#364 Antibiotics vs Herbs: Recovering from Lyme and Infections with Dr. Bill Rawls, MD

This week on The Less Stressed Life Podcast, get ready for an eye-opening chat with the incredible Dr. Bill Rawls. Dr. Rawls is the ultimate expert in turning health crises into opportunities for a vibrant life, and today, he’s spilling all the tea on how herbs can be your secret weapon against chronic illness. 🌱

We dive deep into Bill's journey from being knocked down by chronic Lyme disease to rising up stronger with the power of herbs and holistic therapies. Trust me, his insights on cellular wellness will make you rethink everything you thought you knew about staying healthy. We also tackle the big question: Why are herbs so much better than antibiotics?

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

• The five sneaky factors that stress out your cells (and how to fix them!)
• Why herbs are the real MVPs in your wellness toolkit 🏆
• How to keep those pesky microbes from taking over your life
• Do microbes create a resistance to herbs?
• Chronic illness often stems from reactivated dormant microbes
• A healthy nervous system is key to preventing chronic illness
• Symptoms provide more insight into your health than lab tests

ABOUT GUEST:
For over 30 years, Dr. Bill Rawls dedicated his life to medicine. After a chronic Lyme disease diagnosis revealed the limits of modern medicine, he turned to holistic and herbal therapies, restoring his health and inspiring a focus on cellular wellness. Now, through his bestselling books, Unlocking Lyme and The Cellular Wellness Solution, and as the founder of Vital Plan, Dr. Rawls advocates for the power of herbal phytochemicals in defending against illness. His signature Restore Kit™ has helped thousands reclaim their health. As a bestselling author and speaker, Dr. Rawls makes complex science accessible to all. 

WHERE TO FIND:
Website: https://vitalplan.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vitalplan/
Website: https://rawlsmd.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rawlsmd/

WHERE TO FIND CHRISTA:
Website: https://www.christabiegler.com/
Instagram: @anti.inflammatory.nutritionist
Podcast Instagram: @lessstressedlife
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@lessstressedlife
Leave a review, submit a questions for the podcast or take one of my quizzes here: ****https://www.christabiegler.com/links

EPISODE SPONSOR:
A huge shoutout to Jigsaw Health for sponsoring this episode! Grab a discount on any of their fantastic products. Use the code lessstressed10

Transcript

[00:00:00] Bill Rawls, MD: these things are not aggressive pathogens. They're opportunist, and all they want to do is eat. slide in under the radar. And that's what they do. So whether you get antibiotics or not, whether you have symptoms or not, some of these microbes are able to bypass the immune system's defenses.

[00:00:18] Bill Rawls, MD: And when they do, they invade cells of the body.

[00:00:22] Christa Biegler, RD: I'm your host, Christa Biegler, and I'm going to guess we have at least one thing in common that we're both in pursuit of a less stressed life. On this show, I'll be interviewing experts and sharing clinical pearls from my years of practice to support high performing health savvy women in pursuit of abundance and a less stressed life.

[00:00:52] Christa Biegler, RD: One of my beliefs is that we always have options for getting the results we want. So let's see what's out there together.

[00:01:10] Christa Biegler, RD: Today on The Less Stressed Life, I have Dr. Bill Rawls, who has dedicated his life to medicine for the past 30 years, for more than 30 years. When a health crisis with chronic Lyme disease abruptly changed his quality of life, he came face to face with the limitations of modern medicine and began to explore the vast possibilities of alternative treatments.

[00:01:30] Christa Biegler, RD: Restoring his health through holistic and herbal therapies inspired him to share his revelations on the importance of cellular wellness for defending against microbes and other root causes of illness. Today he works to bring life and vitality to others as he helps them establish their own paths to wellness through modern herbology.

[00:01:46] Christa Biegler, RD: He's got a couple bestselling books, Unlocking Lyme and the Cellular Wellness Solution. In those books, he demonstrates why crucial herbal phytochemicals are key to protecting cellular health and strengthening the body's defenses against illness. He's also the founder of VitalPlan, a holistic health company, where he developed his signature RestoreKit, an advanced herbal protocol that's helped thousands reclaim vibrant health.

[00:02:07] Christa Biegler, RD: Welcome to the show, Dr. Bill. 

[00:02:10] Bill Rawls, MD: Thank you. Pleasure. 

[00:02:11] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. All right. We'd love to start talking about your story. I actually have a unique fascination anytime someone totally reinvents themselves or, and I'm sure there was like just this huge rock bottom for you. I really want to hear about the story, the diagnosis of Lyme, sometimes Lyme, and I think you're in a Lyme hotbed, but what's the story?

[00:02:33] Christa Biegler, RD: Also, who isn't in a Lyme hotbed now, so I want to hear about that and if it was a bit of a challenge to get the proper diagnosis there, and then a little bit about the journey transitioning from maybe you were in, I don't know if you were in typical medical practice into what you're doing now, because it's such a different thing that you're doing now.

[00:02:51] Christa Biegler, RD: I wonder how that went, if there was a bit of an identity crisis along with health crisis. So please tell us a little bit about your story. 

[00:02:58] Bill Rawls, MD: Okay, certainly. Yeah, it's none of us come to a place like this of just challenging the status quo without finding that maybe it doesn't work in some way, and that was my case.

[00:03:11] Bill Rawls, MD: I went to medical school with the idea of helping people live healthy lives, and I came even in medical school to understand that a lot of what we do is just help people live with their illness, not necessarily helping them get well. Because of that, I went into obstetrics and gynecology because it was a healthy specialty dealing with mainly healthy people bringing life into the world.

[00:03:41] Bill Rawls, MD: And the interventions that I did were acute and really had sometimes a transformative power. But there wasn't a lot of chronic illness in that. But oddly enough, even though I promoted good health practices even 30 or some years ago I fell into bad health habits myself and a lot of that was the profession.

[00:04:04] Bill Rawls, MD: The profession of obstetrics and gynecology then was different than now. I was required to take a hospital call for labor and delivery and the emergency room 24 hour call every second to third day, every second to third weekend. And typically when I was on call, I was very alert. If someone was in labor or having a problem in the hospital, I was awake.

[00:04:30] Bill Rawls, MD: So I spent, basically every second to third night, I got very little sleep. And when I was in my thirties, I could get by with it, just work around it, push through it. But as I got into my forties, I began to be able to tolerate it less well, and by the end of my 40s, I crashed, and eventually had to stop doing obstetrics, but even not having that obligation of call I didn't bounce back and my whole body started falling apart.

[00:05:04] Bill Rawls, MD: I started having joint issues and gastrointestinal issues and heart issues, which were really concerning brain issues, everything, my whole body was falling apart and it just seemed to be accelerating instead of getting better. Of course, I changed my health habits pretty remarkably. I did things to try to retrieve sleep, though I had lost the ability to sleep properly at that point.

