The Cellular Wellness Solution with Dr. Bill Rawls

Hi, I'm Dr. Tabitha, the gutsy gynecologist. I'm a triple board certified, OB, GYN and Functional Medicine physician. I've embraced the world of functional medicine and wellness through my own personal health journey. And I'm super excited to share my wisdom and unique perspective as it pertains to women's health. After caring for thousands of women, I've come to realize that your gut health determines your gyne health and your overall health. And it's a super gutsy thing for me to go against conventional gynecology practice to bring you the truth. No more band aid medicine, ladies. We're talking root cause resolution on this show. So if you're struggling with hormone imbalance, weight gain, period issues, anxiety, insomnia, you name it, then you've come to the right place. And I want to be your gutsy gynecologist. So welcome. Hi ladies, welcome back. So today I'm bumming it in my gray sweatshirt because it is so dark and dreary outside here in Michigan. I just want you to know that you should always get up with the sunshine. And if there's no sunshine, then you just get up and start moving your body. So it's really important when we're going into these long dark months, especially us northern hemisphere people, to get up and exercise your body in the morning, move your body, get some kind of sunlight into your eyes, hitting your retina to stimulate your cortisol awakening response. If you don't have any sunlight, you can get a full spectrum white light lamp on Amazon really cheap and just shine that in your direction for the first 10 or 15 minutes in the morning. You want to stimulate that cortisol awakening response. But, but moving your body is key. Like get your muscles pumping. They are your sugar burners, your, you know, your fat burners, get your blood flowing to move the hormones through your body, move the toxins out, sweat things out, get those toxins out of your body. So that is what I want you to get out and do today. Like pick a way to move your body. I don't care what it is, I just want you to move today. You can move while you're listening to this, right? You can go for a walk, you can get on the treadmill, on the peloton, whatever you want to do, but get moving. So anyway, I'm really excited about my conversation today because at the heart of functional medicine, functional medicine means how is our body functioning at a cellular level? So cellular medicine, cellular health, cellular wellness. In my mind, that equals functional medicine. That is how a functional medicine provider should be thinking when they are evaluating your health history and your labs and all of that. It's like, how is your body functioning at the cellular level? What is going on inside your trillions of cells? Cells with all these processes that are working together to make the tissues and the organs work and the systems work and then the body. So it's like cells, tissue, organ systems, body. And my guest today wrote the book the Cellular Wellness Solution. So what he found on his journey come coming back from burnout, as a physician himself, is he had all these diagnoses from conventional medicine like fibromyalgia, you know, chronic Lyme disease, which they don't even recognize. But he wasn't getting well, he wasn't figuring out why. And he went on this journey and he figured out that you have to literally heal your cells. And he has found an amazing way to do that. He's going to talk to us about herbs and their beautiful properties to help cells heal. So I'm just really excited for this conversation because we don't talk about this very much. And he's doing a lot of cutting edge stuff which we talked about after the recording ended. So hopefully he'll be back in the future with more stuff about microbes and our microbiome. Microbes refer to bacteria, viruses, yeast, parasites, all the little guys that we live with on this earth and how they get into our body and they either help us or harm us. So he's just a wealth of knowledge. We're going to talk about how herbs not only help the cells function, but how that relates to, to hormone balance, thyroid disease, gut issues, all of this stuff that you guys care about. So I hope you listen to this episode all the way through. Remember, you can always pause it and come back to it. That's the beauty about a podcast. And share it with every woman. You know, like, don't keep this a secret. It's really important that we support each other as women and we lift each other up and ask, like, how are you actually doing? Not just I'm fine, but sharing with each other. I'm struggling. I'm not fine. This is what's going on. Or I just had an amazing kick ass week at work and I'm doing amazing and help her celebrate that. Like, we should be able to live in our authenticity, celebrate our wins and share our struggles.

So.

So be that amazing friend to the woman that you wish that you had and that's what you will receive. I truly believe that. So let's dive deep into Cellular wellness and herbs and everything related to getting you actually well and feeling good and not just managing disease. So, and the cool thing is, is he was an OB GYN and his story is way too close to mine. It's crazy. So he's going to share that a little bit with you. Let me just sing his praises. So. For over 30 years, as a fourth generation physician, Dr. Bill Rawls has dedicated his life to medicine. When a health crisis in his early 40s abruptly changed his quality of life, he came face to face with the limitations of modern medicine and, and began to research the vast possibilities of alternative treatments. Today, Dr. Rawls shares the revelations that helped himself and thousands of others reclaim their lives and find their own paths to wellness. So he's the best selling author of Unlocking Lyme. So if you have concerns about Lyme disease, check that out and the Cellular Wellness Solution. He's the medical director and co founder of Vital Plan, which is a holistic health company and certified B corporation. So they do herbs and all that amazing stuff. And he's got some pretty impressive endorsements on his book. Dr. Hyman, Dr. Axe, a lot of amazing people. So check out his book. It's such a great resource. And if you are like me and you're a lifelong learner and you really want to understand stuff like, his book is a quick, easy way to like, go to medical school without spending $200,000, it's pretty cool. He's gonna give you like, the basic understanding of what's going on in the cells, what common problems we see and how to tackle that, and then what herbs to use, how to know if herbs are safe and what to look for and how to use them. Such a good resource. So I'm really excited for you guys to hear this conversation and check out his books. So here we go. Well, welcome, Dr. Rawls, to the gutsy gynecologist show.

