What’s Living Inside You Could Be Why You’re Sick | Dr. Bill Rawls

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Dr. Josh Axe Show Episode: What’s Living Inside You Could Be Why You’re Sick | Dr. Bill Rawls (August 28, 2025)

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Overview

In this insightful episode, Dr. Josh Axe is joined by Dr. Bill Rawls—medical doctor, herbalist, and author of The Cellular Wellness Solution—to discuss the epidemic of chronic hidden infections, such as Lyme disease, viruses (Epstein-Barr, CMV), parasites, and mold. Together, they examine why so many people experience unexplained chronic symptoms and break down Dr. Rawls’ unique, cell-focused philosophy for true, lasting healing. They cover root-cause medicine, the role of stealth microbes, optimizing cell health, and the power of herbs, with actionable strategies for listeners suffering from fatigue, brain fog, autoimmunity, and more.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Real Cause of Chronic Illness

• Dr. Rawls recounts his personal health battle, highlighting that his decline was not triggered by a single tick bite, but by decades of sleep deprivation and chronic stress. Conventional medicine was unable to find or fix the underlying cause.
• Chronic symptoms typically progress gradually, not all at once.
  • "It's a slow progression. Over a course of a year, somebody realizes, ‘Wow, I feel like I'm aging too quickly. My body's falling apart.’" — Dr. Axe [00:41, 27:42]
• Most with "chronic Lyme" didn’t recall a tick bite or sudden illness onset. [00:27, 27:07]
  • "About 90 to 95% of people who identified with chronic Lyme disease did not remember becoming ill around the time of a tick bite." — Dr. Rawls [00:27, 27:08]
• Conventional diagnosis and symptom treatment fall short; the focus must shift to root causes and cellular health.

2. Why Focusing on Cells is the Solution

• Every chronic illness is rooted in cellular dysfunction and stress.
  • Dr. Rawls conceptualizes the body as an ecosystem of cells that require the right nutrients, clean environments, downtime (rest), and protection from microbes.
  • Key stressors that damage cellular function: Poor diet, toxins, chronic stress, lack of movement, and microbial load.
• Autophagy (cellular recycling) is central, both to clean up cellular debris and defend against microbes. Healthy cells can digest invading pathogens via autophagy. [18:30]
  • "That process of autophagy...is also a defense mechanism. If our cells are healthy, they can actually digest the microbes." — Dr. Rawls [18:30]
• Chronic infection is not a battle to "eradicate" a single invader but about restoring the body's ability to contain and coexist with its inner microbiome.

3. The Role of Dormant and Stealth Microbes

• Ticks and other vectors transmit more than Borrelia (Lyme); Bartonella, Babesia, mycoplasma, chlamydia, and more can persist stealthily in the body.
  • Many microbes go intracellular and dormant, residing inside tissues (nerves, heart, brain) for decades without causing acute illness.
• Virulence depends as much on the host as the pathogen. Most chronic microbes are “stealth” with low virulence, taking advantage only when the host is weakened (through stressors or cellular dysfunction). [27:11]
• Diagnosis labels like MS, fibromyalgia, or chronic fatigue often reflect this multifaceted microbial (and environmental) burden rather than the true cause.
  • "I don't even think in terms of diagnosis anymore. The purpose of a diagnosis in conventional medicine is defining medical therapy. The therapies don't get to the root causes." — Dr. Rawls [36:28]