[00:05:29] Bill Rawls, MD: I now understand why. Kept chasing diagnoses with conventional physicians and really got nowhere. I finally ended up with a diagnosis of fibromyalgia because I didn't quite check the boxes for other things. I had a lot of symptoms of MS, I had a lot of symptoms of other kinds of illnesses, but not quite bad enough to say, yeah, this is your diagnosis.

[00:05:53] Bill Rawls, MD: So you end up in this no man's land or no person's land of diagnosis. chasing everything, chasing your symptoms with drugs which is a really unpleasant place to be and you just never get well. And that just wasn't good enough. I wasn't ready to stop my life at age 50. And so I kept working and kept looking and thinking, what could be causing this?

[00:06:19] Bill Rawls, MD: Looking at reef claws is recognizing that I grew up with ticks and tick bites, thinking, could it be the Lyme bacteria? Initially, the testing was negative. Later, I found out I did have some of these microbes in my body. Now I'm at a point where I realized that's less relevant than you might think and ultimately identified with chronic Lyme disease at that time.

[00:06:45] Bill Rawls, MD: Embraced an herbal protocol. First antibiotics. That failed. Ended up out of desperation turning to herbs. Didn't really have high expectations because you learn a biased opinion of herbs when you're in medical school. But hey, they worked and they didn't have side effects. And over a five year period of ups and downs, I got my life back completely.

[00:07:10] Bill Rawls, MD: And for the past decade or more, I've been robustly healthy and I've been taking herbs that whole time. Now I have good health habits, no doubt about it. That's important, but I take herbs every day and I have been for over 15 years now and at age 67, I'm out doing things that I thought I was going to give up at age 50, pretty vigorous things like kite surfing and things like that.

[00:07:39] Bill Rawls, MD: Strenuous hikes in the mountains. Can do them no problem, and I don't have a lot of the symptoms that most people expect to have at age 67 So that's been a remarkable journey. So the past decade of my life is trying to answer those questions Why? What was going on in my body? And why did the herbs make such a remarkable difference? 

[00:08:04] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah, I want to crack open a couple concepts there. Even though it'd be easy to glaze over, you said, the Lyme diagnosis is a loose term here, didn't matter as much as I thought. And I do think we are entering that phase of functional medicine where What people want is validation because they've been dismissed and invalidated for a while, and I'm sure you had parts of that experience.

[00:08:27] Christa Biegler, RD: I almost wonder what would have happened if you got a different diagnosis, or even a misdiagnosis, which would have been a mis are all diagnoses sometimes even a misdiagnosis? Who knows? I wonder what would have happened if that was the case. Sometimes people have this sense of relief.

[00:08:40] Christa Biegler, RD: There's so many emotions wrapped up in this. They have a sense of relief, and then it may or may not become an identity, and you may live like that. And as you said, chase it with medications. And So some being on the inside, you're like is there any other options? I'm curious if you came to herbs on your own or if someone had introduced you to it or if you had any mentorship or if you were doing research and just said, I'm going to try this because it looks like it's indicated for this. 

[00:09:04] Bill Rawls, MD: Yeah, I had been aware of herbs and used them a little bit through my life and through my practice Just because I was very open minded and I didn't want to discount anything. My patients were doing I thought it was worth looking at but had this impression that Like many people that herbs were just weak versions of drugs And now I know that it's really apples and oranges.

[00:09:27] Bill Rawls, MD: They're not anything alike in most cases for most of the commonly used herbs and that they were working in a way that no drug has a capacity to. As far as finding out about it, it was, my situation was I had to stop doing obstetrics, which severely compromised my ability to generate income. And but I was left I was just stuck and I started a primary care practice that did not have the same call obligations, , it generated enough income for me and my family to survive.

[00:10:07] Bill Rawls, MD: But it didn't allow me the freedom to go and pursue things like going to see functional medicine doctors or blind doctors or that sort of thing. And so if it wasn't something that I could bring to me or figure out on my own, it just wasn't something that was available. That turned out to be a blessing for me because it forced me to figure things out and recognize that the real solutions to these problems are mostly outside of a provider's office.

[00:10:38] Bill Rawls, MD: They are very available and they're very effective in what they do. Herbs were one of those things one of the primary things. And I happen to read a book called Healing Lyme by a guy named Stephen Booner. It was produced about the time I was going through this or published about that time in 2005.

[00:10:58] Bill Rawls, MD: It had just come out. It was this protocol for Lyme disease. I had just come across to thinking, yeah, maybe it really is a Lyme disease. And I read the book, and I did the protocol, and it worked. But it wasn't your average grade supplements and your average herbs coming from a health food store.

[00:11:19] Bill Rawls, MD: These are things that I specially ordered. They were high grade extracts. And Yeah, they really made a difference in my life since then I've really come a long way in understanding herbology and the microbe factor that I think is connected to a lot of things, not just chronic Lyme. 

[00:11:38] Christa Biegler, RD: Before I leave chronic Lyme and move into all microbes, you said your initial, because I think this is helpful for people when they're trying to understand themselves.

[00:11:46] Christa Biegler, RD: And for me, I also think Lyme is a bit secondary, or I've also arrived at the factor of there's a lot of microbes, doesn't matter exactly which one sometimes to an extent, maybe. 

[00:11:57] Bill Rawls, MD: You got it right there. That's it. 

[00:11:59] Christa Biegler, RD: And I'm curious how you decide you stated earlier said, I eventually figured out I did have some of those Lyme microbes.

[00:12:07] Christa Biegler, RD: So very often people do a Western blot test and sometimes it's, that would be considered negative if you didn't catch it right away. Was there a way you. determined that, oh, I did have these particular microbes and then let's talk about all microbes next. 

[00:12:19] Bill Rawls, MD: Yeah, I did another test after I got another tick bite.

[00:12:24] Bill Rawls, MD: So it was, Probably about a year after I had stopped doing obstetrics, and I was functional, and I'd been working out in the yard, and about a week later, I realized that the chigger bite on my rear end wasn't a chigger bite, it was actually a Small tick a seed tick and I got notice and can't see back there Looked around and like it was a bullseye rash and got a test But at that point the symptoms that i'd been having all along I had an uptick in my symptoms not like a whole new thing So it brought into mind, you know This has been Lyme disease all along.

[00:13:06] Bill Rawls, MD: This isn't a new thing. And even then, that event, I would describe differently now than I did then because I know a little bit more about what's going on in the body. 

[00:13:18] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. I think it's all part of the journey and so we can respect where someone, if they really identify with that Lyme symptom List and then you do a protocol and it works.

[00:13:27] Christa Biegler, RD: I think our we like best success, right? And so success allowed you to uncover further, but then you get better and better at something You're like, it seems that there's many microbes So let's talk about that a little bit before we run hit record we want to talk about cellular stress so we can come at this from any which way but maybe I think there's a Conversation about there's microbes living within you and they may lie dormant I think this is a concept you talk about.