Well, thank you very much. Pleasure to be here.

I'm really excited to talk to you because you have gone down a path very similar to mine. You were a conventional OB gyn. You burnt yourself out and created a whole new life. I would love for you to just share with my listeners, like, what did you learn along the way? Oh, what was the biggest thing?

Like, how many hours do we have.

Conventional gynecology to finding this world of wellness? Like, for me, it was like shock.

Yeah, it is. And I had to rethink everything. And it's, it's not that I threw all the training that I got in medical school out the window. It's basically that I had to turn it on its head and ask questions very differently, and it took me to a very different place. So how you look at something, the perspective you look at, it really matters and how you interpret that and what kind of end results you're going to get. So it challenged that, you know, and I probably, like, you went into OB GYN because it was dealing with wellness and health and bring life into the world, right?

Yes.

Yeah, exactly.

Most women weren't sick.

That's right. Yeah. You know, it's when I was in medical school, out on the medical floors, and they were just, you know, all these patients getting all these heavy medications, and none of them were getting well. You know, they were just being maintained in this chronic state of illness. And I really didn't want that. But like you, you know, years and years of not sleeping and forced into poor health habits, poor eating habits and everything else, just because you didn't have time for anything else, caught up with me. I crashed. And when that happened, you know, I first identified with fibromyalgia, later found that I was carrying some of the microbes associated with Lyme disease, identified with chronic Lyme disease, found out the conventional medical. Does it even recognize chronic Lyme disease as a diagnosis? And, you know, and this whole thing went around in circles. And what I found is that conventional pathway of treating illness, of helping people with chronic illness just didn't work. And so I had to find something else. And that's how I ended up with a completely different life.

Yeah, it's so amazing. And I wish more physicians could see this pathway and see this whole world of health and wellness, because I really was not exposed to it. I'm sure you weren't either. And it's all about the disease processes and managing disease. And I remember going into my internship year and they came out with algorithms to treat everything. And so they were dumbing down how you would admit, like chest pain workup in the emergency room or heart failure or whatever the diagnosis was. You would do these check boxes. And so I remember being in internship thinking, do they not want us to even think critically anymore? They just want us to, like, check the boxes and give this med for this number. And it felt so wrong to me. You know what I mean? Like, didn't even make any sense.

Yeah. Cookbook protocols designed to basically use pharmaceuticals or medical surgical therapies to inhibit the processes of illness. Yeah, it's true. And again, it's that perspective. So I would make this statement. Our conventional medical system does A wonderful job of doing what it's designed to do, and that is acute intervention. We do a great job at acute intervention.

We keep people alive. We do a really good job at that.

Somebody has a tubal pregnancy, we can fix that. Somebody has a heart attack, we can probably save their life, as long as it's not, you know, too catastrophic. We can do a lot with acute intervention, but the problem is our rate of chronic illness goes up every year. Now, 60% of the population is designed, defined as being chronically ill. And we treat chronic illness with ongoing acute intervention. Basically, we use drugs to enter to artificially interrupt those disease processes, and people don't get well. They get stuck in this state of managed illness and they just get worse every year. And then they have to deal with all the side effects of all the drugs and all these other things. And so when I was coming along and really figuring this out, it was, I came to this thing of, you have to ask the question differently. You have to ask, start asking why? Why is the patient sick? We don't do that, but it seems like it would be critical. And for acute intervention, yes, we are looking for that. Ectopic pregnancy and all of that. But with chronic illness, what we're searching for is the diagnosis which defines the drug protocol. And stop and ask that question, well, how did this person end up in this place? And what can we do to modify those factors to get them back to where we want them to be, which is a state of wellness.

So when you were sick and being told you had fibromyalgia and you were just burnt out, what were the doctors telling you was going to help you?

They really didn't have anything. I mean, they were just frustrated, right? So I had every symptom that we define as chronic Lyme disease or chronic or fibromyalgia, which is everything under the sun. You know, I had joint pain, cardiac arrhythmias. You know, I was having PVCs every second to third beat with constant chest pain. I had digestive dysfunction, chronic constipation, brain fog, neurological symptoms, burning feet, any name I had. But I didn't have a diagnosis, you know, it wasn't enough. And I found that, you know, that's about half of people. When you go to any medical clinic, about half of people are still searching for a diagnosis, you know, because you're going to be really sick before you be are defined. So, yeah, there was a point that I was wondering, did I have Parkinson's, Did I have ms? You know, there are various kinds of things, but I wasn't quite sick enough for those things. So we worked up my thyroid for a while. You know, some of the thyroid functions were off. And it's like, okay, finally found the answer. Will treat me with thyroid. And that didn't help. And finally found these Lyme microbes. Yeah, if I can just find these microbes in my system, then they can make me. Well, did the antibiotics, did nothing. Made me even sicker. And that's about the time that I gave up. But that was after cardiac cath, all kinds of. I mean, you know, I spent a ton of money on the system just with workups that. That got me nowhere.