4. The Five Steps to Healing Chronic Infection at the Cellular Level

1. Reduce Stress & Calibrate the Nervous System
   • Chronic illness creates sympathetic overactivity ("fight or flight") blocking healing. Calming practices (brain retraining, yoga, meditation, calming herbs like ashwagandha) are foundational. [42:02–44:59]
     • “We spend a couple of months calming that down through brain retraining exercises, yoga, qigong, some herbs, calming herbs. Ashwagandha.” — Dr. Rawls [43:58]
   • Most doctors skip this critical first step!
2. Clean Up the Detox System
   • Optimize sleep, reduce toxin burden (diet, air, water), and support liver/kidney function.
   • Use mild movement, sauna, and supportive herbs (milk thistle, dandelion, andrographis) to protect and restore detox pathways.
     • “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...that's where something like sauna can be really important.” — Dr. Rawls [47:31]
3. Restore Gut Health
   • Chronic stress and inflammation slow gut motility and disrupt the microbiome (leaky gut, food sensitivities, SIBO). Rebalance the nervous system first, then use gentle herbs and dietary changes.
4. Dietary Interventions (“Back to Basics”)
   • Emphasize whole, unprocessed foods; lots of vegetables; lean protein and healthy fats; minimize refined carbohydrates and grains.
     • “Eat whole foods as much as you can...I try to eat more vegetables than anything else. Vegetable fiber, not grain fiber, is really, really important.” — Dr. Rawls [58:22]
   • Customization is key—no universal “best” diet.
   • Keep carbohydrate intake moderate—not ketogenic for most; use time-restricted eating but avoid aggressive fasting in very sick patients.
     • "I try to keep my carbohydrate count below 150 grams, which isn’t quite ketogenic... And the last thing...is just trying to narrow my eating window."[60:05, 61:15]
5. Target the Microbes Intelligently (with Herbs)
   • Use broad-spectrum herbal antimicrobials which support cellular health, regulate the immune system, and do not disrupt the healthy microbiome—unlike antibiotics. [67:57]
     • Herbs: Japanese knotweed (trans-resveratrol), cat’s claw, Chinese skullcap, andrographis, medicinal mushrooms (reishi, cordyceps).
       • "If you were on a desert island, what herb would you take with you? My answer is always Chinese skullcap." — Dr. Rawls [77:38]
     • Herbs provide multi-faceted, “intelligent” antimicrobial action and do not create resistance.
       • "Herbs...don’t disrupt normal flora. They are selective for pathogens but don’t disrupt normal flora. So...my gut started getting better." — Dr. Rawls [74:02]
   • Antibiotics still have a role in acute infections but are less effective against slow-growing, dormant microbes and can create resistance.

5. Broad Connections: Microbes, Cancer, and Senescence

• Chronic co-infections (not just one microbe) are now recognized as a major risk factor for cancer and persistent, unexplained illness. [80:09]
  • "One of the single greatest causes of cancer today is having a co-infection. Specifically, if you have a parasitic infection, your risk of cancer goes up dramatically." — Dr. Axe [80:09]
• Ongoing cellular stress (including hidden microbes) drives accumulation of senescent cells within tissues, further impeding healing and regeneration. [84:33]
  • Research suggests these cells may harbor intracellular microbes, maintaining inflammation as a “food source.” [86:21]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "We haven't made any new antibiotics since I graduated from Medical School in 1985." — Dr. Rawls [01:03, 75:03]

• "It's not a goal of eradicating [microbes]...they become part of us, kind of an ill fitting part of us." — Dr. Rawls [05:17]

• "Every chronic illness is rooted in cellular dysfunction and stress." — Dr. Rawls [13:01, paraphrased]

• “Herbs...are not just suppressing microbes. They’re restoring cellular health and protecting cells, which is what matters most.” — Dr. Rawls [69:29]

• "Most doctors discover how to do things differently because of their own illness or the illness of a family member." — Dr. Axe [12:15]

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Important Timestamps

• Diagnosis and personal journeys: Dr. Rawls on gradual illness, misdiagnosis, and discovery [07:08–10:43]
• Cell-centric framework explained: How root-cause illness is cellular [13:01–21:31]
• Why symptom treatment fails: The limits of conventional medicine [12:15–13:01]
• Role of autophagy and cell organelles: Cellular mechanics matter [21:31]
• Dr. Rawls’ five-step healing protocol: [42:02–67:57]
  • Stress modulation with calming herbs [43:58–44:59]
  • Detox/liver support with specific herbs and movement [47:31–50:25]
  • Restoring gut motility and microbiome [52:33–54:25]
  • Dietary pivots and lessons learned [55:35–61:27]
  • Customizing the approach (“One size doesn’t fit all”) [61:27–64:36]
• Herbs for chronic infection: Broad-spectrum, intelligent defense vs. antibiotics [67:57–77:32]
  • Notable herbal favorites: Japanese knotweed, cat’s claw, Chinese skullcap [77:38]
• Microbes and cancer risk: Co-infections as hidden drivers [80:09–84:33]
• Senescence, aging, and lingering microbes: New research and hypotheses [84:33–86:33]

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Tone and Takeaways

• The conversation is open, empathetic, and deeply pragmatic. Both Dr. Axe and Dr. Rawls blend evidence-based science with patient experience and the wisdom of natural medicine.
• The call is to empower patients, question traditional paradigms, and favor individualized, integrative approaches that restore not just symptom relief, but true cellular and systemic wellness.