[00:13:51] Christa Biegler, RD: So let's talk about what this, what the environment is with microbes in general in the body and how they start to take over, perhaps. And does it matter what kind of microbes there are? 

[00:14:05] Bill Rawls, MD: Yeah this gets into where I am currently with this idea of a dormant tissue microbiome, which is a pretty fascinating concept.

[00:14:16] Bill Rawls, MD: So when you look at the Lyme bacteria, the one we call Borrelia the one that nobody even knew existed before 50 years ago, and now we have, all the co infections and all the things that go with it it's not an aggressive pathogen. It's not, and I think that's the misconception that so many people make is this is aggressive bacteria that makes us ill.

[00:14:41] Bill Rawls, MD: It doesn't. Ebola is an aggressive pathogen. Everybody that's infected with Ebola gets deathly sick and 40 to 60 percent of people die from it. That's an aggressive pathogen. microbe. So when you look at Borrelia, most people who get bitten by a tick carrying Borrelia don't become symptomatic and those who do only become mildly symptomatic.

[00:15:08] Bill Rawls, MD: It is very rare for someone to get severely ill at the time of a tick bite that carries Borrelia. Doesn't happen. So what that tells you is we have built in immunity to these things, and it makes sense because ticks have been biting humans since the beginning of humans, and they've carried Borrelia since that time.

[00:15:28] Bill Rawls, MD: So we have a lot of built in immunity to these things, but the microbes are very stealthy. So when I look at it it's, these things are not aggressive pathogens. They're opportunist, and all they want to do is eat. slide in under the radar. And that's what they do. So whether you get antibiotics or not, whether you have symptoms or not, some of these microbes are able to bypass the immune system's defenses.

[00:15:54] Bill Rawls, MD: And when they do, they invade cells of the body. And they have sophisticated mechanisms of traveling and actually infect white blood cells. And the white blood cell becomes a carrier. It's called a Trojan horse mechanism. And this has been documented for a lot of things. Transcribed Streptococcus, SARS that causes COVID, all of most microbes have the ability to stay alive inside white blood cells and travel and then deposit in brain and tissues throughout the body.

[00:16:26] Bill Rawls, MD: This has been documented for a lot of things. When they get to cells, If the cells are healthy, and they invade a cell, then they can become dormant, and this is a survival mechanism that's used by all microbes, viruses, bacteria, protozoa, all of them have this capability that they can enter your cells, and if it's a hostile environment to microbe growth, They can become dormant.

[00:16:55] Bill Rawls, MD: So being inside a cell protects them from the immune system, but if they get an opportunity they can break down the parts of the cell for nutrients to microbes and in some cases actually use the machinery of the cell to make more microbes. So the cell is pretty much essential either as a food source or a source of building more microbes.

[00:17:18] Bill Rawls, MD: And here we're talking about any cell in the body. Some cells have, some microbes have preference for some cells, but it's pretty much everything. So if you can imagine that, if you get bitten by a tick once, twice, hundreds of times during your lifetime, every little time you seed your tissues with some of these things.

[00:17:39] Bill Rawls, MD: And if you're healthy, if your cells are healthy, you don't get symptoms. And they just stay there, dormant, years. They can be there. But that's tick borne microbes. And we think about a few things carried by ticks that can cause problems, but, quite frankly, there's still a lot we don't know. One tick species has been found to have, to carry 237 different families of bacteria.

[00:18:05] Bill Rawls, MD: That's thousands of bacteria. And we don't know what most of them do. Or their potential to cause illness. But they're probably low grade pathogens like Borrelia, that can become dormant. And then, there's not just that. From the time you emerge and start putting stuff in your mouth when you're a kid, or having intimate contact with other people, or respiratory infections, or getting things in food, and water, and other beverages you drink, that's probably There's a lot of opportunities for microbes to enter your body, bypass your immune system, and invade your cells.

[00:18:42] Bill Rawls, MD: And it's hard to gather that information because we don't necessarily chop healthy people up and look inside their cells, 

[00:18:50] Bill Rawls, MD: but we're getting indirect evidence through things like brain biopsies and autopsies and to looking at blood specimens of healthy people that yes, we actually do. We have a microbiome of the brain.

[00:19:03] Bill Rawls, MD: As long as your tissues are healthy, as long as your cells are healthy, these things stay dormant. They won't give you any problem. They just sit there. It's like a time bomb. And we all have it. Some of them are probably worse than others, but we all have it. As you go through life, cellular stress, things that stress your cells, poor diet, not sleeping for every second to third night for years and years on end, pushing that stress button, being sedentary exposed to toxic substances like mold or all the toxins that we're exposed to in our world today.

[00:19:41] Bill Rawls, MD: These things weaken our cells and the weaker. our cells get, the more opportunity these cell, these microbes have to reactivate. So when you look at that definition of chronic Lyme, it's not an infection. An infection is when that thing first entered the body. It is a reactivation of all these things, but not just Borrelia and not just the co infections.

[00:20:09] Bill Rawls, MD: Potentially everything you've been exposed to, chlamydia, mycoplasms, Epstein Barr virus, herpes viruses, they can all reactivate, and wherever they reactivate, you get symptoms. And that's basically what chronic Lyme is, but it's also what autoimmune illnesses are, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, and then as you ramp up the cellular damage, Multiple sclerosis, which Borrelia has been found to be a key player along with Mycoplasmas and Epstein Barr and Chlamydia, Parkinson's, ALS, all of these illnesses are, you can explain by that same mechanism.

[00:20:52] Christa Biegler, RD: In essence I'm working backwards toward it because I think sometimes much like you, when you saw Stephen Buhner's book about treating Lyme, you were like, this is the book for me, right? Even though the roots start to be the same, right? It's what are the roots to everything? And I have this conversation with clients around mold quite frequently, and there's a particular person I'm thinking of, Who, nothing fell apart for him until everything fell apart.

[00:21:16] Christa Biegler, RD: Until he had major work stresses. And then all of a sudden, all of a sudden, like things were not perfect before and then massive stress and then massive health crisis, which I see all the time. And so that's the question I had a client, a lovely client say to me one time. Haven't we had mold around forever?

[00:21:35] Christa Biegler, RD: And I would say totally. As far as I can tell, our environment is more toxic. We have more stress. Our resilience is just poor. And that kind of allows this to just take off and thrive and create a lot of symptoms. Would you explain that differently? Or would you say that's pretty much it? 

[00:21:50] Bill Rawls, MD: No, that, that's it.

[00:21:52] Bill Rawls, MD: And when we look at mold, I think it's important to recognize that The mold doesn't actually enter our body and enter our cells. You can sometimes grow mold in your sinuses, but what you're exposed to is the mycotoxins produced by the molds. So if you have molds in your environment, the molds are protecting themselves from bacteria.