Wow. Oh, my gosh. I know that my listeners are resonating with this because I hear this over and again from people. It's like they get shuffled down the path, sent to specialist to specialist to deal with each little symptom, and nobody is taking a step back and looking at the entire picture and asking. And it wasn't that you needed to figure out a diagnosis. It was that you needed to heal your cells. So I just love that you figured all of this out. And I want to come back to that thyroid thing that you mentioned, because that's a really common issue for women, is being told they have a sluggish thyroid, and that's their problem. And I try to explain to women all the time that is a symptom of a deeper cause. It's a canary in a coal mine. It's trying to tell your body that you're downregulating your energy for a reason. So we need to come back to that. But see, you went, you left the conventional system. They failed you. You figured all of this out on your own. You wrote this amazing book, the Cellular Wellness Solution. I love this sentence. It's about cultivating wellness as opposed to treating illness. So that's pretty much it. Like, if you want to cultivate wellness, you actually want to heal. You need to get to the root causes. So tell my listeners, what the heck is cellular medicine? Because I know. But I. I know most people don't understand that.

Yeah, when you take it down to the cellular level, you simplify everything and everything starts to make sense, which is really cool. It took me a decade to get to that point, though, you know, because you have to get through all that conventional stuff. And then I had to wait for the evidence, the science, to actually show that, yeah, you are. You're on the right track. You know, this. This is real. But taking it down to the cellular level changes the Conversation. So what we're doing with our conventional medical evaluation, all those diagnostic tests that we do, and everything el. What we're measuring is dysfunctional processes, dysfunctional cellular processes in the body. And the body is really complex. You know, we've got a lot of things going on inside, so we're measuring those individual processes so we can artificially block or intervene those processes. And because there are so many different processes, thousands of different things possible, you end up chasing your tail with medications and labs, and it just keeps going around and around in circles. But the simple fact of the matter is we are beings made of cells. You know, we are composed entirely of cells. We have trillions of cells over several different, you know, a couple hundred different types of cells. Each cell in the body has a job, but each cell in the body is functionally independent. Right? So your car, you know, we think, a lot of people think of doctors treating us like we would treat a car. A car is a unit made of parts. And when any of those parts break, that unit is not workable until you go in and physically fix the parts. It can't fix itself. All right, Our body, what makes our body special is cells. Because each cell is an independent functional unit that is capable of self repair, right? So it means your heart isn't a unit itself. It's this composite of billions of cells. So you can lose cells and your heart keeps right on pumping. And those cells can, if they get stressed. As long as that stress isn't catastrophic, they can recover, they can repair. So what healing is, is the ability of our body to. Of our cells to repair damage from, from stress or injury, or regenerate new cells. So the fact that our body is, has this ability to repair itself is remarkable. And we ignore that with medical therapies. So instead of looking at how do we block all these abnormal processes, the other the question to ask is what's stressing ourselves? Right? So if you feel great, it means all the cells in your body are healthy and are working great. Everything is coordinated, all the functions of your body. So all the hormones and mess and nerves and other signaling agents in the body, cellular signaling, it's cells talking to one another so they can coordinate functions. So if all your cells are healthy and all the functions are coordinated, then you'll feel well. If you have symptoms, a symptom is a sign that cells have been stressed or injured in some way. Like if you step wrong in your ankle, you've damaged or injured cells in your ankle. And a couple of things happen. One, those injured Cells release chemicals that activate nerves that tell the brain something's wrong. We feel it as pain, but the other thing that happens is you lose that function. So when you have symptoms going on throughout your body, it means a lot of different cells are stressed in the body. So if you walk on crutches after you strain your ankle and take the stress off, it will heal. So what healing is is the ability of cells to recover from being stressed or injured and regeneration of new cells. So we all do that. We have that ability. Our car does not, our cell phone does not. Nothing man made has that ability. So healing is the ability of cells to recover from stress. So what chronic illness is, is when healing is impaired, the stresses are ongoing. Cells aren't getting a break. It's like if you just keep walking on a bad angle and don't use crutches, sooner or later the cells are just going to keep breaking down, it's going to keep getting worse. Well, that's what's happening in chronic illness. The stresses are ongoing. So where I focus my attention instead of going, how do we block those abnormal processes to what's stressing the cells chronically and what can we do about that? And when we look at the factors that can cause cellular stress and proactively start changing that, modifying that, then that's when we actually promote healing. And that's important. Not. There are no drugs on earth that actually directly promote healing. They can stabilize a process of illness in an acute stage, but they don't directly promote healing. So only we can do that.

Oh my gosh. That's such an important concept for everyone to understand. Like if you want to heal, you have to support your body and its natural processes. So I find this to be so important for women especially because hormones run their lives and you don't have healthy skin cells and healthy receptors for those hormones to bind to. You cannot send the signals, you cannot transport things in and out of the cell. Right. I would love for you to talk about that because women are often told your levels are fine or this is fine and it's really the cell that's not healthy. You know, I'm sure you remember the low fat, no fat diet of the 90s and how that absolutely destroyed roid us. And I try to tell women like fats are what make your cell membranes. You need fats to be healthy.

