The Microbial Connection to Autoimmunity - Episode 349

when your body is stressed, when your cells are stressed, when you don't get sleep, when you eat a bad diet, when you're exposed to environmental toxins, and then mold on top of that, and then all of these things come together to stress your cells, impair autophagy, which when your cells are stressed, they use more energy, they torque those mitochondria harder. So one of the signals for these microbes to wake up is impaired autophagy and mitophagy. It sends signals, they wake up, they start breaking down the cell to generate food, they reactivate, and then they spread to other, other cells and other tissues.

And today I'm speaking with a fellow physician, a gentleman named Bill Rawls, spelled R-A-W-L-S. You're going to want to keep that in mind, R-A-W-L-S. We have a really interesting conversation about chronic disease, chronic illness, Lyme infections in general, autoimmunity, the aging process, and he's got some really cool insights around autophagy, some of the central processes that kind of span across different chronic disease states. And you'll be able to find him if you want at Vital Plan and Restore 180, and also at Rawls, R-A-W-L-S-M-D.com. But enjoy this, enjoy this show. It's really, it's really quite good and fascinating.

He went from saving hearts as a cardiologist to rewriting the entire aging playbook. Dr. Jeffrey Gladden believes 100 is the new 30, and he's got the science to back it up. This is the Gladden Longevity Podcast.

Bill, welcome to the, uh, Gladden Longevity Podcast. It's good to see you today. Here today.

A pleasure. Thank you.

Yeah, absolutely. So I wanted to jump in, tell us a little bit about, um, quite honestly, your journey of how you got to where you started, you know, as a medical student at Bowman Gray, into leaving medicine, so to speak, or at least the practice of medicine, the traditional practice of medicine, and focusing on what you do today. How— what was, what was that, what was that transition like? How'd you get from A to Z?

Not planned. A lot of it somewhat haphazard. But, uh, yeah, so I was conventionally trained, went into obstetrics and gynecology because I was more focused at the time on seeing the value of interventional medicine as opposed to managing chronic illness, which just wasn't very attractive. Considered cardiology at one point, but ended up going to OB/GYN just because I really enjoyed the surgical aspect of it. And, and did that, went to a small town on the coast of, of North Carolina to bring everything that I learned to this somewhat rural area. And, you know, back then, OB-GYN, it was small practices. And I was sharing call with 2 other people, which meant I was on call for 10 nights out of every month.

Yeah.

Which, and call was 24 hours, weekends it was from Friday morning till Sunday. And I was one of those people, unlike my partners who could just go and crash and, you know, drag them out of bed, deliver the baby or whatever. If I had somebody in labor or in the hospital or whatever, I just didn't sleep. And so for all through my 30s and into my 40s, I was totally sleep deprived because I was averaging probably 4 to 6 6 hours a night and pushing every stress button imaginable. And then you're, you know, when you're in your 30s, it's like you just push through it. You're invincible. You can do it. But by the end of my 40s, I crashed and nobody could really understand what was wrong. And I stopped OB, gave up hospital practice, and just still wasn't getting better and couldn't figure it out. Identified later with chronic Lyme disease. I now interpret that quite differently most people.

Hmm.

That by default just was pushed out of conventional medicine because there was just nothing to offer. I became certified in holistic medicine at that time. This was pre-Functional Medicine.

Okay.

And started doing things to help my health that were intuitive, changed my diet, you know, really worked on my sleep habits, everything, and was getting better but not all the way better. Picked up a book about herbal medicine medicine for chronic Lyme. And quite, quite frankly, at that point I was desperate. I mean, if you can imagine, I was age 50 and having symptoms of a 70-year-old. I had severe cardiac manifestations, my joints were shot, my brain didn't work anymore. I mean, my whole body was falling apart. My gut was a mess. And, you know, gravitated toward this Lyme disease diagnosis and thought, hey, I can take antibiotics. You know, it was the one thing— like fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, it's like nobody, nothing going to help me get better. But if I can find out that I'm carrying this bacteria, I can take an antibiotic and get well. And I did find I was carrying that bacteria, probably like an awful lot of other people. And I took antibiotics and got sicker and it wrecked my gut. And I was really desperate, but didn't have the resources to go chase all the many Lyme therapies out there. And by default, put my faith in this herbal pathway really with low expectations. Mm-hmm. But within 3 months started getting better. Over a 5-year period, got my health back completely. I continued practice, but it was more of a wellness-based practice, helping people overcome chronic illness. And I did that for kind of the part 2 of my career.

Mm-hmm.

