The Cellular Wellness Solution: The Science-backed Power of Herbs

Hello and welcome to the Living to 100 Club podcast and another premium episode. Thanks to all of our dedicated listeners for tuning in. I'm your host, Dr. Joe Casciani, and here's today's episode. Well, hello to everyone joining us today on our podcast. You're listening to one of the premium podcasts on the Living to 100 Club, and I'm your host, Joe Casciani. Each week, our conversations educate and inspire helping you get the best out of all the years we are given, regardless of what obstacles come our way. Premium subscribers have access to all episodes, including 2 exclusive episodes per month. Thank you for being a subscriber. Your support allows us to continue this mission without sponsors. We hope you are receiving value from every conversation with our experts, presumably much greater value than the price of a subscription. On today's program, we're talking with Dr. Bill Rawls about his new book, The Cellular Wellness Solution. In this program, we explore the science of cellular damage, which accounts for all illness and injury, and cellular repair, the ability of cells to recover from stress. Our guest shares his knowledge of how dormant microbes in the body are connecting Factor to Several Chronic Illnesses and Why 6 in 10 Americans Are Chronically Ill. First, a little background. As a fourth-generation physician, Dr. Rawls has dedicated his life to medicine, but when faced with a personal health crisis in his late 40s with Lyme disease, everything changed. In his quest to regain his health, Dr. Rawls was confronted with the limitations of conventional medicine and knew he had to find his own path to restore wellness. For the past 15 years, he has extensively studied the science behind herbal therapies and new sustainable approaches for protecting health. Dr. Rawls is a leading expert in integrative health and medical director of Vital Plan, a holistic health and herbal supplement company in Raleigh, North Carolina. In addition to his recent book, The Cellular Wellness Solution. He is the best-selling author of Unlocking Lyme. Dr. Rawls, thanks so much for being a guest on our program today.

Oh, my pleasure. Absolutely.

Thank you. Great. I'm looking forward to our conversation. I always like to open by asking our guests to give us the highlights of what brought you to where you are today. I touched on it, of course, in the intro, but give us the highlights if you could.

Yeah, you know, I went to medical school with the idea of just wanting to help people, you you know, with the idea, yeah, let's, let's, let's make people well. And 30 years ago got into it and realized that we could do that for some things, but there were a lot of chronic illnesses where we had very little capacity. So I ended up going into obstetrics and gynecology because it is one of those things that dealt more with wellness and a younger population. And the interventions that you did actually mattered and people got well. And delivering a baby was really cool. But the price for that, 30 years ago, small town America, North Carolina, was doing call every second to third night. And, you know, so I was up and kind of bought into the idea that was going prevalent at the time of why do we really need sleep? So, you know, even when I wasn't on call, I was cutting my sleeping window way down. And I could get away with it in my 30s, probably retrospectively didn't have the best diet. And just, you know, I was trying to balance being active in the community, being a good dad, husband, part of this crazy practice that I was in. And by the end of my 40s, it caught up with me and my health crashed. I mean, everything, heart symptoms, my joints were falling apart. I had brain issues, all kinds of neurological symptoms, just everything. But not really any of the testing was helpful. You know, it's like, well, you've got some symptoms of multiple sclerosis, but you know, I don't think you have that. And I, I developed a tremor of my head and my hands and it was like, but no, you know, you might get Parkinson's one day, but it's not there yet. And it was like nobody could help me. And finally identified with fibromyalgia. Like so many people with these symptoms do, but didn't really want that diagnosis because it's not anything that they can really help with. So like so many people, I kept working at it until I found this diagnosis of carrying this microbe with Lyme disease. Because the symptoms of chronic Lyme and fibromyalgia, pretty much a direct match.

Uh-huh.

So it's like, wow, if I can get that diagnosis for a microbe, I can take antibiotics, I can get well, that's the solution. And of course, I took antibiotics and I got worse instead of better and realized that what we understand of chronic Lyme disease isn't exactly what it is. And that carried me on a journey just looking at that whole question of chronic illness very differently. But along the way, I happened to read a book that led me toward a protocol of using herbs for chronic Lyme disease. And I was at that time looking at them from the point of view of, yeah, I gotta take these herbs to kill the microbes so I can get better. And I realize now that the herbs were doing a whole lot more than that, and it was quite a bit more complicated. But I did get well. I got my life back.

