NBS #126: Why Mold Hits Harder When Your Cells Are Stressed (Doctor Explains)

Why are so many people struggling with chronic illness, Lyme symptoms, mold sensitivity, fatigue, and unresolved health issues?

In this episode of Never Been Sicker, Michael Rubino sits down with Dr. Bill Rawls, physician, author, and chronic illness expert, to unpack the deeper reasons so many people stay sick.

Dr. Rawls shares his own story of health collapse after years of stress and sleep deprivation, why conventional medicine could not fully help him, and how his recovery led him to a completely different understanding of Lyme, mold, microbes, and cellular health.

If you’ve been wondering why symptoms linger, why mold exposure hits some people harder, or why conventional care often falls short with chronic illness, this episode is for you.

Subscribe for more conversations on mold, indoor air quality, chronic illness, and the missing links behind modern health.

Timestamps
00:00 Intro + Dr. Bill Rawls
00:33 His health crash + Lyme journey
04:03 Herbs + mold exposure
06:06 Chronic illness + microbes
07:39 Lyme + mold connection
08:35 Cellular stress explained
11:59 Mitochondria + energy
17:28 What is autophagy
19:23 What blocks healing
24:50 Why he thinks differently
30:45 Why chronic illness is rising
35:55 Blood pressure example
40:07 Biggest lie in medicine
42:20 Microbes + chronic disease
45:21 5 things to improve health
48:58 Homes + environment
50:54 How to test your home
51:24 Chemicals + modern life
56:53 Where to find Dr. Rawls
59:27 Outro

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🔵 About Dr. Bill Rawls, MD
Vital Plan Co-Founder and Medical Director
For over 30 years, Dr. Bill Rawls has dedicated his life to medicine. When a health crisis with chronic Lyme disease abruptly changed his quality of life, he came face to face with the limitations of modern medicine and began to explore the vast possibilities of alternative treatments. Restoring his health through holistic and herbal therapies inspired him to share his revelations on the importance of cellular wellness for defending against microbes and other root causes of illness. Today, he works to bring life and vitality to others as he helps them establish their own paths to wellness through modern herbology.

Through his bestselling books, Unlocking Lyme and The Cellular Wellness Solution, Dr. Rawls demonstrates why crucial herbal phytochemicals are key to protecting cellular health and strengthening the body's defense against illness. Dr. Rawls is also the founder of Vital Plan, a holistic health company, where he developed the signature RESTORE180 program, an advanced herbal protocol that has helped thousands to reclaim vibrant health. 

Dr. Rawls is a #1 bestselling author and seasoned speaker and interviewee. With a compassionate approach and an incredible depth of knowledge, Dr. Rawls has a distinct ability to make scientific concepts accessible and enriching for everyone.

🔵 Follow him:
Website: https://rawlsmd.com/resources/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rawlsmd/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rawlsmd/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/RawlsMD%20
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bill-rawls-md/

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

My body is just over. I have really severe heart symptoms, neurological symptoms adjoints with the money.

SPEAKER_01 0:07

My name is Michael Rubino. I'm on a personal mission to make sure you don't get sick inside your own home.

SPEAKER_00 0:12

I knew there was something wrong. I just don't believe there's something that you can do about it.

SPEAKER_01 0:18

Hello, and welcome to another episode of Never Been Sicker. I'm your host, indoor air quality expert, Michael Rubino. And today's very special guest, Dr. Bill Rawls. Dr. Bill Ross, thank you so much for taking time out of your busy day to be here with us.

SPEAKER_00 0:32

It's a pleasure. Thank you for inviting me.

SPEAKER_01 0:35

So you're a published author, you're a Lyme expert, you're a medical doctor, uh, you've had your own journey with uh illness. Can you tell us a little bit about your journey so far and kind of what led you down this path that you're that you're now on?