And then built a company with herbal protocols and re— restorative protocols after that, where I— that's where I'm spending most of my energy now. But spent the past 20 years really looking for the evidence, understanding chronic illness, what chronic illness, wellness, aging, everything are, and what can we do to prevent chronic illness, slow the processes of aging, and stay healthy. So long story short, I'm one year shy of 70 now and doing things that I didn't think I would be doing anymore at age 50, like kitesurfing and a lot of other stuff.

So it's— I love that.

It has been a pretty interesting journey.

Yeah. So let's go down the Lyme rabbit hole for just a little bit. So difficult to diagnose, difficult to treat, lots of co-infections, lots of things going on with Lyme, different genetic predispositions for Lyme syndrome, if you will. Tell us kind of how you unraveled the knot there and what your, what your therapies ended up looking like, or maybe it was more empiric therapy just on top of the symptoms. I'm not sure.

You know, the therapy ended up being the right choice. Over anything that I've— could have done by default. I mean, it's almost like I was supposed to fall into that to learn certain things. And to understand Lyme disease, you really have to understand the nature of the bacteria. And if you understand chronic Lyme disease, you have an opening to understand every chronic illness, because I think every chronic illness is fundamentally that— the same process. So when we look at the Lyme—

tell us, tell us a little bit about what that fundamental process is. What is the process that you've discovered is kind of connecting everything?

You know, we don't think of the body— we think of the body in terms of parts. You know, we divide it up into systems and organs. You know, we have a heart, we have a liver, and all of our systems. And that's our functional pathway of how we understand the human body. But it's really more appropriate to think about it as a complex collection of cells. So if you want to simplify something, take it down to the smallest functional unit, which is a living cell. So our body is a composite of trillions and trillions of cells working in synergy. So when we look at our hormones and our signaling agents, it's all about cellular communications and coordinating cellular functions. So each one of our cells is— you can think of it as a small biological mechanical unit that's self-contained and has its own software. You know, our genetic program is basically a hard drive that's built into every cell that tells it how it should function in relation to all the other cells in the body. And it contains a blueprint that the cell can start replacing its parts. So when you look at the body as a cellular organism, we are a function, our health is a function of this health of our cells. Everything that happens in the body is a function of cellular actions, whether that's heart beating, thyroid function, anything. It's all cellular functions. So when we get sick, it's our cells that are sick. And when you look at that, it, you know, every aspect of every chronic illness can be defined by cellular dysfunction. So carrying that a little bit deeper, your audience may be aware of the process called autophagy, which many physicians are not. But autophagy is the ability of cells to restore and rejuvenate.. And so autophagy is a really critical factor. It's a wonderful marker of cellular health. So if autophagy is impaired, then cellular functions are impaired, then mitochondrial functions are impaired, and that impairment translates into symptoms, abnormal labs, every inflammation, every other aspect of chronic illness. So when you look at cellular health, you really have—

just to interrupt you for a second. So I think the audience is tracking with autophagy, but it's a little bit like spring cleaning for the cell is kind of the way that I think about it, where it can be triggered by being in a caloric deficit, either from exercise or fasting or things like that. It can also be potentiated by things like spermidine, which will turn it on. It's turned on by metformin. Rapamycin also potentiates it. So these—

but these, these—

this process is essentially where you're taking old parts of the cell and kind of recycling them, which enables you to, to replace those old parts with new parts. To your point, there's a full blueprint of what to build in each cell. So now you're replacing replacing old parts with new parts, and it's kind of like the cell then functions at a much higher level. Mitochondria can be regenerated also. Mitophagy can occur, and so the old mitochondria are discarded and, and recycled, and new ones are built. And, and so if you're in this phase of intermittently rejuvenating yourself, you can stay much younger functionally for much longer. So that's kind of the idea that we're talking about here.

It is the key.

Yep.