Wow.

It was, you know, a start and stop kind of thing that went on for about 5 years or more. But all the symptoms cleared, including some pretty severe heart issues, completely. And it was like, wow, that got my attention. But not only that, I had been diagnosed with essential hypertension when I was in my 30s. You know, my blood pressure typically was 150 over 100, and I couldn't take any of the medicines because they made me feel so bad, like so many people with hypertension. And my cholesterol had been going up, and my blood sugar had been going up.. And yeah, I changed my diet, I changed my lifestyle, but I just started taking these herbs and ended up just continuing them and everything got better. Arthritis went away. My blood pressure normalized. Now at age 65, my blood pressure is typically 115 over 70. My cholesterol is better than when I was in my 40s. My blood sugar is perfectly normal.. And I'm, you know, diet, lifestyle, no, no doubt. That's extremely valuable. But the herbs I think have done things to enhance my healing capacity. That was pretty remarkable and something to definitely pay attention to. So I spent my life researching it.

Remarkable.

That's a remarkable transformation and a journey that you took from your traditional medicine approach to where you are today. You're sharing a lot of this in your book, and I know we're going to talk about more of some of these concepts today. So let me ask you, when you and I spoke, you, um, you talked about cellular stress as being the cause or contributing to a lot of our medical problems and chronic conditions as well. So help us explain what this cellular stress is and how is it the origin of disease and injury.

Yeah, you know, in conventional medicine, we tend to look at the whole and parts of the whole, right? So we have the whole body and we divide it up into compartments and we have specialists that specialize in those compartments. We have cardiologists and rheumatologists and pulmonologists and nephrologists. And, you know, so it's, it's almost like we are trying to fix the body like we would fix a car, say, right? Right? So a car is a unit, just like your cell phone is a unit. A 747 is a single unit, and if something breaks in that unit, then it needs to be fixed or it's not going to get— it's not going to work again. The beauty of our body though is our heart is not a unit. It's a composite of billions and billions of individual functioning cells. So you can lose cells. So everything that happens in the body is due to the actions of cells. We are a cellular organism, so the smallest functional unit is a living cell. So cells function in synergy, but they all are individual specific units. And, you know, it's really cool that we can lose cells and our body quite keeps quite on work— keeps quite— keeps going functioning, which is different than your car. You know, one thing breaks on your car, it's done. We're losing cells all the time, and we keep right on going. Another thing remarkable about cells that makes them different than, say, a mechanical device is that cells have the ability to repair internal damage and regenerate into new cells. So that enables the body to repair itself. When we damage our tissues, like when we cut our skin or have some kind of an injury, what's happening for that repair, what healing is, is the ability of cells to recover from injury, or if cells have been damaged beyond repair, to actually regenerate new cells. So that whole process of healing is a cellular process. So as long as cells are getting everything they need, the right nutrients, a clean environment, downtime to recover from stress, we can heal, we can repair, we can regenerate. But what happens and what chronic illness is, is when healing is impaired. So when we eat a poor diet, don't get enough rest, or our cells are polluted with toxic substances from the outside environment, or we're not moving blood through being set sedentary, or this microbe factor that we'll talk about more as we go along in the conversation, cells become compromised. They become stressed. They become weakened. So when cells are stressed or weakened, they can't do their job. And so we lose those functions. So people ask me, you know, I've got fatigue. What can I take to fix the fatigue? Well, what fatigue is, is when cells in the body are stressed to the point that they, they're working so hard, they're burning down their energy reserves and they don't have the capacity. So it's, it's a, it's all about cellular stress. So when you look at chronic illness, any kind of chronic illness can be related to cellular stress. So we have a lot of different illnesses because we have several hundred kinds of cells in the body that can be stressed in different ways. But when you start asking that question, what's stressing our cells, as opposed to what's the diagnosis and how do we suppress the symptoms, it puts you on a different playing field and one that really has an endpoint of wellness, unlike so many of our conventional medical therapies that the best we can hope for is a state of managed illness, that we reduce the symptoms or slow the processes with drugs.