[00:22:13] Bill Rawls, MD: Bacteria are mold's arch enemy. All living organisms have to have a defense system against bacteria. Yeah. even bacteria have to have a defense system against other bacteria. Molds their big thing is producing things to kill bacteria. What mycotoxins do is they damage cells. Bacteria are very simple, small cells.

[00:22:37] Bill Rawls, MD: The bacteria, the mycotoxins are pretty toxic to bacteria, interestingly. But they float around in the air, they become airborne, we breathe them in, we get them through food, we get them in different places, so we are taking in these cellular toxins. And you're right, Molds are everywhere. It's, I've always had that observation that say I have a patient with chronic Lyme or whatever And they're living in a moldy environment and it's just crippling for them and part of my journey I ended up stuck in a moldy situation But other people don't seem to be bothered at all And the reason is because if your cellular health is good then Even these mycotoxins that damage cells, they don't bother you as much.

[00:23:25] Bill Rawls, MD: But if your cellular health is poor, if it's compromised by not only poor health habits, but at a point, reactivation of dormant microbes, that's when the mycotoxins do more damage. There's a point, I call it the boiling point, and it's like we're all exposed to factors that stress our cells through life, and all symptoms can be rooted to cellular stress.

[00:23:53] Bill Rawls, MD: So we have symptoms that come and go because stress factors come and go through our lifetime, and that stress is it becomes more intense as we go through life because our cells are gradually aging. But, you have this thing of our cells being stressed, and you reach a point where you reach a point where you start having symptoms that don't go away, and that's suggestion that those stresses are ongoing.

[00:24:21] Bill Rawls, MD: But if the stress keeps building, and typically people have this perfect storm of stress that comes together. They're reactivating microbes throughout that time, the microbes are emerging and starting to break down their tissues to generate a food supply to grow more microbes, but the boiling point is the point that it becomes a self perpetuating process that the microbe the cellular stress is being driven by the microbes that have reactivated and breaking down the cells, so it gets to be this vicious cycle.

[00:24:56] Bill Rawls, MD: And once you hit that point, just changing your health habits isn't going to do it. You need something to suppress that microbe frenzy that's destroying cells. 

[00:25:07] Christa Biegler, RD: Let's talk about what's actually happening in the cells. I have some feelings about this. I like to talk about cell membranes a lot with clients.

[00:25:17] Christa Biegler, RD: You said something that's gonna resonate with a lot of people, right? When things don't go away, that stress is ongoing. So we'll talk about this from a few angles. But when we're talking about, I think let's maybe get down to the 101 of cell function and how you're thinking about the health of the cell.

[00:25:32] Christa Biegler, RD: Maybe the anatomy, the physiology of the cell. What maybe starting with what changes happen when cell function is compromised? What actually is happening in the cell? 

[00:25:41] Bill Rawls, MD: Yeah. I think it, it starts with the really basics and it gets down to causes of illness can be rooted to causes of cellular stress.

[00:25:51] Bill Rawls, MD: And Okay. We tend to think very macro, our whole body, and when we're sick, we think of our whole body being sick but if you take it down to that microscopic level, our body is composed completely of cells. Absolutely everything that happens in the body, whether it's your heart beating, brain impulses firing, thyroid hormone being produced, it's all done by cells.

[00:26:17] Bill Rawls, MD: Absolutely everything. So you are a function of your cells. And if your cells aren't working right, you're not going to work right. So you can think of your cells as a little microscopic machine. Every cell is an independently functioning unit. Now, all the cells in the body rely on all the other cells, but they all are functionally independent.

[00:26:40] Bill Rawls, MD: They all basically have the same structure. They've got a cell membrane. That's what defines a cell as being a cell, is that cell membrane. They have a genetic program, which is basically that, that software that runs the cell. All except red blood cells don't have genes, but all of our other cells have that genetic program that's inside of our chromosomes.

[00:27:04] Bill Rawls, MD: They all have parts to do a function, to do work. So they have proteins and so they're taking information from our genes and defining a job. Heart cells have the job of contracting muscle and making our heart pump. Brain cells have the job of firing impulses. So the basic machinery, though all cells are similar, has been modified to do a particular job.

[00:27:35] Bill Rawls, MD: But when you look at our cells, They all have the same basic requirements and getting this is really super important. These are the things that define cellular stress. So every cell in the body has to have the right nutrients. That's really important. It's different for different cells.

[00:27:55] Bill Rawls, MD: It's like thyroid cells need iodine, heart cells run off of fat, brain cells use more carbohydrate. So it's different, but if you're eating a whole food diet, you're giving that full spectrum that all your cells are going to need. So your cells need the right nutrients. Your cells need a clean environment.

[00:28:13] Bill Rawls, MD: little microscopic machines. If you throw toxic substances in there, you're going to damage cell membranes and disrupt the machinery of the cell. Basically a lot of our organic petroleum toxins are absorbed by our cells and they basically just inhibit functions. It's like throwing the sand into the machinery of the cell.

[00:28:35] Bill Rawls, MD: It works, but it has to work harder, and it burns a lot more energy. So clean environment, that's essential. Cells need downtime. Heart cells rest in between beats, but most of our cells, they work all day. they need some rest and they need eight hours of good sleep at night to recover and regenerate. So if you're shortening your sleep to four to six hours a night, you're starting your next day with cells that haven't recovered from the day before.

[00:29:05] Bill Rawls, MD: So cells need recovery time. That's one of the most remarkable things about our cells is the ability to repair and regenerate after they've been stressed. And what that is, that defines healing. Healing is the ability of ourselves to repair and regenerate after stress. 

[00:29:22] Christa Biegler, RD: Which takes nutrients, essentially, right?

[00:29:25] Christa Biegler, RD: In a clean environment. 

[00:29:26] Bill Rawls, MD: Yep. Yep. these things interconnected. Cells need good blood flow. They need good blood flow to deliver nutrients, oxygen, but also flush away metabolic and built up toxic waste. We get that from being physically active. So humans through time have done moderate physical activity through the day.

[00:29:50] Bill Rawls, MD: Most of us today, we sit in front of a computer. We're not getting that anymore. We get little intervals of it at the gym, but we don't get that consistent activity. It's really essential to flush away those toxins. We talk about detoxification and we take all these products and we dump them into our GI tract.

[00:30:10] Bill Rawls, MD: It's not where the toxins are. They're in our cells. And our cells can't get them because there's all this congestion that's built up around the cell. They need to be flushed. The solution to pollution is dilution. They need that good flush throughout the day. And being active throughout the day builds up chemicals that help us sleep better at night.

[00:30:32] Bill Rawls, MD: Physical activity. The other side of that is, It's too much physical stress, trauma, other physical factors, they're directly damaging to cells and that's obvious. And that fifth factor is microbes. This, not only microbes that we get infected with how microbes, how pathogens do harm is damaging our cells.

