressed in various ways, they can reactivate.

But different microbes occupy different spaces, different cells in the body. So we talked about Bartonella. It invades cells that line blood vessels. So it, you know, and that can be in the heart too. So it's acting very differently than Borrelia. So every one of them is a little bit different. So what we pick up in life may have a really important bearing on what kind of chronic illnesses we might end up with.

And so what do you do in terms of, we kind of ended with the gut? Do you do anything after that in terms of kind of finalizing that kind of healing process with patients? Fine-tuning and really doubling down on the microbe stress. So what we, you know, the herbs are just so remarkably important. And, you know, after I, you know, in my journey, I out of desperation, ended up doing an herbal protocol. You know, I read Booner's book in 2005 and started doing this really robust herbal protocol, frankly, without a whole lot of expectations that it was going to help me and just had this extraordinary experience.

You know, within three months, I was starting to get my life back. And over five years, every one of my symptoms were gone. Wow. My joints. All those heart symptoms? I mean, I met a guy who was having the same symptoms that I had had, that it had a heart transplant, and ended up passing away a few years ago. He's big in the Lyme community.

And I thought, call, that could have been me. If I had not started these herbs, it all cleared up. everything. You know, I thought I would be kind of like a cardiac cripple my whole life. Yeah, wow. And it all went away. And my joints, God, my joints were so bad, everything got better. So working with the herbs and realizing that they were not only suppressing the microbes, but also helping to restore cellular health, protecting cells. You know, up until 150 years ago in most of the world, when people use the word medicine or went to an apothecary or pharmacy, they got herbs.

Right. It's what they got. That wasn't until John Rockefeller in the United States really came in and started pushing, you know, pharmaceuticals that that just started going away. Yeah. You know, in all of Chinese medicine and Ayurveda, it's like that's, that is medicine as herbs. So I would be curious to hear from you, you know, when I really started studying herbs and using them with patients, there were a few herbs that I found that were just so underutilized.

You know, we hear a lot of turmeric today. We hear about ginger. We hear about maybe an aschaganda a lot, but there are some sort of, I would say, lesser-known herbs that I started using and just getting phenomenal results with patients. Estragalus is one of them. It's one of my absolute favorites for patients. And I've got a few others. But for you, what are some of those favorite herbs you have for helping people heal that are maybe lesser-known today? Yeah, but you can't find at your basic health food store.

Yeah. It's a lot of the things that we've defined as antimicrobial herbs that have gravitated towards. the Lyme community, but I think are so valuable for so many things. So Japanese not lead. Yeah. That's a big one. I'm sure you know of that one. And I don't think that's a mainstreamer.

Maybe it's becoming. I don't think it's mainstream at all. It's really high in resveratrol, right? Is it? It's high in resveratrol, but it's high in trans-resveritral, the form we absorb. So we actually get much higher levels of it than we do in, in, in, wine or graves. So beyond that, just to all of the other wonderful chemicals in Japanese knotweed. But resveratrol has some antimicrobial properties, but it also, it's, you know this,

it's how it affects our mitochondria. Yeah. It's that and Tirostil bean from blueberries. Oh, yeah. have what's called a decoupling effect. So like if we're eating too much carb or we are doing things that are driving our mitochondria harder and producing a lot more oxidative stress, but we're not really exercising or doing things that we're using that energy. We're basically burning both ends of the candle with our mitochondria. Well, the resveratrol and terrastilbin kind of freewheel the mechanisms of the mitochondria, so it doesn't produce free radicals and it doesn't burn out, which is really cool.