Yeah, it's true. Yeah, it's, yeah, there were a lot of things back in the 80s and yeah, we all had to figure that out the hard way, I think. But it's important, you know, that idea that we're made of cells, but all of our cells have to, to communicate. And we hear that word homeostasis a lot. So what that is is when all the functions of all the cells in the body are balanced. So our brain is constantly, through our five senses, sensing what's going on both inside the body and outside the body. And it's sending messages through nerves and hormones to define cellular functions to match what's going on to balance those functions. So homeostasis is that state of balance when all the cells in the body have coordinated functions and everything is working in unison. And homeostasis is different whether you're sitting in a chair resting or out, you know, going for a jog or running a marathon. So, so those, so that change is really important. So we lose track of the fact that what hormones do is coordinate cellular functions. That's, that's the purpose of all hormones. And it's also cellular communication. But hormones are produced by cells. The thyroid gland is made of cells. The adrenal gland is made of cells. And if those cells aren't healthy, then those things are going to be affected also. So that side, that concept of cellular stress applies to all cells in the body. And it's. And that, you know, that in itself simplifies things too, because when I started asking that question, what stresses cells, I got it down to only five categories of things. And you know, that seems, wow, that's. That, that's responsible for all illness. We can get into the nitty gritty of why that is. But yeah, you can explain all illness from those five factors. It's nourishment, what you eat. Are you eating the right things that your cells need? And is your GI tract working? Are your intestinal cells absorbing those nutrients? Toxics, toxins, Both toxic substances that are natural, like mold toxins, but also all the petrochemicals that we're exposed to now. And you know, we live in a world that's a sea of, of unnatural radiation. So environment, what kinds of things and how those things are affecting our cellular functions. You pollute your cells with all kinds of contaminants and they don't work as well. And that affects every cell in your body. Third is mental stress. So when we're mentally stressed, we keep our body, you know, our brain says, okay, things, we're being threatened. There's a saber through tiger around the corner. We have to keep everything in the body in high alert. And that affects sleep. And so when you push your cells constantly and Keep them revved up. They don't have downtime to recover. And that's especially true if we're not sleeping, because nighttime when we're asleep, is when our cells get the downtime that they need to recover from stress. So if you're sleeping four to six hours, average is six and a half hours in this country, you're cutting yourself short. You're not getting cellular recovery. You start that day, your cells are going to work all day and then not recover again the night, and they're going to start a little more stress the next day. Fourth category is physical factors. And that can be everything from trauma, you know, that affects cells, to being sedentary. And the really important thing that we do with exercise is we move blood. And when we move blood, we dilate blood vessels and we wash away chemical toxins and other things that our cells need. It's really the first step of detoxification. And then the fifth category, this is the big one, this is the wild card, is microbes. And that's where my journey has carried me, is understanding the role that microbes play and how microbes determine what kind of illness we might end up with even more than our genesis.

Yeah. Oh, my gosh, I love that. I want to talk about that. I do want to talk about number one, because I heard you on another podcast talking about food and how the way that we grow our vegetables now has, you know, it's done in a less stressful environment. So the phytochemicals are no longer there. I would love for you to explain what are phytochemicals and why do we need them, and why don't we have them as much anymore?

Well, that's getting into the argument of. Of why we should all take herbs, which is my big yes, yes, we're getting big message. Everybody should take a handful of verbal supplements every day. But even further with the problem of diet, though, is people aren't eating vegetables. They're eating grain.

Yeah, there's problem number one.

And, you know, so we're eating loads of carbohydrates that are just really terrible for ourselves. You know, they just really destroy our cells and our collagen and everything else. And so the carbs are really bad, and we're not eating vegetables. But the. The part of what we're getting with vegetables, though, from the plant is chemical substances called phytochemicals. So when you look outside at any plant, that plant is having to defend itself from all kinds of the same stress factors that we are. Free radicals, radiation, Toxic substances and especially microbes. So plants have a chemical defense and regulatory system. It's a little bit like our immune system, but it's chemical. So plants are producing this wide spectrum. So it's not just a random collection of chemicals. It is a system of chemicals that the. The plant is using to protect itself. But also there are chemical messengers in that mix that the plant is using to coordinate cellular functions. Just like we are using hormones and neurotransmitters, plants are using chemical messengers to coordinate functions within the plant. And it just so happens that a lot of plants use very similar hormones and neurotransmitters that we do. So when we take these things, it tends to have a balancing effect on our stress hormones, which is really wonderful. So there are a lot of herbs that, that actually have that. But when we take a plant, we get all these protective chemicals. And we were doing that for hundreds of thousands of years. When humans were eating a forage food diet, about two thirds of what most people on earth ate was plant matter. But it wasn't cultivated plants and seeds. They didn't eat grains, they didn't eat beans. They were eating leaves and stems and roots and berries from the wild. And they were having to eat a lot of it because that. The one thing it didn't have that our food has now is calories. So they eat a lot of this stuff, and they were getting a lot of these chemicals that the plant was producing. But all of those plants were wild plants. So when we started cultivating food, and especially when we started cultivating food, we started cultivating grains and beans. Grains and beans really don't have much in the way of these protective phytochemicals, because it's just, you know, that's just the seed. It's not the plant arts itself. So when we started cultivating vegetables, eating more grain, or cultivating plants eating more grains, we started cultivating in calories at the expense of these protective phytochemicals. So even our healthiest vegetables, not to say that broccoli and cabbage and cauliflower and, and, and celery and, and squash and all of these things, they're really good for you. But you're not going to find the same protective phytochemical concentration in these plants, because our plants, all of our plants are cultivated under conditions that we de. Stress the plant, we don't want to stress our food plants. We want them to produce lots of calories. And over years and years of cultivation, we've actually bred out those protective qualities that's one of the reasons we have to use so much pesticides and herbicides in our plants because they can't protect themselves anymore. So it's a deficiencies. And, and so when I look at deficiencies of our diet, you know, we have great excesses with carbohydrates, but our deficiencies aren't as much in vitamins and minerals as it is these really important protective phytochemicals. And because of that, it really makes a taste of the fact that we should be getting these things. And herbs, which are basically wild plants, are one of the best ways to do that.