[00:30:54] Bill Rawls, MD: And then there's the presence of this thing. tissue microbiome of more dormant microbes that reactivate that do direct cellular damage. So when you look at that, every single chronic illness known can be traced to those five factors. Every single aspect of any chronic illness, whether it's hormone imbalances or anything else can be traced to those five factors. 

[00:31:22] Christa Biegler, RD: Clean environment, nutrients, good blood flow which is by physical activity and microbes. Did I get them all? 

[00:31:29] Bill Rawls, MD: Good nourishment, clean environment, sleep, got to get that too. 

[00:31:35] Christa Biegler, RD: So people are going to wonder about clearing the microbes, something, a behavior, perspective people have. It's interesting when you work with humans, there's recurring themes that come up.

[00:31:44] Christa Biegler, RD: They would like you to predict the future. So you, they never have pain again. And also they would like to move through this experience and never have it again. And so in that way, people are going to say, Could I just clear the mic is the goal to clear the microbes forever? And, or is it to prevent reactivation of the microbes?

[00:32:02] Christa Biegler, RD: Cause I feel that reactivation is going to happen under stress of the cells. Anyone who's ever had a virus, I feel like this is like virology 101. It's Mr. Opportunistic. It's it never really expresses unless you have stress. And your sleep sucks and all the things that the trifecta or the perfect storm just happens.

[00:32:20] Christa Biegler, RD: So is it clearing the microbes or preventing the reactivation? For example, if someone has viruses latent, can they clear that? Or are they just charged with resilience of stress and preventing reactivation? 

[00:32:32] Bill Rawls, MD: It's all about reducing cellular stress and restoring cellular integrity. So part of that early on is suppressing the microbes, but you have to do that carefully.

[00:32:43] Bill Rawls, MD: And the general tendency is we're going to blast them away and get rid of them. That's the main strategy of chronic Lyme disease and all the Lyme doctors and everybody else is we're going to blast those microbes. But what you end up doing is blasting your cells too. And most importantly, blast your normal flora and your gut and your skin and sell you set yourself up.

[00:33:06] Bill Rawls, MD: So everybody talks about immune system functions, but we actually have four levels of microbe defense. All right. So your first level is barriers. We have skin, the lining of the gut, the lining of our sinuses and nasal passageways, and all those linings are designed to keep foreign microbes and foreign substances out of our tissues.

[00:33:28] Bill Rawls, MD: Of course, they're leaky. So you have a backup plan. Things are constantly trickling across those barriers. So we have our immune system. That's our acute system for taking care of those acute threats, acute infections, acute, things coming across from our GI tract, foreign substances. So immune system is really dealing more with acute threats.

[00:33:53] Bill Rawls, MD: But your fourth, your third level is your cells. Your cells, using a process that we call autophagy that you probably talked about before in your show, so autophagy is actually a mechanism by which cells can destroy or expel cells. invasive microbes. So healthy cells can protect themselves, but these sneaky microbes can actually stay in the cell and become dormant.

[00:34:21] Bill Rawls, MD: The fourth level of defense is your normal flora. So normal flora in your gut and on your skin are actually secreting substances to suppress pathogens. And the problem with the antibiotics, the things that we blast microbes with, is they're really great for fast growing bacteria. but that's it. So if you've got a pneumococcal pneumonia infection and those bacteria are attacking the cells in your lungs and they're turning over every 20 minutes, your antibiotics are going to be very effective for them and are going to tone down that infection enough for your immune system to take care of it within days.

[00:35:04] Bill Rawls, MD: Borrelia turns over every 12 to 24 hours. Even slower. If it's inside cells, especially if it's dormant, it doesn't turn over all. So when you use antibiotics, you've got a time window that's 10 days. It all it takes is 10 days to disrupt the normal floor in your gut, but also start creating antibiotic resistant bacteria.

[00:35:33] Bill Rawls, MD: So the pathogens in the gut Be, start becoming resistant to the antibiotics before your normal flora, so they start emerging as dominant. That's it, 10 days, and you start running out of time with a conventional antibiotic and start causing other issues in the body. Also, antibiotics are cellular toxins, and so when you look at this, blasting away with antibiotics, typically this takes, this problem takes a long time to solve because microbes are continually reactivating, and you've got these dormant microbes, but they're growing pretty slowly, so with antibiotics you're hitting your normal flora really hard.

[00:36:17] Bill Rawls, MD: It's commonly used in chronic Lyme, but putting people on antibiotics for months after months really just rips their cells and their normal flora apart. You may be suppressing microbes, you may get better for a while, but it's coming back. You can count on it. So what we're doing with the herbs is something different.

[00:36:40] Bill Rawls, MD: And I think that's really important to explore. 

[00:36:43] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah, let's talk about antibiotics versus herbs. This is a conversation I have with clients quite a bit. And I also want to talk about a conversation next after herbs is the sum of parts or individual herbs as well. But first, antibiotics versus herbs. 

[00:36:56] Bill Rawls, MD: Okay yeah, 

[00:36:57] Christa Biegler, RD: If you're urinating a lot when you're drinking water, maybe you're not actually hydrating that much. Or, in other words, getting the fluid and nutrients into the cell. Electrolytes are minerals that help fluid and nutrients get into the cell. I recommend all of my clients start by drinking electrolytes when we begin our work together, so to improve energy.

[00:37:18] Christa Biegler, RD: And then we get even more strategic with our electrolyte recommendations as test results come in. Now, generally electrolytes are potassium, sodium, and chloride. One of my favorite electrolyte products is pickleball cocktail from jigsaw health, because it's one of the only products you can get with an adequate dose of potassium to meet my recommendations, which is critical for blood sugar, which everyone should care about hormone health.

[00:37:40] Christa Biegler, RD: And digestion, huge thing for relapsing digestive issues. Jigsaw health is also maker of the famous adrenal cocktail made popular by the pro metabolic corner of the internet and root cause protocol, as well as a multi mineral electrolyte for recovery called electrolyte supreme. You can get a discount on all of jigsaw's amazing products, including pickleball, electrolyte, supreme, and adrenal cocktail at jigsawhealth.

[00:38:04] Christa Biegler, RD: com with the code less stressed 10. That's three S's less stressed. Ten.

[00:38:12] Bill Rawls, MD: when you look at an antibiotic, but I don't think a lot of people realize is they all actually originally came from nature.

[00:38:19] Bill Rawls, MD: All the other antibiotics either come from a fungal source, penicillin was the first or a bacteria or a plant. All of them do. But, you have to understand that we're borrowing from that, that organism's defense system. But we're not borrowing the whole defense system. We're pulling out one chemical out of a complex defense system.

[00:38:44] Bill Rawls, MD: And we're potentiating that to be a real killer. And it does a great job of killing fast growing bacteria. But there's no intelligence about it. It's just this random killer that takes out our normal flora and everything else. So that becomes a problem when you start using it long term. You just don't have that system of benefit that you would like.