Yeah. So there are so many things in herbs that protect our cells, the different machinery of our cells. But the antimicrobial properties are really interesting. So that's one, one of the other ones that some of the Amazonian herbs, cat's claw. I think people are hearing more about that one. Traditionally, cat's claw was used for cognitive functions, dementia, and arthritis. And it just has these wonderful antimicrobial properties. And that in some studies has been shown to be, you know, as anti-inflammatory as turmeric and ginger having really powerful effects there. Yeah. But I think what people don't often realize is,

virtually any herb is going to have antimicrobial properties because basically what we're doing is we're borrowing the protective and defense systems from the plant. Yes. And I think that's really fascinating to think about it that way. So unlike like an antibiotic that's a chemical, you're talking about hundreds, thousands of chemicals that work like an intelligent defense system. Yeah. So when you take an herb, you're getting this broad spectrum coverage against bacteria, protozoa, yeast, viruses in your system, and they're really good for suppressing this microbe reactivation. But at the same time, you're not disrupting your gut. You're not disrupting normal flora.

They have preference, this intelligence. They're selective for pathogens, but they don't disrupt normal flora. So that's why, you know, when I first started taking herbs, it was kind of like, well, if they work, they're going to wreck my gut just like the antibiotics. But the opposite happened. My gut started getting better. Yeah. I was like, hmm, that's interesting.

Yeah. I actually found a study that documented that the herbal antimicrobial properties don't disrupt. In fact, I've found that often herbs can work as well as probiotics for balancing that. Well, you talked about the Japanese now. We have such a perfect example of that because there are studies on the resveratrol, some of the other compounds acting as prebiotics. And so that's a great point. Yeah, yeah, it's really good.

But the other thing is the herbs don't generate antibiotic resistant pathogens. And that's an enormous problem. I mean, you know, we're hearing so much about chronic Lyme disease and more and more people, but people don't die of chronic Lyme disease. They may progress and die of other things as they get progressively sicker, but they don't really die of that. So we haven't made any new antibiotics since I graduated from medical school in 1985. Talk about antibiotics for a minute because it's the most prescribed medication for Lyme disease today. Well, there's a place for it. There's a place for it. You know, we would be in a bad

place without antibiotics. Antibiotics work for fast-growing bacteria. This is really important. So like if you contracted a pneumococcal pneumonia. Yeah. Those bacteria are turning over. They're doubling their growth every 20 minutes. And what that means is somebody can get really sick, really fast, but that fat growth is the Achilles heel that antibiotics really work because it kills the bacteria that are growing fast. It depends on something growing to inhibit it. So if they're fast growing, that makes a difference. So antibiotics could save somebody's life. Borrelia, the Lyme bacteria, the spirochete,

in its most active phase, doubles every 12 to 24 hours. It's really, really slow, and that's the defense mechanism. So antibiotics, even an acute illness, aren't going to work as well. So, but antibiotics is a single chemical, and they all come from nature, right? So all antibiotics either come from a bacteria, a fungus, or a plant. Yeah. But we're not smart enough to pull that organism's whole defense system. Yeah, you're just one total.

Yeah, we pluck one chemical out, and then we have to patent it, so we change it to potent it, and make it a chemical that we can patent. So it's one chemical. all bacteria can get around that chemical very, very rapidly. So you've got about 10 days. So you've got a window of 10 days before you start generating antibiotic-resistant pathogens inside your body. So not only do they suppress normal flora,

they're turning the things that are resistant. They're making pathogens resistant, so you're creating antibiotic-resistant pathogens. And how many patients have you had? like I've had, they went in and got antibiotics. They felt better for two weeks. And all of a sudden, three months later, the infection comes back worse and stronger. Well, that's it because, you know, we're not eradicating things in the body.

And that's where our herbs have so much value. Well, what are some of your favorite herbs then to use for something like Borrelia, you know, for Lyme specifically? Yeah. The ones that we're using are things that we know about because we've used them for so long. and we mentioned Japanese knotweed. That's a really important one. Cats claw, that's a good one.