I love that. And I, like, I hope everybody's mind was blown a little bit, like, because that's really important, that our bodies were made to utilize herbs and, you know, keep us healthy. And I, I think of the fact that nowadays I use herbs every day in my practice. I'm giving oil of oregano and thyme and slippery elm and passion balm and all these things. And I didn't know any of that in medical school, right?

No, yeah, not at all.

But they're just as powerful and they're so much better because they actually are just ridiculous. Turning you to homeostasis. Right. As opposed to just covering up a symptom. I think that's what a lot of people think, is that herbs are just covering up symptoms again. So can you talk about how it's modulating cellular health for us?

Yeah, it's, you know, when we look at herbs, there's a pretty broad spectrum of what that entails. There are a lot of plants out there that classified as herbs, and some of them do have drug like effects, but most of the herbs that we're using have more of a restorative property. So comparing herbs to drugs. So what we're doing, our whole desire to use a drug is to block an abnormal process. So drugs are designed to specifically block certain enzymes, certain receptor pathways, or activate pathways. Pathways. And what we're doing there is modulating dysfunctional cellular processes that have been, you know, disrupted by stress and chronic illness. So we're artificially affecting those things, but we're not affecting that cellular stress. So a lot of people look to herbs to treat symptoms like they would treat a drug. And a lot of people come to the conclusion, well, herbs are just a weak version of the drug growth. They're not, they take longer to work because they're working differently. So what we're doing with most of our herbs is we are inhibiting the stresses that are driving the cellular dysfunction very different than a drug. So we're blocking free radicals, we're blocking toxic substances. And a big thing, a really big thing that I found that the herbs are doing is they are inhibiting microbes, bacteria, viruses, protozoa. All plants have antimicrobial properties, and I think that's a big part of what they do. So it's. It's. It's hitting all these cellular stress factors. So when you reduce cellular stress, you allow the cell to recover. And when cells recover, well, that's what healing is all about. Out. So drugs don't directly promote healing. Herbs do do everything that you want to promote healing. And so that takes longer. There's no doubt about it. It won't work as fast as a drug for blocking the symptom. But the end result is that you restore cellular health, and with it, you restore wellness of the whole body.

Oh, my gosh. That's so good. Yeah. I would love for you to talk a little bit about thyroid, because a lot of my patients have either autoimmune thyroid disease or just subclinical hypothyroidism, or they've been told they have a sluggish thyroid. And I love the idea of using herbs to help the cells heal so they can function again, because I truly believe that organs don't just stop working. Your thyroid isn't stopping producing thyroid hormone for no reason. There's something right behind that. Right.