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Learning Links

• Dr. Bill Rawls: rawlsmd.com
• Book: The Cellular Wellness Solution (endorsed by Dr. Axe)

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Summary for Listeners
If you (or a loved one) struggle with chronic “mystery” symptoms, autoimmunity, recurring infections, or fatigue, this episode is an essential masterclass in understanding the real roots of illness. Dr. Rawls unpacks how restoring healthy, defended, detoxified cells—supported by herbs and mindful lifestyle changes—may achieve what mainstream medicine cannot. Share widely for anyone feeling stuck, misdiagnosed, or ready for a different way forward.

Transcript

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

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[Dr. Josh Axe]

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[Dr. Bill Rawls]

About 90 to 95% of people who identified with chronic Lyme disease did not remember becoming ill around the time of a tick bite.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Wow.

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

So they were like me.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Now, why is that, do you think? 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, somebody realizes, wow, I feel like I'm aging too quickly. My body's falling apart. And that's the sort of thing that you're talking about there, right?

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

Yes. Same thing with me. You know, it wasn't like I just suddenly got sick.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Yeah, it was.

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

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. They're being attacked by microbes. Everything is a mess, and your brain is just on fire. We haven't made any new antibiotics since I graduated from Medical School in 1985.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Talk about antibiotics for a minute. It's the most prescribed medication for Lyme disease today.

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

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 in acute illness, aren't going to work as well.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

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.

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

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[Dr. Josh Axe]

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[Dr. Bill Rawls]

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[Dr. Josh Axe]

Hey, everyone. Dr. Josh Axe here. Welcome to 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 Epstein Barr 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 or. 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 to the show.

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

Hey, thanks, Josh. Glad to be here.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

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, 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.

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

Yeah, you know, when we look at Lyme disease, everybody doesn't distinguish between acute Lyme disease and chronic Lyme disease. 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 a, you know, that's ongoing and it's assault 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, we're an ecosystem. And, 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 at age 50.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

What were some of the issues you were dealing with?

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

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 had, you know, I had lots of tics when I was a kid because I grew up playing in the woods. But it was 20 years of doing obstetrical every second to third night, every second to third weekend for years and years on end. 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 fatigued 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 beating, beating, 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.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

And why was that? Why were you dealing with all those issues?

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

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 tests it was abnormal, some tests it was normal. Tried thyroid hormone, did nothing. You know, neurological evaluations, had a cardiac cath and they said, well, your vessels are clear. We're not really sure what's going, 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, 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 meet because I had to have an income. And so I kept grasping at this idea of what 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 identified with fibromyalgia because, you know, when you don't, you know, I 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. 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.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

So talk about defun. What are those? Borrelia, Bartonella, and where do you think you got those?

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

Tick borne. 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 exist 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 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 all those symptoms in the conventional medical world, it doesn't get you much. But treatment of symptoms, that's it.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Yeah.

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

That's all they have to offer.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Yeah.

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

We don't know what's causing it. We have these drugs that can help your symptoms a bit, but you're not going to get well.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

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 gonna stop treating symptoms. And listen, I've noticed this with interviewing 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.

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

It's true. We all have a story, right?

[Dr. Josh Axe]

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. 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 isn't enough, but getting the cell well is enough to help people heal.

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

Yeah. 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, that 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 I. 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, 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, is due to the actions of cells. Absolutely everything. Whether that's your thyroid producing, thyroid hormone, your heart beating, muscles contracting, brain impulses 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 fillet. So whole cell diet, it's like an apple isn't just carbohydrate, it's carbohydrate contained inside cells. So when you eat an apple, you're getting all the parts of the cells and those are nutrients for your cells. And 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. Some cells, like our heart cells, have to rest in between beats. But when we talk about that process of autophagy, then I know that you talk about a lot of 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.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Yeah.

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

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, 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 congests 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 or chi gong 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 that's really interesting, that process of autophagy. It's also a defense mechanism. So when cells, when microbes, viruses, bacteria, protozo, invade our cells, our cells, if our cells are healthy, then they can actually use that process of dautava to basically digest the microbes. 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. That is really important. So that's really the formula of wellness right there.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Yeah. So. So as you're talking about, and just to just kind of track back and kind of help everybody fully understand this, there are multiple causes of cellular sickness. And so your belief and 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. 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 love 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, you know, they're 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, 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. And we need to make sure those are functioning properly. And so when you take care of patients, Dr. Rawl, 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?