So if we get out of the way of cells, they're able to repair themselves. Basically. And you're talking about lifestyle changes, dietary changes, removing some of the pollution, the toxic environment that— right— you're exposed to. And that, that allows the cells to regenerate or repair themselves.

Correct.

Yeah, interesting. So, um, this is how— this is really kind of a micro, um, approach to why good diet works and why physical exercise works and why all these recommendations to stay healthy on a cellular level that really matter. It really—

it makes all the sense in the world. And, you know, we don't tend to do it because our medical system really isn't trained to think that way. We are trained to think to fix illness. So, you know, doctors are trained to use drugs or surgical technologies to treat diagnoses. And it really works very well for acute illnesses or stabilizing illness when it's in a really bad state. You know, we can reduce symptoms, we can slow down the processes so that, you know, it just makes— it puts the body in a much more stable condition. But no drugs have the ability to reduce cellular stress. In other words, no drugs have the ability to actually directly promote healing. So that, that endpoint of wellness doesn't happen very often. And when it does happen, it's because the person's body has been restored to a state where those cells can recover.

Mm-hmm. Wow. Wow. Now, when we talk about the aging process, you know, my, my focus is on longevity and successful aging. You mentioned that the natural aging process is a function of mitochondrial burnout.

Yeah.

And without this burnout, we could live much longer, conceivably over 100, maybe up to 120 years. Help us understand this mitochondrial burnout and what's going on. Yeah.

I, you know, I mentioned that cells have the ability to repair internally damage and regenerate, but that's not unlimited, you know? So what aging is, is the loss of functional cells as we go through time. So we accumulate cells until age 20. And at that point, we— our cells are brand spanking new, and we have 5 to 10 more times the cells that we need to survive. So, you know, there's— it's not surprising that many 20-year-olds feel pretty invulnerable. But after that point, we start gradually losing cells. So even though we do have this pretty high capacity to regenerate cells, repair internal damage. All cells, you know, just that process of working, and the physics of the matter is that cells gradually burn out their mitochondria. And it's a more complex process than I can just explain here, and there are other factors that enter in. I mean, there are multiple aging theories out there, but the one that kind of hits front and center, that explains everything the very best, is this idea that we grad— our cells gradually burn out mitochondria. So we, as that happens, they lose their capacity to regenerate, repair, and they basically just run out of energy.

Hmm.

So, you know, yours and my cellular capacity isn't nearly what it was when, when we were in our 20s. That being said, you know, that, that capacity for longevity is pretty high. And if there were no other stress factors, if there were zero other stress factors, you know, we had a perfect diet, we lived in an environment that was totally clean, we got perfect sleep, we were never stressed, we exercised the perfect amount, and we only had favorable microbes, and the only issue was mitochondrial burnout, theory is that our body would last about 120 years. And so far that's been proven. The longest-lived person that we know of lasted 121 years. Mm-hmm. So most of us don't come near that age though, because we don't eat a perfect diet. We get stressed in a lot of different ways. We have environmental toxins, we don't get perfect sleep, and we have all of these microbes that are become part of our lives throughout our life. And all of these factors do cause a low generates just cellular stress in everyone, and therefore, you know, we typically don't make it. But the message is we should be living a lot longer than we are, and not only should we be living longer, we should be living better.

Yeah, so that really argues in favor of taking all the proper steps, the healthy steps, earlier in our lives, because once the the mitochondrial loss or deterioration starts to take effect, it's hard to reverse that, and it's hard to start it in our later decades, right? It's hard, harder to reverse that in our 80s or 90s.

You know, it's hard to reach people in their, their 20s and 30s, but I do as much as I can because it makes so much difference. But, you know, I, it is true, it's that, you know, the sooner you get started, the better. But I'll have to say that from the time I was 30 to 50, boy, I did not treat my body well. I mean, I was stressing just about pushing every stress button there was, collapsed. And by age 50, I thought, you know, my functional life is done. I had really bad arthritis, heart issues, brain issues, a lot of different things. And with this pathway that I followed, I was able to get all of that back. And here at age 65, I am amazed at what I have regained and how much resilience I've had. I'm aging. I have to work harder to keep what I have.

Mm-hmm.