Yeah. Yeah. Looking at the bigger picture, here's how I look at hypothyroidism, and we can continue that even into how we think about Hashimoto's. So when I look at someone with hypothyroidism, what that tells me is their thyroid cells are stressed. And so, you know, there are factors that are stressing those cells directly. But part of the problem is it's generally a situation where we're overworking the thyroid cells. So the deeper problem is that person typically has extra stress factors, you know, in the form of diet, chronic emotional stress, toxic stress, these other kinds of things going on that are stressing all the cells in the body. So the brain perceives that cellular stress. You know, all those cells are collectively sending distribution stress signals to the brain. And going, things aren't good. We need to do something. And. And they're also. When cells are stressed, they work harder, they use more energy. So metabolism. They're drawing. They're drawing more. More nutrients to. To drive that. That greater metabolism. So the brain is going, all right, thyroid, push harder. Get that thyroid hormone out, because we need to really pump that thyroid so these cells can get the what they need so they can work harder. So we're driving our thyroid cells harder. But also, I think they're underlying factors. And in my impression, whenever you have any kind of autoimmune illness, you're always talking about invasion of cells by intracellular micro. And I know we haven't really touched on that yet, but microbes, we pick up various kinds of bacteria, viruses, protozoa, throughout our, our lifetime. And this idea that we have microbes just in our gut and on our skin, yeah, they're there, but it turns out things trickle across into our tissues. And that's a big part of my research right now. And what's going on in the science community is really looking at this concept that we have dormant microbes in our cells throughout our body. And when we, when our cells get stressed, those microbes, those things that we've been picking up since we've been children, start reactivating. And when that happens, the body attacks. That's those cells that are, that have these microbes and other cells, other normal cells, get attacked at the same time. That's what autoimmunity is. There's no other way to explain it. So they haven't found definite microbes associated with Hashimoto's, but there is a hint that that's what's going on. So I think we have this underlying microbe component. We have cells that are driven harder than they need to be. Because, you know, when I'm looking at a person with hyperthyroid symptoms, it's like I had all of those symptoms before I started seeing abnormal thyroid function. So I don't think all the symptoms of hypothyroidism or hypothyroidism, I think you were talking about, there's already widespread cellular distress going on, and we're driving that thyroid harder. So it's kind of one of those horse before the cart type things. I'm not sure which comes first, and it's probably both simultaneously. But I can tell you I've worked with so many patients, myself included, where I restored cellular health and restored wellness and my thyroid normalized. And I've had plenty of patients that be able to get off thyroid hormone. That's not absolute across the board. You know, if we only have so many cells, and if you have truly eliminated enough thyroid cells, you're not going to get them back. And you may have to use thyroid hormone. But if you're taking care of those cells, if you embrace that concept of cellular wellness, then you stop losing cells and you're not going to continue to need more and more, more and more and more thyroid hormone every year. And you may actually be able to get off the thyroid hormone.

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I see that every day in my practice. And you know, I think a great example of these microbes is I just think of the viruses that come out when we're stressed. You know, the, the shingles and the herpes virus with the cold sores when our body is under stress. Like you're saying it's the physical cells, those microbes are replicating and damaging our cells and preventing them from doing their job. And I think it's in the infancy of understanding the bacterial microbes that are involved in all of this. But I totally agree, that's where we're going. Like when I do stool testing, there's a whole section on the autoimmune associated bacteria living in your gut. And, and so we just, we're on the frontier of this. So I think that's why people are like, but my doctor doesn't know about this and they're not going to. I remember when I was practicing, like, the only thing I read was whatever was required for ACOG or NAMS to get me through my cme. Because I was so burnt out, I didn't have time to learn and read and research or watch TV or any of that. Did you?

No. You know, interestingly, there are two factors here, right? They have studied this. We, we like to study things, right? So they have studied this and there's something called the research to clinical medicine gap. And they've measured it to be an average of 17 years from the time that scientific studies are published that define a certain thing to the thymits implemented in clinical medicine. So the studies that I'm looking at right now might be recognized by the practicing medical community in 15 to 20 years if then. And the problem with what I'm looking at right now is going to rewrite our definition of chronic illness. And a big part of that is we're going to find that most of the medical therapies we use now is don't apply. And the pharmaceutical companies are not going to like that.

Right. And so I think that's a big reason that those research studies don't get the media and everything else, because that's suppressed. You know, it's unfortunate, but that's the truth. So we need to use podcast platforms and YouTube and books and everything else to help educate people and help them understand. And I, I Think it's really amazing that we have so much information at our fingertips. And I love your book. It's such an amazing resource because you can like literally learn about all the herbs you want. You can troubleshoot, like prostate health, menopause, and just see what herbs help with what. So that's really helpful. And like my listeners want that. I have women who are like, I want to learn more. They just, just, they love the learning and understanding it. My mom wants to go to medical school. I'm like, well mom, you're in your 70s. I don't think that's a great idea. But I just thank you for putting this information out because I think people need some kind of good resource because they're just not getting it from conventional medicine at all.

Yeah, well, you know, it's interesting. My journey is now, you know, I, I've been robustly healthy for a good decade of my life now, but my journey total is, you know, 15 or 20 years. And a decade ago I could not have written this book even though I was coming to these conclusions. And you know, it. And logically that's where things were carrying me. It's only been in the past three to five years that the science has really come out that supports that, that I could actually document it and say, okay, here's the study that documents what I'm saying here. And so I had to just wait for some of that.

So what would you say are like a few of your favorite herbs that everybody would benefit from?