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

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 talk to the patient.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

By the way, the average doctor visit is seven minutes, right? That's the average.

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

Yeah, Yeah. I really failed at 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. But I. And later I started doing online consults that were much more like health coaching consults. 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.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Yeah, yeah.

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

And just work from there. And it included questions like, you know, were you on a lot of antibiotics when you were a child? Or do you have infections? 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. 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 microbe part because it's really fascinating. I think it's a key part of understanding chronic illness. But 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.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Wow.

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

So they were like me.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Now why is that, do you think?

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

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, that word virulence, the. 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.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

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. And that's the sort of thing that you're talking about there, right?

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

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, 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.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

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 saw 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 the bullet 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.

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

Right. You know, and that's when bad things happen, is they skip over from an animal host, which the origins of COVID I guess 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 coronaviruses, 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%.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Yeah.

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

The SARS virus, it was maybe around 1 or 2%, so it wasn't as bad. When you look at Lyme, though, and all these other microbes we talk about, Borrelia, Bartonella and scores other 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.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Yeah.

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

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, this give and take, this tug of 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 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 infect 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 to 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.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Pepper our cells and just take up.

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

Residency and just take up presence.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Wow.

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

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.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

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 that things like Lyme in these microbes most like to take residence in?

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

Yeah. Well, that's interesting, too. And, you know, when we look at this concept of microbe dormancy, 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, chlamydias, and then all the viruses, like Epstein Barr and many, many others. But things which 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.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

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'd also had mold issues. And when we started treating them for mold, completely healed, out of wheelchair, ms, 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. Well, 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.

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

Yeah, I don't even think in terms of diagnosis anymore. Yeah, I've really gotten away. That's good. Because diagnosis is, you know, when you. The purpose of a diagnosis in conventional medicine is defining medical therapy. And the medical therapy's don't get to the root causes, people don't get.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Well. Yeah.

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

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. There are other microbes that invade oligodendrocytes and scavenge 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 our nerves work the same way. They have to be insulated. So there's 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. The plastic was partially stripped from the copper wire and things began shorting out.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

And we see this with ms, with loss of function of so many things.

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

Yeah, but demyelination, 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, listed Borrelia, chlamydia, several others that I had already knew about said it was like it was basically that same formula. 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.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

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 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 you can see with jeans, but it's the same thing. Some people have stronger, more robust livers, some people are BO and 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 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 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 ms, they would say, oh, your body is too damp and there's too much stagnation, that 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 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. And conventional medicine says this, let's Bomb the body, let's treat the symptom, 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 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. The good news is there are natural ways to support your thyroid through the right foods, herbs, nutrients, and daily habits. And if you or someone you love is struggling with thyroid problems, I've created a free resource just for you. You can head on over to draxethyroidclass.com to discover practical steps you can take today to start healing your thyroid naturally. That's draxe thyroidclass.com your journey to better energy, focus and healing starts now.

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

What we're talking about here is behavioral modification, which is hard.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Yeah, you know. Yeah, it's hard. It's hard.

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

I struggled with it.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Yeah.

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

Changing my diet, changing everything in my life. I mean, it was hard.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Yeah.

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

You know, and then you have things that are unexpected. So I had this really nice practice, but I had to leave my ob GYN 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, small town, you can't tell people. So I got this little office. It was a 50 year old building. It was full of mold. So I found all about mold. 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 some, 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, they're being attacked by microbes. 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, qigong, some herbs, calming herbs. Ashwagandha.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Yeah, I was gonna ask some of your favorites for that.

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

Yeah, yeah, there are a lot of great herbs out there. Ashwagandha 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, L theanine is really nice. Some those kinds of combinations, getting people on that and you know, 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 can.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

I say 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 because it's 50% of the issue with most patients or something close to that. So it's just, I'm so glad that you do that.

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

It's great. But we start them out on a tincture product with herb called cryptolepis and hutonia 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, Mississippi, 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 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, 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 we've seen in Covid.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Yeah.

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

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 you're on. You're not sleeping like you should, 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 cells and start invading other cells. So your body become. 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.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Yeah. And so really, step number one, as 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.

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

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, if 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. You know, 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 qigong or yoga or those kinds of things, that's really important. But that's where something like sauna can be 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 andrographis 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, 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.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Yeah.

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

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.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Yeah, yeah.