SPEAKER_00 0:51

Sure. Yeah. You know, I think we we all have a story of that push us one direction or another. And I never expected to be where I am today. Um, but life pushes you in different directions, and quite frankly, I wouldn't trade any of it. So I've been a physician for 40 years. I graduated from medical school and went into obstetrics and gynecology, delivering babies, taking care of uh women's health. And it was uh it was it was great. I wasn't attracted to chronic illness because people just never got well, you know. I wanted something that I could see a difference, and I went into that. Um, the downside of it was that uh back then it required being on call every second to third night, every second to third weekend. And that meant hospital call for labor and delivery, emergency room, uh whatever was patients inside in hospital from seven o'clock one morning till seven the next morning, weekends Friday morning until Monday morning. And I was one of those people, if somebody was in labor or having a problem or anything else, I just didn't sleep. I mean, it you know, it's um my partners, they'd crash and they'd pull them out of bed and go deliver the baby. Most of the time I was there waiting, you know. Wow, and it was just and I could do it in my 30s, you know, you just push through, and there was this thing back in the 90s that do we really need sleep? We could just push through on four hours a night. We don't really need to sleep. And I bought into that, and I was pushing every other stress button, and by the end of my 40s, it had all caught up with me, and my health crashed, but and I had to stop doing obstetrics. But it was not one of those things that I, you know, I stopped taking call and I was able to sleep again, and everything turned great again. My body just kept falling apart. Um, you know, I had really severe heart symptoms, neurological symptoms, my joints were falling apart. I mean, my body was just a total mess. Conventional doctors couldn't really figure it out, labeled me with fibromyalgia, which is not a great diagnosis because you just end up with medications for symptoms. Kept thinking about this thing called Lyme disease. Could I could I could that be it? I mean, I was bitten by plenty of ticks when I was a kid. Could it be that? And at first the tests were negative. I finally found that I was carrying some of these bacteria and thought, like everybody else, take antibiotics. I'll be well. This will be great. And ever several rounds of antibiotics just made me sicker rather than anything else. And at that point, I was like, do I need to go get IV antibiotics or see functional medicine doctors or go get hyperthermia or all these crazy therapies that were available? And I my situation was such that I just didn't couldn't afford it. I mean, so when I left my practice, I still had to generate income. So I started a primary care practice. And that um, so my income was way cut back. Um, and the only thing I could find that might be a maybe was herbal therapy. And there was an herbal protocol, a book had been published about using herbs for Lyme disease. Um, and I went in with low expectations, uh, assuming if it actually worked, it would wreck my gut, you know, if these herbs actually had antimicrobial properties. Um, I got better. I started getting better within three months, and within about a four or five year period, fits and starts, still figuring it out, I got my life back. Um, but a significant part of my journey that's that uh is something for you is I there when I I was in a small town and I I I left my practice. Um I had to find office space, and and there was nothing for rent. There was this old 50-year-old building for sale. This is coastal North Carolina. And I moved in with this optimism that I was going to figure things out and get well and help people and do all these wonderful things, and found out it was it was saturated with mold. Um, it had mold in the crawl space, in the in the in the wall board. Um, but I think that what's significant is I really didn't have money for mold remediation, but I was able to, I was in that building for 10 years, and I was able to recover my health completely while I was in that building. Um, which says, you know, there's there's something to be said for just restoring cellular resilience, resilience of your body. Now I did things like ozone and and uh you know on the weekends and everything, and air filters and uh essential oil diffusers, everything I could to decrease exposure. But yeah, I learned out, I learned about mold the hard way. And uh, you know, so it was it was quite an experience. Um, but over the past 20 years, I've spent really understanding why the herbs work, what was going on, what was going on in my life. Um, and I think about chronic Lyme differently than most everyone now. Um I look at the microbes associated with Lyme disease differently and recognize they're not limited to Lyme. We're see, we're seeing same and similar microbes in many chronic illnesses, and I think there's a microbe factor in every chronic illness that is not well being addressed.

SPEAKER_01 7:04

Totally. Yeah, I mean, just from my perspective, I'm not a doctor, obviously. That's why I have amazing people like yourself on to talk this through. But a lot of people are complaining about chronic illness. And when we're looking at investigating their homes, we're seeing an abundance of microbes, you know, abundance of mold and abundance of bacteria, the toxins that mold produces and bacteria produces. And, you know, there there seems to be a correlation there. So it kind of aligns with what you just said that you believe that chronic illness is a, you know, has some sort of microbe component to it. I'm curious with respects to Lyme disease, because you hear this very often, that when someone has Lyme disease, they seem to have a heightened sensitivity to mold. Uh, what's the connection there?