Yeah, for sure. Yeah, without— if autophagy stopped right now, yours and my body would last a few days and that's it. You know, it's that critical. So every chronic illness, virtually every chronic illness, is associated with impaired autophagy. So it's really important. When you look at optimizing autophagy, you know, diet, exercise, all of those things are very important. And we can get down the details of that. But a lot of people don't realize that one aspect of autophagy is, it's also part of our defense mechanism. So our immune system is especially important when we have foreign invaders that come into our system. But if they get past that, they invade cells. And when they invade cells, part of the defense is that autophagy, that lysosome that digests all the old parts. Well, you can throw a microbe in there and digest it too. So it's, it's really important. But a lot of microbes have learned ways to get past autophagy, which brings it to the Lyme bacteria. So when you look at Borrelia, it has the properties of being what we define as a stealth pathogen. So a lot of pathogens, when they come in the body, they're breaking down the door, they're trying to overcome the immune system and break down our tissues as rapidly as possible, and they grow very fast. It's like like you get a virus and on top of that you get a pneumococcal bacteria. It's turning over every 20 minutes. It's very, very aggressive and your immune system is recognizing those kind of invaders. So every 20 minutes it's turning over, doubling itself. Borrelia, when it enters the body, it's doing everything it can not to be noticed by the immune system. So it grows very slowly. The doubling time of Borrelia in the body is 12 to 24 hours. Really slow. And this is true of all the co-infections too. Babesia, Bartonella, mycoplasmas, you know, outside of ticks, mycoplasmas, chlamydias, many things have this potential of slow growth. So that's a defense mechanism. It helps them survive. Not to say that the bacteria, the spirochetes are really fast. They, you know, they squiggle right through, but they don't grow fast, which makes them less of a target to the immune system. System. So that's one thing they do. The second thing is, as soon as they hit the ground running, they blaze through the bloodstream and they invade tissues, and they use sophisticated mechanisms of getting into the brain, into the heart, throughout tissues, and they invade cells. Now, if the— if our defenses are down, if the immune system is weak, they hang out and start breaking down tissues. They use enzymes and other mechanisms of breaking down tissues to generate food to grow more microbes. But if they're in a hostile situation that the immune system is healthy, they invade cells. And once they invade a cell, they subvert or circumvent the autophagy process and they basically go dormant inside the cell. So intracellular dormancy is a really important mechanism of persistence. So Borrelia doesn't care about making you sick. It cares about having a presence in your body and then later having opportunities to spread to other hosts. Well, that's actually the way most microbes work. So if you have been bitten by a tick in your lifetime, there's a good chance that you have some tick-borne microbes buried in your tissues. So I picked these things up when I was a kid playing in the woods.

Sure.

So they can be present for a very long time. And this is true of Borrelia, the co-infections, and many, many things beyond that. So we pick things up. They end up in our tissues. As long as cells are healthy and autophagy is functional, then these microbes stay quiet. If we were able to dig deeply in the tissues of people in New England or other areas where there are a lot of ticks, we'd probably find that most of the population are carrying these microbes. But when your body is stressed, when your cells are stressed, when you don't get sleep, when you eat a bad diet, when you're exposed to environmental toxins and then mold on top of that. And then all of these things come together to stress your cells, impair autophagy, which when your cells are stressed, they use more energy, they torque those mitochondria harder. So one of the signals for these microbes to wake up is impaired autophagy and mitophagy. It sends signals, they wake up, they start breaking down the cell to generate food, they reactivate, and then they spread to other other cells and other tissues.

So what I'm hearing you say basically is that one of the keys to combating Lyme or any of the tick-borne microbes is to augment autophagy and mitophagy. That's, that's what I'm hearing. That's like a central pillar is what, what you're saying, right?

Or any chronic illness.

Or, or, and then generalizing that to any chronic illness.

Yep. Yep. It, it is true. You know, and, and that's where the herbal therapy I've learned is so remarkably important because when you look at an antibiotic, it depends on fast growth. It's gonna kill that pneumococcal bacteria in your lungs.

Mm-hmm.

But it's not going to kill Borrelia or Bartonella or Babesia or any of these other things. They grow so slowly. It's unbelievable. Yeah.

And they're hidden and they're—

and they're— and it's not gonna get inside cells. So you're not gonna wipe out that reservoir that you may have. So the problem with antibiotics and many, you know, targeted interventional therapies is that it may kill the active bacteria, but it's not going to get the buried reservoir in your tissues. And you've got about 10 days before you start disrupting gut flora, generating antibiotic-resistant pathogens. And what's really critical is antibiotics and many drugs actually impair autophagy. And, you know, so that's critical for getting well. So when you look at the herbs, the herbs have well-documented antimicrobial properties. And when I say herbs, I'm talking about a class of herbs that are defined as adaptogenic. Adaptogens, I'm sure you've heard of. An adaptogen is an herb that doesn't have drug-like properties and elicits its benefit primarily by protecting cells from a wide range of stress factors. And that includes a wide range of microbes.

Interesting. That's really interesting. So an adaptogen, just for the audience, just to make sure they're clear on this, the way that we tend to think about an adaptogen is that it brings something back into harmony. So if something is overexpressed, it'll bring it back down. If it's underexpressed, it'll bring it back up. But it's, it's trying to bring things back into homeostasis or equilibrium, if you will. We tend to think about it that way.