[00:39:11] Bill Rawls, MD: So when you take an herb, first of all plants have antimicrobial properties. They have to. Every living organism on earth has to have a defense system against viruses, bacteria infectious yeast. Every organism, every plant, every animal has to have this. But a plant's system is different from ours.

[00:39:35] Bill Rawls, MD: It's chemical. We have a cellular immune system. Plants basically have a chemical immune system. So all plants are producing this robust spectrum of chemicals to suppress a wide range of bacteria, viruses, protozoa, yeast, but at the same time you have chemicals in that mix that are cell protectants.

[00:39:56] Bill Rawls, MD: They're protecting cells from free radicals, toxic substances, radiation, all of these other things. So it's a complex system and one of the most interesting things about that system that I found early on was they don't kill normal flora. They're selected for pathogens. So I had used antibiotics in my journey, and every single time I used them within 10 days, I would just rip my gut apart, whether I took probiotics or anything else, and finally pretty quickly found that even trying different antibiotics that wasn't going to be a solution.

[00:40:31] Bill Rawls, MD: When I started taking herbs, I was taking these potent herbs that had proven antimicrobial properties and I thought, yeah, I'm going to have the same thing within 10 days. didn't happen. My gut started getting better. It actually started healing. And I came to appreciate that it wasn't killing the normal flora.

[00:40:52] Bill Rawls, MD: It was actually supporting the normal flora. And I've actually, when I wrote my most recent book, I found a study that somebody had actually proven that in a study, they define that. So it makes sense though, the plant Needs to take care of friendly bacteria doesn't want to kill them. It wants to select out pathogens So you've got this complex system with intelligence when you take that whole herb You're actually taking the plant's system and it's killing these so it's suppressing and Because you're not disrupting normal flora because you're not damaging cells You can use these things long term.

[00:41:33] Bill Rawls, MD: So in the very beginning, one of the mistakes I made, it was like I was taking the herbs, that was my therapy, and I thought I've been on these herbs for several months, I'm about 70 or 80 percent better, I need to stop them now. So I would stop the herbs and some stress would come along and I'd be right flat back on my face again.

[00:41:53] Bill Rawls, MD: So I'd restart the herbs, I'd get better, do the same thing, And finally, I just said, I feel a lot better on these herbs. I'm going to just continue taking them. And not only that, I'm going to add other herbs on and start rotating herbs, and I'm just going to keep hitting these things with herbs.

[00:42:13] Bill Rawls, MD: That's when I really started getting better. That's when I recovered my health completely. And combining different herbs gives you a broader spectrum of benefits. So if you think about it, you know the plan is going to be making defenses against the microbes and other stress factors that are within its natural environment.

[00:42:36] Bill Rawls, MD: When you take herbs from different places that solve that problem a little bit differently, you expand that. that spectrum of protection, but you don't expand the necessarily the toxicity of the herbs. So I just continued really high doses of herbs for a five year period. Once I got my health back 100%, I very cautiously, almost reluctantly, gradually backed off over time.

[00:43:07] Bill Rawls, MD: But I'm still taking herbs, 15 years later and I think that's really key. 

[00:43:14] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah, it's fun. This is a fun conversation because the way I had learned it was that herbs and antibiotics both kill good and bad bacteria, but for some reason, because we're borrowing the immune system of the plant, the bad bugs did not grow back.

[00:43:28] Christa Biegler, RD: And you're describing a more optimal situation. which is that they only selectively kill the bad. Regardless, I do not see that people have, those negative, as when taking antibiotics, there's a lot of weed overgrowth that comes after the fact, right? We very widely accept C diff as a side effect of taking antibiotics.

[00:43:49] Christa Biegler, RD: And I do not see that happening. And I see that Eradicated with herbs, for sure. And I agree that rotating herbs is the ticket. And for some people, it's absolutely key. What would you say about the microbes creating resistance to the herbs, much like they do antibiotics? Because that's been part of my theory, is that may happen.

[00:44:09] Christa Biegler, RD: And I just know that rotating the herbs works better. Because, as you get a different spectrum and certain things work better on certain things. 

[00:44:18] Bill Rawls, MD: Actual antibiotic or herbal resistance hasn't been documented, the herbs the same way as antibiotics. And it makes sense because you have so many different chemicals.

[00:44:31] Bill Rawls, MD: But over time I found that if I had been taking a single herb for a long time like months or even years, I would plateau, in my symptoms. I wasn't getting any better, and I found that if I brought a new arabin, I'd get a boost, and I'd use that for six months to a year. So I started rotating things and found that it was better.

[00:44:52] Bill Rawls, MD: I can't tell you whether the bacteria in our system are becoming resistant. Or our body just gets better at breaking down those chemicals faster, so they don't have quite the same punch. But you don't have the same problem of a pathogen becoming dominant in the body with herbs, like you can with an antibiotic.

[00:45:16] Bill Rawls, MD: So you don't see an emergence of things like C. diff. with herbs where you very characteristically see that with antibiotics. So I think it's quite different. And I just want to plug that I think there's a place for every antibiotic made, but I think we should be using them much more discriminately, and we should be using them for acute, fast growing infections, not chronic illness.

[00:45:45] Bill Rawls, MD: I just don't think they have a place, and we've been doing that a lot, and bacterial resistance is a real problem or antibiotic resistance is a real problem worldwide, and, Herbs may be our savior in that respect, but the drug companies haven't been making new antibiotics since the 1980s, and it's because it cost a lot of money to produce a new drug, billions of dollars.

[00:46:10] Bill Rawls, MD: In our money today. And with regulations, they it's just impractical because you're not using antibiotics chronically. They're short term use. . So we don't have any new antibiotics and there are none that are slated to be coming and that should scare us on of people. Yeah. 

[00:46:31] Christa Biegler, RD: a good time to understand how to use other modalities.

[00:46:35] Christa Biegler, RD: So about individual versus combined herbs. I find that combining things that address a lot of things works the best. And I will just share that sometimes it's interesting. Sometimes with kids, we've introduced individual herbs a lot around emotions and comfort and all types of reasons that come with working with a parent and a child.

[00:46:55] Christa Biegler, RD: But what's interesting is I routinely see that grapefruit seed extract by itself is quite irritating. Now, I have learned from someone who has created some like formulas for mycotoxins, I think they found a very similar thing, like using this one herb did not work, but using a combination worked much better.

[00:47:14] Christa Biegler, RD: I don't know if you have any other final thoughts on that topic. 

[00:47:17] Bill Rawls, MD: Yeah, this is something that's been noted in herbology since almost the beginning of herbology is that formulas, combinations of herbs, anywhere from four or five herbs to a dozen herbs has a stronger effect, a more beneficial effect.

[00:47:33] Bill Rawls, MD: And, just building out formulas with herbs that have complementary properties work better. That's really important. 