SPEAKER_00 7:50

Yeah, it's um it's cellular stress. Um, you know, our bodies are made of cells. Everything that happens in our bodies are are are the result from the actions of cells. And our cells are the smallest functional unit in our body. You know, we talk about systems and organs. Everything's made of cells. It's all about cells. Every aspect of every chronic illness can be described in terms of cellular stress. So, what chronic Lyme is, is a state of extreme cellular stress. Um, so most people, 90% of the people that I talk to with chronic Lyme disease, do not remember becoming sick around the tick bite. These bacteria, borelia and all the coin infections like Babesia and Bartonella, um, these are very slow-growing, what we call self-stealth pathogens, that their mission is persistence, and they don't necessarily need to make you sick to achieve that mission. So they enter the body, they grow very slowly, extremely slowly. So they're not affected by antibiotics, and that makes them not a target of the immune system. So they slide into our body and they invade cells. And if our cells are healthy, you know, here we're talking about cells in the brain, cells in the heart, cells in joints, cells everywhere, plus different microbes, so Babesia, Bartonella, and Mycoplasmas, chlamydia, they're invading different cells. So this is happening to all of us. We're all picking up some of these things. Um, I think the percentage of people that are actually carrying the Lyme bacteria is probably remarkably high, even in healthy people. So you can be perfectly healthy. And that's what it needs, really. I mean, all it wants is a platform to hang around and spread to another host. So when you get another tick bite, or you know, back when our ancient ancestors were around lots more tick bites, it's just lots more opportunities to spread to other host. So, you know, that's that's that's how these things operate. And that's very different than like us pneumococcal pneumonia that grows really, really fast. So these things are present in our body, and it's not until we're stressed. Ourselves are stressed. For me, it was years of eating bad food, not getting sleep, exposed to various environmental toxins, and then finally mycotoxins. My cells were already stressed when I moved in that building. And it was always interesting to me. I walk in the building and I could feel an immediate effect. My energy would drop, and part of that is an immune response, but it was affecting my cells too. But my employees didn't bother them. They didn't have the pre-condition of cellular stress. So if you're so mycotoxins affect you more if you're vulnerable. So chronic Lyme disease is a state of cellular vulnerability. So when someone develops chronic Lyme, what's happened is most of the time they have a perfect storm of factors that come together in their lives, like mine, stress their body, and then the microbes reactivate and start breaking down tissues. And you reach a point that I call the boiling point where the microbes are driving enough cellular stress to keep reactivating more and more microbes that you end up in a state of uh sickness that just improving your health habits isn't going to help. And at that point, your cells are really vulnerable. So you pull in various kinds of mycotoxins and bacterial fragments and all the other things that you might breathe in a sick uh-building environment, and it just wreaks havoc, wreaks havoc on your cells that are already stressed and weakened. So that's that's a big part of what's going on, and that's why chronic Lyme are vulnerable. But really, any kind of chronic illness is going to be more vulnerable to mold.

SPEAKER_01 12:07

Yeah, I know it's so interesting, you know, thinking about all the all the things that you've just said here with respects to cellular health and how it's an important piece of the puzzle. You know, we hear a lot of talk about mitochondria. Can you explain a little bit about how mitochondria has to do with cellular health and if there's any impact to mitochondrial function with all of these microbes and these pieces of the puzzle that we're putting together?