So I always ask, how does it do that? You know, what happens is it's affecting cells. So when cells are stressed, They die off. We have inflammation. Hormones become imbalanced. Everything. So there's good evidence that many of the herbs that we use in chronic Lyme disease, like cordyceps and reishi and Japanese knotweed and others, calm down inflammatory cytokines. How do they do that? They protect cells. And when cells are able to recover, then things start to normalize and it takes the load off the immune system. So the immune system isn't sending out inflammatory cytokines to drive the process and It's calming the microbes that are sometimes driving those cytokines. So it's really the effect that the herbs have on cells that have that normalizing properties. Now, all herbs have that, but some herbs, a lot of herbs that are used in traditional medicine, Japanese knotweed, kava, so many others contain phytochemicals that have a drug-like effect. And that's why they're predominantly used. Now, they have all the other adaptogenic properties too, but sometimes those drug-like effects get in the way and it makes it harder to use that particular entity long-term. So the value of the adaptogens is they don't have chemicals that have drug-like effects that are tweaking our physiology. They're primarily affecting stress factors. They're affecting free radicals, toxic substances, radiation that are adversely affecting our cells, and especially the microbe factor. So that microbe factor is really interesting, and you can carry it into aging, chronic illness of any kind. And the deeper I go, the more fascinating it gets.

Yeah, they also— these molecules will interact with NF-kappa-beta and NRF and things that basically modulate the drive for inflammation also. So it'll tend to downregulate it almost at a genetic expression level so it works at different levels, which is kind of cool. But are you suggesting that the combination of these, one of their key effects is to increase the autophagy that you're referring to? Or are you talking about using herbs that actually support the cell while you're using something else to increase autophagy? How are you thinking about that?

I'm pretty careful about how I use the word stimulate or increase autophagy. So there are a lot of things that increase autophagy that are potentially harmful I mean, if you look at most of the petrochemical substances that are damaging to ourselves, they stimulate the heck out of autophagy because they are damaging the cell. But it's also breaking the machinery of autophagy, so it's destructive in the long run. So I'm really careful, you know, there are definitely— you mentioned a few drugs that stimulate autophagy, they turn it on, you know. We know that there are 3 main switches that turn on off or turn on autophagy, mTOR being the big one. So, you know, when I was first looking at how herbs and how the substances are affecting it, I was looking at those switch mechanisms, and I found that just turning it on isn't necessarily a desirable effect. Because if you have a cell that is stressed and you are turning autophagy on, you're pushing it harder, it can be a self-destructive process. So you have to be really careful. So here, what I'm talking about and the primary effect that adaptogenic herbs are doing are protecting cells from stress factors. And by protecting the cell from stress factors, we enable the cell to get back to work and do what it's supposed to do and do autophagy normally. Now, autophagy, you know, it is that stress recovery, stress recovery, you know, exercise stimulates, but then you have to rest to recover. Fasting, which is a stress, stimulates, but then you have to recover. And that, you know, and I was looking at that aspect for what about toxic substances? And it turns out that many of the things, the chemicals that we process from plants, actually do have that effect of stimulating autophagy, of promoting autophagy, but they don't break autophagy the way a petrochemical that's an unnatural chemical that we would define as a poison does. So some of these ancestral things that we're exposed to, our body is kind of used to it, that little bit of stress of having this chemical and having to process it. Is actually a favorable effect on autophagy. So I like to use the words that it either boosts or enhances autophagy or it disrupts autophagy. And interestingly, an awful lot of drugs we use for chronic illness are major autophagy disruptors.

Yeah, that's really interesting. So when you're talking about protecting cells, a lot of times the way we've thought about that is actually mitigating oxidative stress, which is kind of you know, inflammation will be mediated in terms of its effect on the cell with oxidative stress, excess oxidative stress. So I suspect that the herbs that you're using are also targeting those processes as well, sort of the source of inflammation, oxidative stress, etc., right? Yeah.

Yeah. You know, the evidence accumulated suggests that these adaptogenic herbs— and I say adaptogenic because is a true adaptogen actually contains chemicals that have an effect on the hypothalamus that lower cortisol and our stress hormones. So, you know, your classic adaptogens, rhodiola, ashwagandha, reishi, cordyceps, and there are many really good ones that I definitely use in my practice. But, there's some like turmeric, like hawthorn, like Japanese knotweed, cat's claw, some of these, and some of those have really nice antimicrobial effects. They we don't have chemicals that directly affect stress hormones, but I call them adaptogenic because, you know, what we're looking at is things that increase our resilience and stamina. So by protecting our cells, they do that. And that's, that's where we see the physiologic benefits. So, you know, when, when I look at, you know, how do we protect our mitochondria, besides the fact that we can— things that we can do like clean environment and eating properly and getting the right amount of exercise, sleep, et cetera, the herbs have a higher potential to protect mitophagy and autophagy than anything else you can do.

How does this translate into autoimmune conditions? Do you take a sort of a similar approach there, or— Yeah. Tell us a little bit about this translates into autoimmunity.