One of my favorite herbs, people ask me sometimes, well, if you were on a desert island, what herb would you take with you? And it's, if my answer is always Chinese skull cap. It's just this wonderful herb that we, it was originally thought it was primarily immune modulator. It balances the immune system and has. has a lot of cellular protective effects and adaptogenic properties. All these things have adaptogenic properties. But it has these really wonderful antimicrobial properties against a wide spectrum of different

algorithms, including Borrelia. And so those are some really important ones. Andograph is on the list. It once was thought to be good for Borrelia. We're finding it doesn't have as good an activity. was a series of Johns Hopkins studies from Johns Hopkins University. They actually did test tube studies with these herbs. And they found that they actually killed Borrelia better than the antibiotics, which was really fascinating. But they also looked at Borrelia, Babesia, Bartonella, and other

kinds of things. And they found that they were just as good for those, too. Same herbs, like Japanese not weed and Chinese skull cap, and it was really wonderful. Andrographis is really good for Babesia. It's really great antiviral. That king of bitters, it's from an area in India. And interesting, there's a story that the 1918 flu epidemic, the area of India where Andrographis grows was some of the lowest mortality in the world, and they were all taking Andrographis.

Wow. I love that. So really has some wonderful antiviral properties. And I like the medicinal mushrooms, the adaptogens, like Rishi and corticeps. They're widely used in these protocols. But when you look at illness as cellular stress and reactivation of microbes, which I think, you know, every illness that I look at, I'm starting to find links between these same kinds of microbes and there's always cellular stress.

Well, you know, you mentioned something at the very beginning of the interview, and I think this is important to know. Most people don't have just one microbe affecting them. It's multiple. And there was a study I read recently on, this was shocking because I had not read this before. One of the single greatest causes of cancer today is having a co-infection, specifically in the study it was of parasites.

Like if you have a parasitic infection long term, your risk of cancer goes up dramatically. It's literally one of the biggest causes of cancer period. And, you know, we both know it's because what your body, if your body has to fight off one invader, most of those bodies are strong enough to handle the one. But what if you're in a fight against five other people? That's pretty hard to win. You know, the connections between microbes just go, you know, that's where I've been in the past 10 years,

is just tracing out all the little connections and looking at cancer. that's kind of fascinating. You know, when you look at cancer and look at microbes, it's really interesting. And it has to do with the growth rate, right? So our cells have restricted growth, which means you can only fit so many cells in a liver or a heart. So genetically, there's a growth restriction that a cell basically knows its place

when that cell dies, you can replace that cell, but you have to restrict the growth of the cells within our organs, our skin, everything. What cancer is is when those cells take on unrestricted growth. So you look at bacteria or viruses or anything. They have an unrestricted growth. So as long as food is present and the right conditions are present, bacteria will keep growing until those conditions change. And they grow and they grow.

You put bacteria in a petri dish, the right conditions. It will keep growing until there's no food left. So that has a lot to do with, that's very interesting with cancer. And I found this study. This was interesting. They were using an algae as their specimen that, you know, algae has complex eukaryotic cells that are like our cells. So they were using that as their study model, and they were trying to introduce cancer in those cells.

So they took the algae, and they exposed it to all kinds of chemical carcinogens and all of this stuff trying to induce cancer. Can't do it. Just died. Yeah. And they thought, well, what if we stress the cells? So they put them in the closet, no sunlight, stressed the cells, exposed them all this stuff. Cells just died. But then they found that there was this intracellular bacteria.

So all we all, every organism on earth has these intercellular bacteria that can invade cells and become dormant. So they found this bacteria that did this. And normally it didn't hurt the plant, but they took the plant or the algae, they put it in the closet, they stressed the cells, they introduced the intracellular bacteria, turned to cancer, are every single time. Wow. And they found that the bacteria was inserting its gene for unregulated growth into the cells. Yeah, a lot of people don't know, you know, these allergies like sparyolina, chlorale, these are

bacteria, these are microbial, you know, and so. Spirulina is bacterial. Chorella is actually a true allergy. So it has uchariotic cells. I see. Yeah, it's so, so interesting. And, you know, I've seen over the year. is reading up on a different sort of practitioners saying, well, we think that cancer is most

resembles a fungus or most resembles a parasite. But generally, a lot of these people say, you know, cancer cells most resemble an unrestricted microbe, you know, in terms of what it does in the body, exactly what you're saying there. You know, and they have found that different kinds of tumors have different microbiomes of intracellular bacteria that live inside of them. So there's cancer microbe connections are really becoming very common. But my latest thing is looking at asking that question, why do we have senescent cells? Right? Yeah.