SPEAKER_00 12:31

Yeah, you know, it's a big deal. So I think the mistake a lot of people make is trying to treat mitochondrial dysfunction with nutrients of various kinds to optimize mitochondrial. Your cell is already doing that. So what, and this shows how long standing our relationship with bacteria are. Um, our mitochondria come from an ancient bacteria that uh is a distant relative of the bacteria that causes Rocky Mountain spotted fear. That's how long this has been going on. So generating energy for really large cells, eukaryotic cells like ours, is a really toxic process. It generates a lot of free radicals, breaking down fats and glucose to generate energy just really, really just it's really hard on structures. So these free radicals damage cells, but what if you could compact those inside mitochondria where it didn't bother the cell so much? So we're basically outsourcing energy production to these ancient bacteria that now have, you know, just a uh a continual relationship with all of our cells, that they they're part of us. And it's like a skin cell might have 100 mitochondria, a heart cell has 5,000 or more mitochondria. So the more energy it needs, the more mitochondria. So mitochondria are a limiting factor. All cells burn out eventually because they burn out their mitochondria. This is getting down into the weeds a little bit. So mitochondria are managed by the cells. So some of the genetics, the DNA to manage mitochondria was passed over to our cell. So we have active management ability to those mitochondria. Um, but part of the the process of generating energy is still mitochondrial DNA. So every mitochondria has about 10 or 15 copies of a little DNA loop that that it allows it to rebuild the engines that are generating energy and parts and that sort of thing. So, but that that mitochondria DNA really takes a bad hit. And over time we burn out that the mitochondria burn out that DNA. So the con our cells are constantly, you know, finding the best mitochondria, flushing the the bad mitochondria that are burned out, and and but over time we lose energy. Um so that's one of the things of aging is you know, most 20-year-olds, you have five to ten times more cells than you actually need by age 40, it's half that. And your cells have burned out half their mitochondria. It's why we don't see professional athletes over age 40 very much. So the more the cell is stressed, the more energy it's going to use. And the more energy it's going to use, the harder it's going to work that mitochondria, and the faster it's burning out. And if the inner if the cell is overworked, it's going to have a harder time managing the mitochondria, so it gets behind in that management, and you start to have an energy deficit. So that's a key part of chronic illness. So the difference in aging, mitochondria, and just regular aging is we gradually lose mitochondria and that causes us to lose cells, but it's a pretty gradual process that doesn't necessarily cause symptoms. But when you stress your cells, bad diet, mycotoxins, not sleeping, you know, all of these different factors, and microbes. They're a big one. They're huge, and they actually scavenge some of our mitochondria. Um, then you know, you you stress those cells and and and they're burning their mitochondria faster, the cell burns out faster, you have more turnover of cells, so you start losing that. So the solution isn't trying to fix the mitochondria, the solution is reducing the cellular stress so your cells can manage those mitochondria properly and bring them back to the optimal state, you know. And that's the amazing thing for me. I'm 68 and you know, my health has been great for a decade. Um, and I don't have the energy I did when I was in my 20s and 30s, but I don't have symptoms. You know, I don't have the fatigue that's associated with with uh with chronic illness. So it's amazing how much your cells can recover and your mitochondria can recover.

SPEAKER_01 17:30

Well, congratulations on that, by the way. That's huge. I mean, you know, feeling better for the last 10 years, that's uh a dream that I think most people really strive for, especially, you know, when you're listening to this type of podcast, looking for alternative answers. Um, yeah, I I was curious with regards to autophagy, um, is that part of the process? Um, maybe, maybe help people understand what autophagy is. And then is that part of your process? Does diet, uh not dieting, but fasting, does that help with autophagy?

SPEAKER_00 18:04

You know, people are hearing that word more and more, and I think it is really good because it's really central to cellular health. So, what autophagy is, is the ability of ourselves to renew and rebuild. So, our cells, unlike any man-made thing, you know, your your car or your cell phone don't have this ability. Cells, every cell in the body is rebuilding itself continually. And we know that there are a lot of conditions that actually promote that rebuilding process called autophagy. So part of the autophagy process is something called mitophagy, which is managing mitochondria and you know, picking the good ones, throwing away the bad ones, making new ones from the good ones, that sort of thing. But autophagy is critical. Um and there are a lot of interesting things about autophagy. Um, you know, people should be very familiar that with that word. It's it's it's really important when you understand health. So if right now autophagy stopped in every cell in your body, how long would your body last?