Most everything that I say, I have spent a lot of time investigating and just really sorting out the science. To know whether it's true or not. Here, it's more speculative. And when I look at autoimmunity, when I look at the mechanisms by which these microbes invade cells, go dormant, can stay dormant for indefinite periods of time, reactivate under stress, and then emerge, we know that one effect is the body sees those cells as being abnormal and starts attacking those cells. We also know that different microbes invade different cells. You look at the different Lyme coinfections and then outside of Lyme, all the other stealth microbes, they all invade different cells in the body and they— and when they emerge, it just makes sense that the body attacking that would be the mechanisms behind most autoimmunity. Besides the fact that it's well documented that Borrelia and many of these microbes cloak themselves by putting, you know, proteins from our tissues, our cells, onto their structure to help cloak them. And that can initiate autoimmunity. But also just the immune system being in a very stressed and dysregulated state is contributing to that whole thing too.

Interesting. What about things like COVID or long-haul symptoms related to COVID and things like that? Is it also on extension of the therapies? Do they extend into those kinds of situations as well, or is that something a little bit outside your purview?

You know, when you look at these adaptogenic herbs and cellular protection, and you look at all chronic illnesses as being manifestations of cellular stress and impaired autophagy, you would have to think that they would have some good. And there's plenty of evidence. We We have definitely had a number of people on our protocol that are struggling with Long COVID. So I think the undefined thing about Long COVID is, is it just SARS virus? And again, speculation here, I don't think so. I think what you've got is reactivation of a lot of things that, you know, we all have things buried in our tissues. That is a conclusion that I can affirm pretty firmly. Sure. To.

Yeah.

You know, everybody knows about Epstein-Barr and some of the other herpes viruses, but the list is actually much, much longer than that. And so you do see reactivation of Epstein-Barr, which we test for. We know of that one, and we find that most people with Long COVID have reactivation of Epstein-Barr. Well, it doesn't take a whole lot of logic to go, yeah, there are probably other things there that are reactivating besides that. So Long COVID is a state of impaired autophagy and cellular stress that allows reactivation of microbes. And I have something I call the boiling point. So if you look at this, that if you accept that we all have some kind of stealth pathogens in our tissues, and when we are stressed, our body is stressed, and these things start to reactivate reactivate, you reach a point, and this is the point that someone is chronically ill, where reactivation of pathogens is driving the cellular stress that's driving more reactivation of pathogens. So it comes— becomes a vicious cycle. And that's where I was, that just changing my health habits wasn't going to get me better.

Mm-hmm.

That it took actual suppression of the microbes to get me better. And, you know, I'm— and so, you know, the, the evidence behind this is accumulating pretty fast of just looking at, you know, hundreds and hundreds of studies of looking at individual microbes and tissues and, and conditions of finding that microbe connection in so many places.

So it sounds like you're kind of distilling things down to at least one common denominator across a lot of chronic illness. And I'm hypothesizing that with the herbs that you've put together, that there are variations in the combinations, but there has to be sort of a core number of things that probably are applicable in most cases, something like that. I don't know, do you want to comment on that or how you think about that?

You know, I, I, the value of the adaptogenic herbs is because they don't have drug antibiotic-like properties. You can take them for a long time. And we do know that, you know, various different herbs may have better properties for one microbe or another or may affect different cells, some cells differently than others. Like we know that milk thistle is exceptionally good for protecting liver cells. We know that hawthorn is exceptionally good for the vascular system. So, you know, there are some variations of pulling in different kinds of herbs. And the nice thing about using herbs with low potential for toxicity is you can combine multiple herbs. And that does go along with herbal traditions of typical— of using formulas that typically contained anywhere from 5 to a dozen herbs that you get a synergy of the different herbs working together.

Okay.

Okay.

And with that, you talked a little bit about the nervous system as well, nervous system regulation or dysregulation, because we know that that's a big driver, either being able to heal or not be able to heal. It's difficult for the body to heal when it's sympathetically stressed all the time. It's easier for it to heal when it's parasympathetic dominant. So the herbs you're using are also, it sounds like, with the ashwagandha, rhodiola, things like that are focused on trying to modulate the nervous system as well.

Yeah, you know, that was for a long time we had put together just a package of high-grade, high-concentration herbal extracts. They focused mostly on suppressing microbes, and we found that, you know, using it, doing a little bit more logically and systematically works. So that led to about a year ago, I created a program that's months. And the first thing we do right out of the gate is calming sympathetic overactivity. You know, we spend 2 months on that alone. And the herbs help you. I use a combination of ashwagandha, L-theanine, and a couple of other calming herbs, but also helping people learn relaxation techniques and just focusing on how do we de-stress their lives so that they can function better. And I found that that's essential for opening up the door to everything else because is if somebody's body is in high alert, they've shut down their GI tract, they've shut down their detoxification pathways, and you're not going to make any progress there until you do this. At the same time, we start them off on a tincture that's a little less concentrated than, than some of the other herbs that we use, just to get their foot in the door on some of that adaptogenic antimicrobial benefit. Fit at the same time.