So you've talked about that. I'm sure that we have these cells that, you know, what's supposed to happen is part of aging is just losing cells as we go through life. So we hit peak cell count at age 20. We have about five to ten times the cells that we need. And over time, our cells gradually lose energy. We're burning out our mitochondria capacity. And so we're gradually losing cells.

So that's what aging is. But ideally what happens is the cell basically just commits suicide called apatosis, that it basically just says, okay, I'm burned out, time to make way for other cells, and it, you know, and it lets itself go. But some cells become senescent cells. They become these metabolically active cells that are still present, clogging up all of our tissues, but they're not contributing. They're not doing their job anymore. And it's kind of like, why would we have that?

And I've had this theory that could it be intracellular bacteria? and doing research, I've been using AI to help me find the research faster, and I'm finding microbe connections, and it's looking like the reason behind senescent cells is intracellular bacteria and other microbes that are basically maintaining these cells as a food source and just a resource, just a haven, to stay inside the body. Which is a really fascinating idea. I'm still early in that. I think we've had a lot of more research, but it starts putting a different eye on why we have these things.

It's interesting. Well, it's interesting. You see there's a lot of compounds, whether it be quercetin or natokinase or some of these herbal compounds that also help with senescence. And of course, we know fasting is probably one of the biggest things there, or at least closing up that eating window. But that makes a lot of sense. Well, Dr. Brown, I want to say this has been great. It's been a total honor having you on. I want to let people know about your book.

Well, thank you. It is the cellular wellness solution. And this is a book that I endorse because it's fantastic going through a lot of herbs, a lot of protocols, sort of the philosophy of healing here of Dr. Rawls. And if you are struggling with any type of infection, whether it be lime or mold or parasite, this is a great book. And if you're also interested in herbs, you want to learn, you become more educated. It's a great book for that as well. Also, I know Dr. Raw has a website. Dr. Rawl, where could people learn more about you and your work?

Probably the easiest place is website RawlsmD.com and put slash resources, and that just gives you lots of information about the things that we're doing, some of the programs that we've put together, and, you know, how we move people from that sympathetic overactivity through these other stages, and really then focus on cellular health and get them well. Yeah. Well, when you look at the research of the number of people with chronic infection, infections, it's incredibly high. It's close to 100%, but the number of people

that have dormant Lyme, dormant parasites, dormant viral infections like Epstein-Barr, it is incredibly high. And when you're feeling ill, oftentimes as Dr. Rawls has talked about, this is these dormant microbes that are waking up, that are coming out, and we need to be able to, your immune system needs to be able to be strong enough to get rid of those, put them back where they belong.

And Dr. Rawls work. has been some of the best in the world on this. I want to say, hey, thanks so much for listening to the Dr. Josh Jack show. Remember each and every week, we're diving deep into the science and principles of how you can heal physically, mentally, and spiritually. Also, the number one thing you could do to support the channel here

and the show is share this episode. There are millions of people that don't know how to heal their infections. There's people that think they have MS now or that are completely debilitated because of microbes like Lyme that have over 10. taken them and Dr. Rawls in this podcast, hopefully can help open the eyes of people of how to truly heal the root cause of the issue. So thanks so much for sharing this. Also, thank you so

much for subscribing. We've got a lot of other great guests coming on, great topics. Don't forget to subscribe. I'll see you on the next episode.