And I probably have to work harder to keep what I have than if I had started this at age 30, which I would recommend that anybody did. But there's so much. I mean, any point is a place to start, and there is so much that you can get back. It's just a matter of taking care of those cells.

So to a listener of our program and maybe 75 or 85, maybe they haven't lived such a healthy lifestyle and maybe poor diet, or not the healthiest lifestyle, we'll put it that way. It is still possible to reverse some of that downward course? I mean, it's absolutely not inevitable.

Yeah.

You say no control.

Yeah, absolutely. You know, there are limits and, and I think we've got to be reasonable about, you know, how much cellular reserve that we have. But I think anyone can go from one level of health to a higher level of health and can hang on to that. You're gonna have to work a lot harder at age 75 than say at 55 or 35. There's no doubt about it. But yes, I think there is a lot to be gained. And so, you know, no time is too late to start. It's just, you know, training, you know. I mean, if you look at athletes, they're really particular about their diet and their sleep and their environment and all of these things, and they're trying to get the very highest level of health. So there's not really any reason why anyone at any point can't gradually increase that to a certain level. And, you know, and, and at this point I'm kind of beyond having health issues and going, how far can I push this thing?

You know? Yeah.

And so I keep working on my sleep and my exercise and keep tweaking that diet and doing those things and, you know, using the herbs as, as an assist. And I'm still, you know, I'm still creeping up a little bit. Mm-hmm. So, okay. It's, uh, you can really gain a lot.

Yeah, so that's a hopeful message then. I mean, in spite of the kind of aging of our cells and gradual decline of the cell life, it is possible to cut into that trajectory and make some changes that can reduce some of that loss and decline of our cell.

No doubt.

Yeah, yeah. Okay, that's good to hear. Well, let's talk about microbes, Bill. I know you talked about stealth microbes and How do they— first of all, microbes are what, things that we take in?

Microscopic organisms. So bacteria, everybody knows bacteria. Bacteria are one-celled organisms. They are living cells just like our cells are living cells, but bacteria are quite a bit smaller. So a bacterial cell will maybe be 1,000 times smaller than one of our cells. Protozoa are a little bit more complex organisms, so they're a little bit bigger, but they're still one-celled organisms. Certain kinds of fungi called yeast are one-celled organisms that are considered microbes, and then there are viruses that aren't cells, and some people don't consider living, but they act very much like the bacteria. And once bacteria get inside cells, it's amazing how the lines start to blur between a virus and a bacteria. The difference in these kinds of organisms and a multicellular organism, a plant, a human, a dog, or even a tapeworm in your intestine, is multicellular organisms reproduce by sexual functions, where microbes, one-celled organisms, simply divide. And divide and divide. So as long as food is present, as long as they have nutrients in the right conditions, microbes keep growing. Bacteria, viruses, protozoa, all of them just keep growing. And that's so, you know, as you know though, we have bacteria in our gut, we have bacteria in our skin, and we get infections with things as we go through life. But it really gets interesting the more I've dug into this picture in that, you know, the bacteria in our gut are mostly isolated. You know, we have the intestinal lining that keeps them confined and they live off of food material that we haven't digested. On the skin, they're kept on the outer surface by that waxy coat on the skin and they live off of oils that we secrete to lubricate our skin. So everything's gotta eat. Bacteria have to eat. So in those places they have food that they can grow, but they don't really interfere with us. The fact of the matter though is that any organic matter, any living matter is food for something else. So technically all of our tissues, all of our cells, all of our connective tissues and collagen and everything that makes us us is food for microbes. And basically, an infection is a foreign microbe trying to get inside our body. So to get at our tissues, microbes have to cross barriers. They've got to either get through the skin, or they've got to come through the lungs, or they've got to come across that intestinal lining. So we have these barriers to keep microbes separate from our tissues, but turns out those barriers are only so good.

Mm-hmm.