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

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.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

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 patients with hormonal issues, Hashimoto's, hypothyroidism, infertility, pcos, diabetes, and also menopausal symptoms. And your liver is so critical for estrogen stabilization and the right levels of estrogen. It does a lot. And again, milk, this was one of those amazing herbs. I read a study once on it being able to, maybe better than any other herb, regenerate actual liver tissue.

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

Pretty extraordinary.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

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. 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, like 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 Grafis. I know, I'm sure you talk about this in your amazing book, but. King of the bitters, right? So we, Jordan Rubin and I own a farm just south of here, an hour south, and we grow herbs and so we tend to. 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 andrographis. 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 yeah, 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?

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

Well, you know, including in that is just getting their GI tract working again. So many people have food sensitivities. I mean, I. When I, in my journey, I was sensitive to 75% of the foods that I was eating.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Yeah.

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

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, you know, 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, our 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.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

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, I would say 95% of doctors, 98, just completely skip that step.

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

Oh, sure. Well, it takes time.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Yeah. Because there are herbs that help. You know, a lot of times, you know, if people don't want a medication, they want to supplement to fix it and there are good supplements for what you're talking about, moving things. Like, I like triphala, like I think that's a great herb for somebody. Gut motility and benefits. But you can't just take trafala and live in this stressed out state and think, oh well, that pill, that herb is going to fix it.

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

Yeah, yeah, truly, it's actually slow motility that are creating a lot of the bacterial imbalances. Right. And sibo, it's a big reason because 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 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.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

From you because I have one myself. When you started learning about how to truly heal people at the cellular level, what was maybe something you had 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 or, or something like that.

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

Yeah, you know, it, it's, it's, 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 give 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, when 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. 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 worked that out of my system. And everything cleared up and got a lot better and started exploring diet. Leaned more toward a paleo 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.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Wow.

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

And it's. And this would be right in line with what you're doing, too.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Yeah.

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

So eat whole foods as much as you can.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Yeah.

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

Most of my food I make from scratch from whole foods. 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, and I actually think it's a little bit healthier to eat lean protein sources.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Agreed.

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

But I think you can get by being a vegetarian. But I just find that I feel a whole lot better if 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 wheat 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.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

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.

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

Especially 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 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. 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. Favorite for me is frying an egg and then doing, like, salad greens and mushrooms and artichoke. Sounds great. And olive oil. And I. You know, I cook an egg, and then I put that in the pan, and. And so that's. That'll be a light breakfast. And then, you know, even in summertime, we're trying to. To finish our last meal by five or six.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Same here.

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

And then not eat after that. Yeah, man, I feel so much better doing that.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Yeah.

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

And, you know, if everybody were doing those four things, we'd all be in a pretty good place.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Yeah. Yeah, I agree. I agree with all that. I think one of my biggest epiphanies was 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 out what's the best diet. And one of the things I realized was there's not 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 IBS D 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 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 real whole foods. I'm not an actual big believer 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. But yeah, 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 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, 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 mass, 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 tests 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.

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

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.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

I was talking about, you know, Mark Sisson, he started 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 gonna 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.

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

Right?

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Well, 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 is why people are getting hurt. And CrossFit and a lot of these. These.

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

Well, cellular health, you're really doing some cellular damage at that point. That's right. 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 too hard can be a really significant thing, too. And reading Outside magazine for years over, 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 your cells too hard to the point that they can't recover. They lose that. Recovered at that capacity. But I'm also in a place that I think there's this component of reactivated microbes in every 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. 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, 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.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

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?

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

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.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Wow.

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

My joints, all those heart symptoms. I mean, I met a guy who was having the same symptoms that I had had, that had had a heart transplant and ended up passing away a few years ago. He's big in the lyme community. And I thought, golly, 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.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Yeah. Wow.

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

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.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

You know, up until 150 years ago, in most of the world, when people used 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. You know, in all of Chinese medicine and Ayurveda, it's like that is medicine is 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 ashwagandha 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. Astragalus 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.

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

Yeah. That you can't find at your basic health food store.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Yeah.

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

It's a lot of the things that we've defined as antimicrobial herbs that have gravitated toward the Lyme community, but I think are so valuable for so many things. So Japanese knotweed, that's a big one, I'm sure you know, of that one. And I don't think that's a mainstream herb. Maybe it's become.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

I don't think it's mainstream at all. It's really high in resveratrol. Right? Is it?