[00:47:42] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. We have so much more we could talk about, but before we start to conclude for today, I want to talk about this concept of, cause this is becoming very popular.

[00:47:51] Christa Biegler, RD: This is the needed conversation in the more integrative, functional, natural health holistic space when herbs and blasting doesn't work. And another way to talk about this might lend itself to like people with hypersensitivity. Now hypersensitive, you're just reacting to a lot of things.

[00:48:05] Christa Biegler, RD: has become something that is an epidemic, honestly, post COVID, right? Something some virus came in, compromised that cell function even more. And so I find that there is just a very malnourished situation with the cells and They cannot handle something like that. That is my approach.

[00:48:23] Christa Biegler, RD: That things need to be supported. It's almost is this person semi nourished or undernourished? That kind of tells you a little bit where to start. What do you think about when herb blasting is not the right first step or choice or whatnot? Or that it doesn't work? 

[00:48:37] Bill Rawls, MD: Whenever I start someone on an herbal regimen, we always start them slow and ease them into it because it can be a shock in the system, either precipitating her time of reactions or precipitating reactions to the herbs.

[00:48:51] Bill Rawls, MD: And I think what you have to understand is that if you have a situation, And we can call it chronic Lyme, but we can call it fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, or really autoimmune, any kind of chronic illness. I think the same mechanism is at play, that the microbes have the upper hand. You have chronic reactivation in microbes, they're breaking down cells throughout the body to generate a food supply, so it's like a frenzy of microbe destruction to our cells.

[00:49:19] Bill Rawls, MD: But the microbes and us have been going at this for literally millions of years and so the microbes and our immune system, it's always this tit for tat thing of, the microbe wins and the immune system figures that mechanism out and that's been going on for a very long time.

[00:49:40] Bill Rawls, MD: So the microbes they do everything that they can to persist. And one of the mechanisms is that Trojan horse mechanism that I mentioned early on of microbes invading white blood cells and using the white blood cells as a vehicle of transport. But they also manipulate the immune system by affecting the cytokines or chemical messengers of that immune system.

[00:50:08] Bill Rawls, MD: And, this is really an interesting phenomenon that as you get into it, you realize this is a big part of going on, of what's going on in a lot of people, and it can be to the degree of mass cell activation syndrome that the microbes are manipulating the immune system in their favor.

[00:50:28] Bill Rawls, MD: I like to think of it this way. Suppose you had a group of criminals in a city, and this group of criminals specialized in hijacking police cars. And the reason that they hijack police cars is to get to the radio so they could call central dispatch and have all the police sent to the other side of town to where from where the crime is going on.

[00:50:50] Bill Rawls, MD: It's the same thing. So what the microbes, they manipulate the immune system because that such that it becomes hypersensitive to foreign substances to the point of reacting to normal substances that shouldn't cause us a problem. And there, and that shift takes the emphasis, the focus of the immune system off of killing microbes and killing cells that are infected in microbes toward being hypersensitive to chemical substances, which kind of works against our favor.

[00:51:25] Bill Rawls, MD: So when people are in that state, everybody is a little bit, but they can be to an extreme degree, then they do become sensitive to more things. And that effect of blasting I use more in relation to what we're doing with antibiotics and what so many people are doing to try to quit because they want to get well quick.

[00:51:49] Bill Rawls, MD: I don't see the herbs as blasting. 

[00:51:52] Christa Biegler, RD: And 

[00:51:52] Bill Rawls, MD: anytime we use herbs, we gradually. increase the herbs as people tolerate them because we don't know what their level of of disruption of that 

[00:52:04] Bill Rawls, MD: immune system is. But there are people with, that are really super sensitive to chemical substances. I have a list of herbs that are generally well tolerated, and what I found is that we usually do get back to them.

[00:52:17] Bill Rawls, MD: To doing just a few herbs at a time or even one at a time. And we start with something like Japanese knotweed herbs that have a lot of quercetin that has some antihistamine properties. And we start really slowly and get a foot in the door. And once you get there and once you can start controlling that micro reactivation, and this is accelerated when people have sympathetic dominance, their whole system is in flame.

[00:52:45] Bill Rawls, MD: They're in that. Fight or flight mode that just drives it even harder. So calming them down, reducing that sympathetic dominance and getting them back in a normal vagal tone of parasympathetic and getting them on a better diet. Doing things to get them, so that they can sleep a little bit better.

[00:53:06] Bill Rawls, MD: And so they can start becoming a little more active and ease into the herbs more and more during that process. And that's inadvertently what I did. I started slow. I was a little cautious at first and gradually increased to the point that I could tolerate a lot of different herbs.

[00:53:23] Bill Rawls, MD: But the process took several months to get there. And that's it people don't have the patience. It's like I want to blast them. I want to get rid of them I want to walk out and be normal in a month and it just doesn't happen again Part of mine was a learning curve, but it took me five years to completely get my health back now we can help compromised 

[00:53:44] Christa Biegler, RD: And the more compromised, the longer it would take, I would say, too, right? 

[00:53:47] Bill Rawls, MD: Correct. So the worse the cellular health, the longer the recovery is going to take. Now, though, we can shorten it to six months or a couple of years just because I was still learning at that time. But even it's not something it's going to take time. Healing takes time. Suppression of these microbes takes time.

[00:54:05] Bill Rawls, MD: But it's just so remarkably important to do it that way and not ignore those important factors. 

[00:54:11] Christa Biegler, RD: I think what would be a good thing, everyone's always wondering about application, and I think what might be good is someone's listening to this episode and they're really resonating and they're saying, Wow, maybe I've been like looking, I haven't been focusing at the root of which cells are the root of the root.

[00:54:29] Christa Biegler, RD: And I think they might say how can I know how? if or how much, how compromised my cells are so I know what to do. 

[00:54:38] Bill Rawls, MD: Yeah, your body's always talking to you. It's all of our physicians, functional doctors, conventional doctors, they cover up for poor Interview skills with labs because everybody like I want a number of what is going wrong with me and quite frankly None of our labs are all that good so your body's always talking to you Alright.

[00:55:05] Bill Rawls, MD: Cellular stress. Symptoms have two components that are tied to cellular stress. So when you injure cells, like if you twist your ankle and you damage cells and tissues in your ankle, two things happen. One is that cells automatically release substances that activate nerves that brain, that tell the brain something's wrong.

[00:55:30] Bill Rawls, MD: We feel discomfort or pain. But the second thing that happens is you lose that function. You can't walk on your ankle because the cells and tissues are damaged. And you can't walk on it again until you start repairing it. And that takes taking the stress off. So once you take the stress off, this, the cells can heal the damage.

[00:55:52] Bill Rawls, MD: Healing is the ability of cells to repair tissues and repair cellular damage. That's what healing is really important. It's really important to recognize that those things you can feel those things, you're getting so much information all the time. So if you have heart symptoms you've stressed your cells in your heart, and if that symptom is ongoing, that stress is ongoing.