And microbes do get across in infections when we know about it, like a COVID or an influenza. We know about it. What that is, is viruses coming in and trying to break through our barriers to get to our bloodstream, because that's what all the microbes want, is to get to the bloodstream. Because if they can get to the bloodstream, they can get to the tissues in our body. Everywhere. Those barriers are only so good, and it turns out that beyond infections, microbes, bacteria trickle across from the gut and from the skin and from the sinuses and from our gums. And that's why we have an immune system, is to, you know, if microbes break through barriers, the ones inside of us or foreign microbes from the outside, our immune system is there to try to kind of break that confrontation and kill those microbes. So we have white blood cells that are lining our, the, the, the, uh, intestinal blood barrier all through our body, circulating through our body, circulating through our tissues, just waiting for microbes to show up. And they do. So we're constantly, even when we don't feel like we have an infection, we've still got microbes that are trying to cross barriers, and our immune system is constantly at work trying to pick those things up. But it turns out the immune system doesn't get them all. So some things that we've, you know, things, infections from childhood like Epstein-Barr virus and chlamydia, which is a bacteria, and mycoplasmas, these are really common things that everybody gets exposed to, and Toxoplasma, which is a protozoa, and tick airborne microbes, which I got a lot of those when I was a kid, but also gut microbes and things from our gums. They make it to the bloodstream, they make it past the immune system in very small amounts, and they make it to ourselves. So what all of the microbes that have in common is they invade our cells because our cells offer resources, a food source, and protection from the immune system. So that's what they're all trying to do is invade the cells of our body. And it turns out that happens, and we collect microbes in our tissues. If we are healthy, if our tissues are healthy, then what can happen is our— you know, we, we hear a lot about the immune system, but it turns out our cells are not defenseless. Our cells have mechanisms for expelling or killing bacteria and other microbes if they're healthy. If they're not healthy, the microbe wins and breaks down the cell and then invades other cells. That's when we get sick.

Hmm.

But a third possibility is bacteria and other microbes can become dormant inside of our cells. And this is pretty new cutting-edge science that they're starting to call this the dormant blood and tissue microbiome. This past weekend, I reviewed 12 different studies that had looked at healthy volunteers and found bacteria that were dormant inside red blood cells in these people, just random volunteers, 12 totally different studies, every single one of them, every single person they found it. So it's pretty easy to sample blood, but you know, we don't normally go around carving people up and looking at healthy people to see if they have microbes in their tissues. So we're just starting to learn about these things. There were other studies that found, just by chance, found microbes in the brain. And multiple different, several studies have found that we actually have a microbiome of the brain and placenta and heart and liver. So we have these things, and if our cells are healthy, they can be dormant. They don't bother us. They can be there. Our cells keep right on functioning.. But if you weaken yourselves as your cells age, if you're, you know, poor diet, not sleeping, all of these factors, these things that we've collected through our whole life in our tissues start reactivating. And because we all pick up different stuff and the different microbes infect different cells, we have different illnesses. So there are ties between various kinds of microbes and Parkinson's, ALS, dementia, everything you look at. They have found microbiomes in tumors of various kinds of cancer, of bacteria living inside the cells of the tumor cells. They have found microbiome inside aortic and coronary arterial plaques. Where do these microbes come from? Some from the outside, but a lot of them from the gut, from the skin, from our gums. Yeah, it's pretty fascinating.

So they may be in the gut or wherever, and they, they get into the cells. That's the intracellular, right, microbe. And a person may appear healthy, and these microbes are really latent in our system. They're not troublesome yet, but as the person may weaken or whatever goes on that they're not—

what the science is suggesting, and it's still pretty early, is that every living organism, plants and animals alike, have some bacteria in their tissues, in their cells.

Yeah, this is really breakthrough medicine, breakthrough knowledge, such valuable information, Bill. I really appreciate this. Well, where do herbs come into the picture? Let's talk about herbs and herbal solutions, herbal fixes, herbal remedies.