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

It's high in resveratrol, but it's high in trans resveratrol, the form we absorb. So we actually get much higher levels of it than we do in wine or grapes. So it's, it's so beyond that, just 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. That and terra still bean from blueberries.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Oh, yeah.

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

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 pterostilbene 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. So there's 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, like cat's claws, 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.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Properties in that in some studies has been shown to be, you know, as anti inflammatory as turmeric and ginger, having really powerful effects there. Yeah.

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

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.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Yes.

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

And I think that's really fascinating to think about it that way. So unlike an antibiotic, that's a chemical. You're talking about hundreds, thousands of chemicals that work like an intelligent defense system.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Yeah.

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

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.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Yeah.

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

I was like, that's interesting.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Yeah.

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

I actually found a study that documented that, that the herbal antimicrobial properties don't disrupt. In fact, I found that often herbs can work as well as probiotics for balancing that gut.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Well, you talked about the Japanese knotweed is such a perfect example of that because there are studies on the resveratrol and some of the other compounds acting as prebiotics. And so. That's a great point.

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

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 talk, 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.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Talk about antibiotics for a minute. Because it's the most prescribed medication for Lyme disease today.

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

But there's a place for it. 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.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Yeah.

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

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 fast 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 in 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.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Yeah, you're just one, one chemical out.

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

And then we have to patent it. So we change it to potentiate 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.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

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.

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

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.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

What are some of your favorite herbs then, to use for something like Borrelia, you know, for lime specifically.

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

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. Cat's 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 skullcap. It's just this wonderful herb that we. It was originally thought it was primarily immune modulator. It balances the immune system and 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. Including Borrelia. And so that those are some really important ones. Andrographis on the list. It once was thought to be good for Borrelia. We're finding it doesn't have as good an activity. There was a series of Johns Hopkins studies from Johns Hopkins University that actually did test tube studies. With these herbs and they found that they actually killed borrelia better than the antibiotics, which is really fascinating. But they also looked at borrelia or babesia, bartonella and other kinds of things, and they found that they were just as good for those too. Same herbs like Japanese knotweed and Chinese skullcap. And it was really wonderful. Andrographis is really good for babesia, is really great antiviral. That king of bitters is 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.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Wow.

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

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

[Dr. Josh Axe]

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. 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 we both know it's because what your body, if your body has to fight off one invader, most people's 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.

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

You know, the connections between microbes just go. 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. Oh, yeah, 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 change. Conditions change, and they grow and they grow. You put bacteria in a petri dish, the right conditions, It'll keep growing until there's no food left. So that has a lot to do with. That's very interesting with cancer. Now, I found this study. This is interesting. They were using an algae as their specimen that, you know, algae has complex eukaryotic cells that are like ourselves. 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.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Can't do it.

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

Just. Just died.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Yeah.

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

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 intracellular 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 every single time. And they found that the bacteria was inserting its gene for unregulated growth into the cells.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

A lot of people don't know these algaes like spirulina chlorella, these are microbial.

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

You know, spirulina is bacterial. Chlorella is actually a true allergy. So it has eukaryotic cells.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

I see. Yeah. It's so, so interesting. And, you know, I've seen over the years reading up on different sort of practitioners saying, well, we think that cancer most resembles a fungus or it 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.

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

And they have found that different kinds of tumors have different microbiomes of intracellular bacteria that live inside of them. So those cancer microbe connections are really becoming very common.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Yeah.

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

But my latest thing is looking at asking that question, why do we have senescent cells? Right.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Yeah.

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

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 10 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. And, but ideally, what happens is the cell basically just commits suicide, called apoptosis, 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.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Wow.

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

Which is a really fascinating idea. I'm still early in that. I think we've got a lot of more research, but it starts putting a different eye on why we have it, these things. That's really interesting.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Well, it's interesting. You see, there's a lot of compounds, whether it be quercetin or nattokinase 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. Beau, 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.

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

Well, thank you.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

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 Lyme or mold or parasite, this is a great book. And if you're also interested in herbs, you want to learn, you want to become more educated, it's a great book for that as well. Also, I know Dr. Raul has a website. Dr. Raul, where can people learn more about you and your work?

[Dr. Bill Rawls]

Probably the easiest place is website rawlsmd.com and put 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.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Yeah, well, when you look at the research of the number of people with chronic 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 Eck 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 can 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 overtaken 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 got a lot of other great guests coming on great topics. Don't forget to subscribe. I'll see you on the next episode.