But what does that consist of? What's the tincture? What's in the tincture?

Uh, Cryptolepis is a really nice herb. It's a— it comes from Africa. And it, uh, so we know a lot about these herbs because they have been used for over 20 years for looking at this condition that we call chronic Lyme. And again, you know, you learn about chronic Lyme and you learn a lot of things about other chronic illnesses too. But Cryptolepis was one of 7 herbs in a study that were— was done in Johns Hopkins University in 2020 that found that that particular herb, Japanese knotweed, cat's claw, Chinese skullcap, several others were as effective as doxycycline and one of the cephalosporins for killing both the motile and the cyst forms of Borrelia. Tell it yet.

Interesting.

Yep.

Yeah.

So what was— now, that was an in vitro study, and they did it in vitro just because, one, it's easier, but two, they wanted to exclude the pot— the factor or the, the pot— the potential for the herbs to be affecting the immune system. They wanted to know, will this stuff kill the bacteria? So it was valuable. But interestingly, some of the same researchers took those same herbs and and looked at Bartonella, another co-infection, and they found that Japanese knotweed's Cryptolepis, Chinese skullcap, killed that as well. And then they looked at Bartonella, which, I mean, Babesia, which is a protozoa, and it was as effective as the drug for that too, just showing the broad spectrum that these herbs have.

Interesting.

Interestingly, when 2020, about March, March when everybody was saying, "Well, we don't have any vaccines or any drugs for this new virus that's coming down the pike." I started looking for herbs. And interestingly, they had looked at many herbs from looking at the previous SARS epidemics. Not could we eliminate the virus, but can we attenuate it? Can we at least slow down and calm the death rate? There were a lot of herbs that they had looked at and very Interestingly, Japanese knotweed and Chinese skullcap, along with other herbs that we use like Andrographis, are on that list. So it just shows that, you know, when you talk about an herb, you're not talking about one chemical like an antibiotic. You're talking about the plant's entire defense system. So it's much more broad spectrum than you would see with anything else.

Yeah, it's nice when you're over, you can use plants. You're getting a broad spectrum. You're getting things that are killing the bug, but you're also getting things that are modulating oxidative stress. You're getting, you know, many, many effects, if you will, as opposed to a single effect from a drug with side effects, right? So yeah, that's really, really cool. I like that a lot. So when you have put these together, do you put them into tinctures, which is kind of an alcohol extraction of the key ingredients, or do you put them in capsules? And, or how do you work at that?

You know, there, when you look at herbs, you can get them anything from teas to enjoying the raw plant, of course. Yeah. But commercially, actually, actually using them medicinally, there are 3 main preparations. So the first is what most people find in a capsule, which is a whole herb powder. And basically they take the active part of the plants, be that the leaves and stem, roots, or whatever, they grind it up, they put it in a powder, a really fine powder, and they put it in a capsule. And what you're getting there is mostly fiber. So you're getting very, very little of the actual chemistry of plant. So when you see things on the internet, that's what you're getting the vast majority of the time, and they really don't have much in them. So a step up from that is the tincture, and the nice thing about tinctures is they tend to be very well tolerated. It is the pure chemistry of the herbs. So we're typically— the extract that we're using is water and alcohol to pull both water-soluble and fat-soluble components of the plant. And so the concentration depends on how of the plant they put in the substrate. So, and then they discard the plant parts, which gets rid of the fiber. So a tincture is really nice. I use tinctures. They tend to be a little milder than what we use for other products, which is a standardized extract. So what a standardized extract is, is it, it's in a powder. It's a fine powder. It's in a capsule. It just, it looks just like a whole herb powder.

Powder.

But what they've done is they take a tincture, spray it on a surface, dry off the water and alcohol, and collect that powder and put that into a capsule. So it's at least 10 times more concentrated than a whole herb powder.

I see. Interesting.

And that's typically what we're using because a lot of times to really get the benefits that you need, you're going to have to use some real potency even beyond a tincture. You know, a capsule of that is going to be like a couple of teaspoons of a tincture. It's going to be really concentrated. The downside is, what we found is, you have to have— people have to be ready for that, you know. Their system, you've got to cut some of the turmoil, calm that sympathetic overactivity, get their gut working again, or they're just not going to be able to tolerate it. So that process of 6 months leading up to that point of being able to tolerate these really stronger extracts is really important.