Yeah, you know, so when you look at chronic illness as cells that are stressed, you know, I've talked to so many people, and, and my kind of my second career, as I was helping people with chronic conditions, instead of just looking for the diagnosis, the diagnosis became less relevant. And what became more relevant was finding out, doing that detective work, defining why the person had become ill. And sometimes that started all the way back to birth, you know, you know, what kind of illnesses they had with a child. Did they get a lot of antibiotics? What it was, you know, what their birth was like, but stresses they've had through their lifetime. And I found that, you know, in most cases I can start putting together this puzzle of why the person became ill, what the stress factors were that kind of came together. And we don't always know the microbes, you know, our ability to test for things compared to the possibilities that are there is really in a very, very early stage. We just don't have the capacity to know everything that's there, but we can tell, you know, why the stress factors that came together. So when I can help a person see that, and then we start to look at how do we undo those stresses so we recover cellular health, then, then that can make a difference. So it's diet, lifestyle, all of those things. But I found that the herbs have this ability to exponentially enhance anyone's efforts. And what the herbs are doing, you know, we tend to look at herbs like, well, they're just another alternative to drugs. And I found that herbs are completely different than drugs. So what we're doing with a drug is artificially blocking enzymes or receptor pathways to achieve an effect of reducing a symptom or slowing a process. What we're doing with the herbs is borrowing the plant's sophisticated mechanisms of protecting its cells. So plants are living organisms. Plants are exposed to viruses, bacteria, protozoa. Plants are— cells are exposed to free radicals and radiation and toxic substances. And plants solve those problems by producing a complex chemistry that we call the phytochemistry of the plant that has all these really sophisticated defense and regulatory mechanisms for protecting the plant's cells to enhance wellness. So when we take an herb, we're basically taking all that. And because different plants come from different environments with different microbes and different stress factors, when we blend multiple herbs together, you know, we, we get this really broad effect. So what the herbs are doing is protecting our cells, not one of our cells, but all the cells in the body against free radicals and toxic substances and radiation, and especially all these different varieties of microbes. Unlike an antibiotic though, and this was really an interesting feature that I found early on, it's, it's, it's a sophisticated system. Like an antibiotic is one single chemical that affects bacteria in a very specific way. So bacteria figured out a way around it pretty quickly, and you have, uh, bacteria, uh, antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Plus, if you take an antibiotic for a long time, it kills the normal flora in your gut and you make a mess out of things. Herbs suppress pathogens without disrupting gut flora, which is really important. I found that herbs work better than probiotics for balancing a disrupted gut, uh, microbiome.

Could you say that again? Herbs disrupt the pathogens without—

herbs suppress pathogens without inhibiting growth of normal flora.

Yes.

And that's actually, you know, I— it was a phenomenon that I recognized for many, many years. And when I was writing a book, I actually found a study that they documented, and it was like, wow. It, you know, and, and what really fascinated me You know, I couldn't have written this book 20 years ago because the science just wasn't there. But now there's just been this extraordinary proliferation worldwide of all this wonderful science documenting all the things that I'm talking about, especially how the herbs work. And so, you know, when I was first starting, I studied all the different herbal traditions around the world, and they were valuable. But it was mostly observational. Um, you know, to, to really understand it, I needed to see the science. You know, I wanted to know what was happening at the cellular and microscopic level. And we have that now. You know, the, we understand why those herbs were being used, uh, in those traditional ways and what they were actually doing and what most of our herbs are doing. Um, the herbs that I use every day are promoting cellular health, they are promoting wellness, and that is exactly what we want.

Yeah, using them effectively, successfully, without writing them up in medical journals, so to speak. So we've known for centuries that they work, but we can't read about it in the research yet. Now we are, of course, but yeah, yeah, fascinating. So I, I'd just like to highly commend you for your book, uh, Cellular Wellness. I've read most of it and it's, it's fascinating and it does capture so much of what you're describing today and all the breakthroughs and what we know. So I do highly recommend it to our listeners. And let's talk about Vital Plan. I know this is another option that you're making available, so tell us about Vital Plan.