All right, well, yeah, everybody asked me that there are lots of great herbs out there. But. But yeah, so there are herbs that we would take to help us with a problem like sleep or stress. Like ashwagandha is a greater for stress. Passion flower is really good for sedative properties. But the message I want to get from across is we could all benefit from taking certain herbs every day. So when we look at herbs that we would want to take every day, we wouldn't want them to have drug like properties or side effects like a drug might. You know, you don't really want to feel something. What you want to do is just feel like a better version of yourself. And that's what potential herbs can do for us. And typically it's not one herb, it's a blend. It's a combination of different herbs. And the reason for that is because even though all herbs are going to have that defense and regulatory system built in, it's a little bit different because different herbs, different plants deal with different stress factors and the environment then their native environments. So when you combine different herbs, you get a broader spectrum of benefit. And it's this synergy. I often like it to an orchestra. Like if you went to hear a symphony and there was one violin. Yeah, that would be okay. You add in three or four more violins and then the whole brass section and the whole, and the percussion and everything and you suddenly you've just got this wonderful thing. Well, it's kind of the same with herbs. When you blend them, you have these wonderful properties of each of the herbs that enhance the value of the other herbs. So I do have a standard list. Top of my list is an herb called rhodiola. It is defined as an adaptogen. So an adaptogen is something that helps us tolerate certain kinds of stress better, but also helps to balance stress hormones. So rhodiola is native to Siberia and it has a lot of physical, harsh environmental stress. And so it's really good for helping us adapt to physical stresses and mental stresses. Interestingly though, in my study of plants and herbs, you find similar plants all around the world. And I've actually found that rhodiola, or a very close relative of rhodiola, grows in our Appalachian mountains of North America. So you find different things that are common around the world. Next is actually not a plant. We include it on our list of herbs. Mushrooms, medicinal mushrooms. So reishi mushroom is a wonderful. If you go walking in the woods and you see a mushroom that looks kind of like a fan coming out from the side of the tree and it has kind of a rusty rainbow color, that's a reishi. So there are different species of ricci that grow all around the world, but the Asian species has been studied in Japan and has some of the most potent anti cancer properties known. And it's a great immune modulator. It balances immune system functions, brings down overactive immune system functions and bumps up, stimulates underactive. So immune modulators are really wonderful and reishi is one of the best. So that's on my list. Turmeric. Everybody knows turmeric. It's the yellow color in curry. In India, just about the entire population consumes somewhere around a gram of turmeric every day in their curry. And it's thought to be one of the reasons why in India they have lower one of the lowest rates of Alzheimer's and cancer in the world because of the potent anti inflammatory properties of the earth. So that's one on the list. And then one called go to Cola, which is also from India. But I found recently it does. It grows on the coast of South Carolina, which is really interesting, but it's great for your brain. And it has been used through history as this restorative revitalizer. So it's greater. Milk thistle for the liver, I think is really, really important. It specifically protects liver cells. We're all being bombarded with more toxins than any humans on the face that ever have been. And our liver takes a beating. Milk thistle has been found to actually stimulate regeneration of liver cells. That's one of the things with aging is we lose the ability to process all these toxins we're exposed to. So you can take all the binders and detox products you want, but if you don't have a good liver, you're not going to do well with toxins. So taking milk thistle every day I think is important. French maritime pine bark is wonderful because it protects vascular cells and it helps with blood flow, which is great. And then the final one is an oddity. It's called shilajit. Have you heard of that one?

No, I haven't.

All right. It's get ready. It's what shilajit is, is plant substances that have been fermented in the soil with bacteria and then ooze between rocks in the Himalayas. And it's been used for thousands upon thousands of years as this wonderful revitalizer. And actually when I was studying it, I found that native Inuit populations in Canada and Alaska also use it, that it's found in northern latitudes. So it's not a plant as much as it is just plant phytochemicals that have been fermented. Why it's important is because we used to eat on the ground and we actually got a lot of soil in our food and soil bacteria and what they produce, which is something called fulvic and humic acid. And you don't get this from other herbal sources, but it's found to have some really nice adaptogenic qualities. It helps restore our reproductive hormones and it's really good for the GI tract. So I felt like that was something that really brought in another aspect of something we weren't getting in our diet that is part of our ancestral diet. And all of that rounds up a really nice collection of herbs that you can take on a daily basis that will protect your cells, balance your hormones and make you more resilient so you won't feel drug like effects. You'll just feel like a brain, better version of yourself.

Oh my gosh, I love that. That's so good. So you, you Must have this in a product, right?

Yes, of course. But, you know, I encourage you. You know, it's. Yes, we do have products that have that. There's one called Daily Herbal, and I couldn't get all the herbs in that product, so there's. And everybody thinks they need a multivitamin. So there's one called Daily Multi that has some of the other herbs and some other ingredients and your basic B vitamins and minerals and things like that. But aside from that, you know, these are just a few of the many wonderful herbs that people can take. There's so many great choices out there. So I encourage people explore, you know, try these things and. And I wrote the book as a guide to. To keep people from being so timid about herbs to know that they can jump in and start and really experience some wonderful things.

That's wonderful. And you have like a. A chart, a spectrum of, like, the herbs are green or yellow or red. So you shouldn't be afraid to try it, like you said, and see if it helps with what's going on. I think that's great advice because so many people are sick of not feeling better and taking that medicine. That doesn't really help and it causes new issues. So, yeah, explore with herbs a little bit. I think that's a great avenue to try. I use it every day in my functional medicine practice. I love it. So thank you for being a wealth of knowledge and bringing all this information, and I'll have all the links in the show notes for everybody to check you out and to get your book. So thank you.

Well, thank you for helping me share my message. Message. It's. It's been such an exciting journey and I just get really excited to turn other people onto that. So thank you for the opportunity.