Yeah, that's really interesting because when you do that you're creating things that need to be taken out of the body, right? So either through detox pathways or through the gut or urine or in some way, shape, or form. And it's almost like you're priming the exit strategies before you actually, you know, kill stuff off and load it into the system that needs to be exited, right? That's kind of how I'm thinking about this, if that's close. Yeah. Okay, cool. Cool. I love it.

Yeah.

Really, really cool stuff. So where can people find out more about your tinctures and things like that?

Well, they— I have a website, RawlsMD.com, where people can find a lot of information. And the company where we have our program, Restore 180, is vitalplan.com. If they just look up Restore 180, they'll find a lot of information. So Restore 180 is an evolution of where we started a decade ago with just this supplement package with these really strong extracts. So it, it, it is a progression that includes health coaching, a community dedicated to this. I've created a whole education program, but it's not specific to Chronic Lyme. It is really any kind of health adversity can benefit from this this. And, you know, when you look at these herbs, I, I know your area of expertise is longevity. Just the microbe factor and how it affects aging is really pretty fascinating too.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, absolutely. No, it's, uh, yeah. Anything that's a chronic stress on the system is tearing us down. Right.

And absolutely.

It's interesting. There was a paper written recently that showed that the balance in the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system, you know, stress, fight or flight versus repair, recovery, kind of the zen that has a major impact on all 12 hallmarks of aging. So it's not a surprise that really it's the nervous system that is one of the first targets in longevity for us, as well as it sounds like for you. So there's some synergy and overlap there for sure.

Oh yeah, yeah, just digging into the— well, at this point in life, for sure, digging into the aging aspect, just, yeah, the connections are really surprising. I had a theory, and and I'm finding growing evidence that senescent cells— I'm sure you're very familiar with senescent cells. They're unwantable, undesirable cells that collect in our system. I was researching, well, is there a microbe connection? And it turns out, yeah, pretty strong. Oh, sure. Even enough for me to theorize that one of the things that happens with senescent cells is these intracellular pathogens are actually overcoming the cell because that's their protection and their food supply.

They're basically—

so there's some evidence that the microbes may be actually a factor creating and perpetuating senescent cells.

Yeah, that's really interesting. We know of a lot of different processes that will lead to senescent cell formation, you know, everything from short telomeres to damaged DNA to, you know, decreased mitochondrial function to— now you're bringing in the idea of actually chronic infection, you know, excess oxidative stress do it. Lots of different things will do it. The other interesting thing is we're now able to look at the immune system through the senescence, you know, window, if you will, and see how senescent the immune system itself is becoming. We have a couple different tests that will enable us to do that. One of them is directly related to shortened telomeres. But of course, if you have a chronically overactivated immune system and it's dividing faster and harder, working harder, it becomes senescent that much faster. So, right. So yeah, it's, it's the way we've started to think about it. You're talking about everything on a cellular level, which is I think the right approach. And we've kind of moved beyond slicing and dicing the human being into all their, you know, component parts like a butcher shop, right? Into, into a systems biology approach that includes, you know, all the different levels of, of interaction. We also know from Michael Levin's work, I don't know if you're familiar with him, um, out of, I think he's out of Tufts. He's shown that cells communicate not only biochemically, but they communicate through electrical fields. And you can actually take an organism like a mouse and basically construct their genetics so that they are 100% guaranteed to get cancer. And yet if you create an electrical field around them that reinforces healthy cell function, they never develop cancer, right? So the point is that medicine, I think, has been far too Newtonian in the past, right? It's receptors and molecules. And right when we know there's quantum energy fields inside cells, we know biology itself is a quantum process. We know that electromagnetic energy plays a big role in what's happening, which is why PEMF can work and other electrical stim things can work as well as laser and light and all these things. So as you're listening to this, just understand that you're much more complex than you've been led to believe, which, which actually is a good thing because it gives us more points of access to actually balance things out. And from our perspective, we have this systems biology approach where we're trying to bring the whole thing back into equilibrium through what we call the elegant solution, where, you know, doing key things to actually move things in the right direction. So it's kind of fun.

Yeah, yeah, it is fascinating to look at it at that cellular level and recognize that, you know, every cell in your body is doing everything it can to survive, to function properly. Properly.

Yeah.

So the more that we can do to create that environment, that internal environment, then allows the cells to function properly. But yeah, cells using electromagnetic energy, biophotons, just all the different ways of communicating. But it's, you know, every cell in the body must stay in constant communication with all other cells for us to function as a unit. But if your cells are healthy, all that's going to happen.