[00:56:18] Bill Rawls, MD: You should be asking, what are the stresses? If you have fatigue, that means that all of the cells in your body are de energized. You've got a reactivation syndrome that's affecting everything, and that's going to cause hormone imbalances and everything else. So any symptom, Is your body talking to you?

[00:56:38] Bill Rawls, MD: It's telling you that there's a problem. And if you strained your ankle and you don't put a brace on it and you don't get a crutch and you keep walking on it's going to get worse and worse because the stress is ongoing. That's what chronic illness is and at some point it becomes a self perpetuating process because of reactivation of microbes in your tissues is driving that tissue destruction.

[00:57:06] Bill Rawls, MD: So listen to your body. Your body is more valuable than any lab test that you can get. And that's even true of microbe testing. I have People all the time ask me about which microbe test should I get a Lyme test, all of this sort of thing. And I always use the example of what about that person who has all the symptoms of chronic Lyme disease?

[00:57:33] Bill Rawls, MD: But every time they get a test, it's negative for Borrelia. Do they not have Borrelia in our system? All the testing is designed for acute microbes infections. Everybody that's using the testing is testing for chronic symptoms. There's dormancy with reactivation. The testing just doesn't work very well.

[00:57:55] Bill Rawls, MD: So it is very hard to really define, but the thing is you can have all the symptoms of chronic Lyme and not have Borrelia because there's so many other microbes that can cause this, and they're all low grade pathogens. It's, so we have these things present in our system, and so it's not as much.

[00:58:16] Bill Rawls, MD: I think testing can be valuable, but for me as a provider, when I use testing, it's to help confirm things that I already know or highly suspect. And interestingly, I did the functional medicine thing in my practice for years, and I got all the testing and all of this sort of thing and it was costing my patients money.

[00:58:36] Bill Rawls, MD: And I found that the more I sat down and actually talked to the person and understood why they were ill, looked at these causative factors, looked at where their symptoms were coming from, and paired this, the stress to the symptom, understood what was going on, I didn't need to do a lot of testing.

[00:58:56] Bill Rawls, MD: Because, Most of the testing, this is true in conventional medicine especially but functional medicine too, the testing is testing for dysfunction in the body. And the purpose of the testing is to define the medical therapy to block that dysfunction. So what our drugs are doing, how drugs are different than herbs is the drugs are blocking dysfunction.

[00:59:25] Bill Rawls, MD: But they're not doing anything to resolve the cellular stress that's causing the dysfunction. So when you look at dysfunctional processes in the body, there are thousands of different processes that can become dysfunctional. And it can get really complicated and therefore there are thousands of different labs.

[00:59:46] Bill Rawls, MD: But every single one of those processes is done by cells. So instead of checking for the dysfunction, understand the root causes, that cellular stress, those five factors. So if you can get to those five root causes, instead of chasing that dysfunction and really start focusing on that, your patients are going to get better.

[01:00:11] Bill Rawls, MD: People are going to get better. And most of the time, they're not going to have to do a lot of labs to get there. 

[01:00:19] Christa Biegler, RD: I want to zoom way out for one of these last questions. And this is just a kind of a passion area for me. And everything you just said was around awareness. And I agree with you a hundred percent.

[01:00:29] Christa Biegler, RD: I love symptoms over tests. I think tests we use sometimes for, because people like to be validated a little bit sometimes, but regardless I love symptoms over testing all the time. However, something that is a statement that comes in the door a lot that I care a lot about because these are the people blocking their own to get better is the person who says, I don't really feel stressed, but I have these recurrent symptoms and my test results keep pointing me that way.

[01:00:57] Christa Biegler, RD: So the topic is really unrealized stress. What would you say to the person who is almost unconscious of their stress? Cause you could have said this is just my life. I just have to stay up every third day and you probably did for many years. 

[01:01:12] Bill Rawls, MD: I think it's important to recognize the different kinds of stress.

[01:01:15] Bill Rawls, MD: So people, when they say I'm not stressed, they typically what they mean is I'm not anxious. But I define when you look at those five factors, as far as what our cells need, you can flip that on its head to define the five different kinds of stress that can cause us illness. So it's nutritional stress, not getting the right nutrients for ourselves.

[01:01:41] Bill Rawls, MD: It's toxic stress, living in a toxic environment. And, we're all exposed to low grade toxic substances in our world today and our air and our food and everywhere else, but also toxic radiation. So toxic environment. Mental stress. That's the one that causes us to have anxiety but also affects our sleep.

[01:02:03] Bill Rawls, MD: But part of the problem is people don't allow enough time for sleep. Average in America, they're sleeping six and a half hours. It's just not enough. We're starting our days with deficits. where cells haven't recovered. Physical stress, that includes being sedentary, but also physical stress factors like excessive cold.

[01:02:23] Bill Rawls, MD: Right now, excessive heat is a physical factor that damages cells. And also just trauma. And the last is the microbial stress, which can be acute, like with a new infection, but it also can be chronic. chronic with this reactivation of things that we've been collecting all through our lifetimes. So people can have stress but not necessarily feel anxious.

[01:02:49] Bill Rawls, MD: If you have a symptom, period. If you have a symptom, the source of that symptom is cellular stress. And every symptom, the cellular stress has a cause. always. There's always a cause. So if you start getting to those root causes and start looking in those five factors of cellular stress with that, if somebody is really, if they've got symptoms throughout their body and are identifying with a chronic illness, in other words they're, seeing a physician regularly because they're in bad shape.

[01:03:23] Bill Rawls, MD: Then at that point, they've crossed the boiling point. They have micro reactivation that it becomes that self perpetuating process. 

[01:03:33] Christa Biegler, RD: There are so many questions I did not get to. So maybe a part two, another day, dr. Rawls, where can people find you online? 

[01:03:41] Bill Rawls, MD: Probably the biggest place is vital plan. com.

[01:03:44] Bill Rawls, MD: I don't have a practice any longer. I still, when I can have time do online consults, more like high level health coaching. But mainly what I'm doing is coaching. Creating courses, designing, just education. This basic education is so remarkably important. It's something that everybody ought to know.

[01:04:05] Bill Rawls, MD: One of my goals at this point in my life is just changing the conversation about chronic illness because 60 percent of the American population is defined as being chronically ill. We can do better. And it's really up to individuals to start paying better attention. So vitalplan. com is a great place to find me.

[01:04:24] Bill Rawls, MD: You can find the books there. You can find them on Amazon. I have a secondary website called RawlsMD that's just also information primarily for people with chronic Lyme disease. And that's an easy place to find me. I'm out there. I'm on social media. 

[01:04:42] Christa Biegler, RD: Thank you so much for coming on today.

[01:04:45] Bill Rawls, MD: Pleasure.