You're welcome. Oh, my gosh, I hope you got so much out of that episode. I know that I did. It was a really good reminder for a few things on me. But my golden nugget that I took away was remembering that microbes have so much to do with chronic conditions. And even though this is like Forefront Horizon Medicine, it's not the standard of care yet. We're still learning so much. The research is, like, ongoing and coming out every single day. There's new articles in PubMed, which is where most doctors go to get their research information from studies and things is PubMed. Every single day, there's a new article about how different microbes are associated with autoimmune conditions and diabetes and adrenal fatigue and leaky gut and alzheimer's and dementia and all of these things. Things. And so what can you do right now since we, this is on, you know, this is all just new and like amazing information that we're really starting to understand is focus on gut health. Because the gut is one of the first major barriers from the outside world to the inside world. So our skin is our barrier. Our respiratory tract is a barrier in our gut. So gut things get in through our gut. And we have defense mechanisms to protect us. Namely, we have like three major things in the gut. We have our microbiome, which are our good beneficial bacteria that live within us and they protect us. There are certain bacteria that make a bunch of mucosal barrier over the cells in our intestines to prevent microbes, bad stuff, from getting in and getting into our bloodstream and into our system and into our cells. But if you don't have those good beneficial bacteria, then you can't make that mucosal barrier. And for the past six to eight months, I have been consistently seeing this in my patients on their stool tests. They are lacking the good beneficial bacteria. A lot of women don't have any Akkermansia or faecali bacterium. These are really important bacteria or they have low bacteroides or firmicutes. And that is a setup. It's like, here, come on in, nobody's stopping you. You need those beneficial bacteria to protect you. So you need to have something like a good spore probiotic. I love my spore lift for that reason. You take that, you eat fiber, which fuels your good bacteria, and you stop eating all the franken food. Right? All of the boxes in the bags, that's going to really help. The second layer of your gut barrier is your immune system. So IGA is the branch of the immune system that lines the skin, lines the respiratory tract, lines the gut. Everything from the outside world to in, it's your immune system's frontline defense. It's like the army on the front line ready to attack and prevent invasion. And, and so if you don't have enough IGA guys on the front line, you don't have enough guys to attack and to protect that invasion. So if you have low level iga, which you can either do testing, like stool testing to find out, or if you get recurrent infections, especially respiratory cold, asthma, sinus infections, ear infections, those are oftentimes associated with low IGA levels. And I've been seeing a ton of it since the pandemic because we've used so much hand sanitizer and we've isolated ourselves so much that our immune system is down regulated. It's no longer even producing enough iga. So that's the sunken barrier barrier issue. The third is active leaky gut. So the cells that you know are the barrier between the food you're digesting and the bloodstream, those all have little gap junctions, they open up like doors. They let in the good vitamins, minerals, amino acids, phytonutrients, all that good stuff. And they are supposed to close and keep out bad micro microbes, parasites, bacteria, yeast, toxins, pesticides, all that bad stuff. But things break those doors, those gap junctions. And if those are chronically broke, things can go into your bloodstream that shouldn't. And so I've recently been seeing quite a few women who have all three of those protective barriers. Compromise. They don't have the good beneficial back bacteria, they don't have enough IgA production, and they have active, increased intestinal permeability, aka leaky gut. So you can take spore lift to help with your good probiotics, you can take IGA lift to help your immune system. And even if you don't need it, it's of benefit because we use so much IGA throughout our body. And the third thing is leaky gut lift. So if you take those for a few months, you're gonna heal your gut and you're gonna have less bad bacteria, less toxins and things getting into your bloodstream and getting into those cells that Dr. Rawls was talking about. So get proactive, you guys. Don't wait until you have cracked chronic diseases to address these issues. Because the way we live in this day and age, we all have leaky gut on an ongoing basis. It comes and it goes, and some of us heal it quicker than others. Like he said, our cells are constantly trying to repair and heal themselves. It just depends on whether that stressor that's injuring it is continuing to insult and injure or not. So the things that cause injury are poor diet, not enough fiber, too much stress and Cortisol production, Motrin, NSAIDs like Ibuprofen, Advil, alcohol, it's a huge one. It kills all your good bacteria, it causes leaky gut. You've got to keep that alcohol to minimum, like two drinks on the weekend, max. Synthetic hormones like birth control pills, all of these things destroy the gut. And if it's ongoing, it's really hard for your body to keep up and repair and actually be healthy. So I hope this was helpful. You can at least focus on your gut health. Heal that gut and you can make a lot of headway. And that's what I see all the time with my women. My patients, they do the healthy her program. We do a three month gut healing regimen based on their stool tests and everything shifts. I constantly hear, I didn't know I could feel so good. Oh my gosh, I'm sleeping again. Oh my gosh, I have energy again. Like, why didn't I do this sooner? It's just amazing the kind of shifts that you can make when you really address the root cause issues. So I hope you found this helpful. Share this with everybody you know, reach out if you need one on one support. We are here for you at Dr. Tabitha. Me and my team, like, we're ready to see you and take care of you and hold your hand and guide you through this process. Because it's not an overnight fix. It's not, you know, a pill for an ill supplement for a symptom. It's actual healing. It takes time, but it's totally doable and it's worth it because the amazing life on the other side is just incredible. So. All right, go have a kick ass week, ladies. See you soon.