Yeah. Yeah, no, it's really cool. Well, I really appreciate the deep dive that you've done on this. I think you're bringing some new wisdom into certainly my purview, and I think to the listeners and the field at large. So that's— congratulations on that. It's really great to see.

Yeah, thank you. Yeah, it's trying to put it in a form that people can understand so that they can start being more proactive. I mean, we look at this thing, and now the World Health Organization has defined that at that 7 out of 10 people worldwide are struggling with some kind of chronic health condition. That's just, yeah, that's, that's kind of ridiculous.

And I think it's the environment, quite honestly, is a, plays a big role, massive role. You know, I was just in Washington, DC, actually speaking at an event put on by a group that's called A4LI that's looking to improve longevity research funding., and we talked, Dr. Oz came in and spoke with us and some people from CMS, some people from ARPA-H. And what was interesting was that they have this three-legged stool approach about how they're going to make America healthy again, right? It's education, access, and incentives. So we're going to educate people in a, in a 10-minute visit once a year on how to live a healthy life. Then we're going to incentivize a doctor with $10 or $15 to spend the extra 10 or 15 minutes talking to this And we're gonna have improve access by making sure everybody has at least one healthy physical a year where they can get this information. You know, you are, you and I are sitting here like, oh my gosh, this is like doomed to failure. It's, it's so little. And you know, if you've ever had, like you and I have practiced and you try talking to people, it was literally 2% of people that would actually implement for me anyway, you know, what we talked to 'em about from heart disease standpoint. Yeah. So we know that's destined to fail. However, If you put people into a healthy environment, right, where they don't have GMO foods and they don't have seed oils and they don't have high fructose corn syrup and they don't have, you know, all this stuff and pollutants and everything else, you know, everything that goes on. If you put 'em in a healthy environment, you'll accomplish a whole lot more, right? Just because you can't walk into every 7-Eleven and buy, you know, high fructose corn syrup. So it's, it's, it's really interesting. I think it's really misguided. I, I, the intention is admirable, but the, it's, it's really a complete misunderstanding, I think, of what it takes to be healthy because nobody's got willpower at 8 o'clock at night. I don't, you don't, right? If there's ice cream in the fridge, I'm eating it.

Sure. You know, I mean, I've connected with so many people and looking at my personal experience too, people do want to feel good.

They do.

And if you really help them understand how to do that and what they have to do, they will move in that direction. But, you know, I've come around to thinking that we need to gear our health system to do what it does best, which is acute intervention. Our mechanisms for managing chronic illness are just highly dysfunctional. So we should be helping people, you know, we should have a system that is there for people when they need something that needs direct intervention. But outside of that, the education comes from our society. We just need to make better choices. We need to be telling people. And if you tell somebody something, I mean, I can remember this one patient I had, and, you know, in part 2 of my practice, one of the things I did, all that extra counseling, I hand people out handouts and information and all this stuff. And I had, and I remember one guy, and he walked in, and his wife had drug him in there, and I just automatically, it's like, just don't waste your time. Time. But I did. I went through all the stuff. I gave him all these handouts. I did all this stuff. And I said, I'll never hear from that guy again. And, and he was— his health was terrible. And, uh, and I didn't see him again, as I thought, until a year later. He comes back and he comes in and says, you know, all that stuff you gave me and all that stuff you said, it made sense. And I started doing it and I feel so good. And I just want to come back Thank you. That's it.

That's awesome. Yeah, that's it.

You know, I've learned you don't give up on anybody.

No, that's right.

That's right. And the more that we can— so what you're doing, what I'm doing to get that word out there. And so that, you know, we're really living in a wonderful age of podcast, of information, of AI. Yeah. Can be good or bad, of course, we'll see. But the more that people are hearing this over and over and over again, again. And you know, we did it with smoking. I mean, at one point, you know, that's right, 75% of people smoke. Now it's well below 25%. So if we just keep putting that information out there, yeah, I think people are going to get it. So it's—

that's a great analogy. I like the smoking analogy because what did they do? They changed the environment, right? They took the advertising off TV, They took all this stuff, they started to tax the packs, they did all these things to change the environment around tobacco use, right? And so to my point, that's what has the impact. It's not telling people, you know, and to your point, one guy, you know, I've had people like that too, come back and say, I implemented what you said, I feel so much better. But you and I both know that's a small minority, quite honestly, of all the people we spoke to. It's more about structuring the environment to really support health is kind of how I think about it. So people don't have to think about it.

So, yeah, no, no doubt. And maybe we are starting to make inroads and making that happen.

So, yeah, I like to think so. Well, we'll work together on it. Bill, it's such a pleasure to chat with you. I really appreciate you taking the time.

Well, thank you. It's a pleasure. How do we live young for a lifetime? How do we make 100 the new 30?

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