Vital Plan is a company that I created with my daughter, so You know, I practiced obstetrics and gynecology for about 20 years, and then I had to stop that because of, of that health crisis. I gravitated, you know, I, I couldn't just declare disability. I started a practice that ended up being more like what we would know as a functional medicine or integrative practice today. And along the way, I did a lot of what many functional medicine doctors and integrative doctors do, which was do a lot of testing and, you know, tried to tweak the body using nutrients and all kinds of things. And as I was using herbs, I found that, yeah, the herbs are doing a lot of that for you. You really don't have to work that hard. And through time, I did less and less testing, and I was further and further off the map from the conventional model. But where I lived, I pretty much had to take insurance and I found that it was just really hard to get revenues because I was operating so differently than the system, and it was, you know, the coding and everything else just didn't fit very well. So in the years, it was like, how can I get this information to people? But also, how do I get good products out there? So I was also frustrated by finding good quality of products for my patients.. And, uh, this has been, I guess, more than a decade ago. I found that I could actually have products made to my specifications using higher grade, uh, quality herbs and higher grade ingredients and looking at creating formulas that respected those traditions, but also was, was, uh, in accounting for the science of how the actual phytochemistry was is affecting our physiology. So I started having products made mainly for my patients in my office. My daughter graduated with a degree in entrepreneurship and said, you know, we really should make this available on a wider scale. So we ended up creating a company that has both been a source of high-quality supplements but also a source of education. To help people understand this different way of thinking about herbs and, uh, how do we get good products in people's hands. Um, I also created programs that have served thousands and thousands of people, putting them on that pathway to wellness. Because one of the things that, you know, it was interesting, I happened upon a study while I was researching the book that was looking at Overcoming Chronic Illness. This was published in a medical journal. And what were the requirements to actually completely overcome a chronic illness? And they found that 90% of it was self-care. Only about 10% came from the medical system. So how do we enable— how do we empower people to do the things that they need to do to get all of the— again, to get everything back, to enjoy the same kind of response that I've had, but not have to spend a fortune chasing it. So that's what we've done with Vital Plan, is create systems. And we're still in the process of refining that, of making them easier, making them better. But it's a very cost-effective pathway to helping people not only regain wellness if it's been lost, but keep it for as long as they can.

Yeah, yeah, that's so important because we're talking about helping people take responsibility for their own health instead of deferring to their PCP or the specialist. We want people to take responsibility and make more informed choices. So what is the address for Vital Plan? Is there a website?

Just vitalplan.com. That's one spot. We also have cellularwellness.com for the book, but lots of great information in both places.

Yeah, it sounds like a lot of information, valuable information. So any final thoughts or takeaways for our listeners?

Oh, just that, you know, anybody can achieve a higher level of wellness. And so much of it is what you do for yourself. You know, the, the biggest thing that I would say is when you look at the people in the world, and I, I know that you're aware of this information, the people in the world that have the longest, the, the, the best longevity and the lowest incidence of chronic illness don't have access to a lot of technology. They don't go to, to expensive doctors. Um, if I'm sure you're familiar with the Blue Zones, of course, many others where people just, you know, it, it's all about food and environment and social interactions. And the herbs are, are so much a part of this whole thing that doing those things doesn't have to be extraordinarily expensive. Um, and it is is something that is available to anybody.

Yeah, that's beautiful information from the Blue Zones. I also say they're very physically active and they're not necessarily going to the gyms and running marathons, but they're very physically active in addition to all the diets and the social engagement. So great information. Yeah, Bill, it looks like we're out of time for today, but before we wrap up, I just wanna remind our listeners to visit my website, livingto100.club. Signup for our email list and download a free copy of my 9 Tips to Make Living Longer Enjoyable. You'll also see an option to contact me with your questions and comments. I welcome your feedback. Finally, thank you again for being a premium club member. Your support helps us keep the program going. I believe that the messages we share each week can lift our spirits, help us to stay engaged, and look forward to getting older no matter what gets in the way. So Dr. Rawls, thanks so much for being a guest on our show today. For those who might want to contact you, can they reach you through your websites?

Uh, yeah, absolutely.

Vitalplan.com and cellularwellness.com.

Yeah, and I try to be active on social media, so, and, and available as much as I can.

Great. Well, thanks so much, and thanks to all of our listeners for tuning in. Hope to see you next time.

Hey, thank you for the opportunity.

You're welcome.

Most welcome.

Hey everybody, Jared Sebaste here, host of Retire Repurposed. This podcast is dedicated to help people transition into fulfilling and purposeful retirements. Retirement is a big life change. In fact, The two most dangerous years of a person's life are the year they were born and the year they retire. Few people could just flip the switch from working a career 30 or 40+ years, retiring on Friday, without methodical steps to living what we call a repurposed retirement. To listen now, search Retire Repurpose on your favorite podcast platform, Senior Resource, or Life Audio.