SPEAKER_01 19:18

I don't know. That's a good question. A few days.

SPEAKER_00 19:21

That's it. Yeah. If you didn't have autophagy, you would last a few days. That's that's how long it would take before every cell in your body broke down. So when we look at autophagy, there are a lot of things that we can do to promote autophagy, and there are a lot of things that that um actually inhibit autophagy. Um so you know, five categories of factors, uh, nutrients, um, our cells, even though, you know, part of the autophagy processes are our cells are reusing proteins, you know, breaking down misfolded proteins, reusing the amino acids, but that only goes so far. So you you need good uh nutrients to help that process. But we know cells need downtime to do autophagy. And if you're eating all the time, it um it it robs the ability of cells to do autophagy. So you know we hear about that thing, intermittent fasting, and the magic number is 16. That's how many hours your cells go before they start cannibalizing parts and actually breaking down vital parts of the cell. So eating for eight hours, leaving 16-hour window. What you eat is important. High carbohydrate diet, high processed food diet have the effect of inhibiting autophagy. It's really bad. High insulin levels, all these things that we hear about, bad autophagy inhibitors. Um, stress. Um, high cortisol and high adrenaline are some of the most high, those are the biggest autophagy stressors that you can do. Plus, your cells need downtime. You know, they need eight hours to recover from the next day for the for the next day. Um, most people in America sleep an average of six and a half hours. That's not enough. It means that you've started your next day with cells that haven't covered from the day before. And I can tell you right up front, that catches up with you in a while. Virtually all of our environmental toxins, so technically a toxin is something that is natural. So molds produce mycotoxins, jellyfish produce toxins, um, you know, bees produce toxins. Um, things that are man made are called toxicants, and we've got a lot of toxicants from petroleum and oil that are floating around. These abnormal chemicals. Get in our cells, and they basically bind them up. Um, and that inhibits autophagy. And very interesting, I was I was actually exploring this recently, um, yeah, and it really speaks very highly to what's going on, just gets to the point of what's going on in conventional medicine. Virtually every drug, virtually every drug inhibits autophagy. Think about that. Virtually every drug. So the drugs that we are using to treat chronic illness block autophagy or inhibit autophagy. So you just can't get well with something that blocks autophagy. So drugs, they have value. There's a purpose and a place for every drug made, but anything that blocks autophagy, and that includes antibiotics, you know, people that are using antibiotics in chronic Lyme, that's that's uh that is a really big autophagy blocker. Um, exercise is a great autophagy inducer. Microbes, that's a very special case. So when we talk about autophagy, so we use it to rebuild. So basically, the cell pulls parts that are worn out and digests them in what's called a vacuole. Well, it can throw microbes in there too. It's a defense mechanism. So every cell in our body can use autophagy to defend itself against microbes that invaded the cell. But the microbes have found ways around this. Borrelia, Bartonella, all of these things, you know, they they go dormant, they they find ways to uh just remain stable inside the cell so they don't get digested with autophagy. So it's it's really interesting. But in my journey with herbal therapy, um, you know, learning about herbs, and when you talk about an herb, unlike a drug or an antibiotic that's a single chemical, it's a wide spectrum of chemicals that basically you're borrowing the plant's defense system. So it's protecting your cells, your body from free radicals, toxic substances, mycotoxins, all of these things that including a wide range of different kinds of microbes, these stealth microbes, especially. So, recent investigation is that virtually every herb in enhances autophagy by a variety of different mechanisms. Really fascinating. So that that word autophagy, yeah, that's that's central to everything.

SPEAKER_01 24:40

Well, thank you for clarifying that. I know I just learned a whole lot, and I hope everybody listening did as well. I think uh it's really important, obviously, to understand that autophagy is continuously happening, obviously, probably at different uh levels, and uh obviously you want to promote autophagy and not inhibit it. Um I have to say, you know, you are speaking quite different than a typical medical doctor. It is very obvious to me that, you know, you had outside of your medical doctor training and schooling, you obviously started to explore different parts of the body, uh, learn more about the cells and cell health and how that plays a role in the chronic illness. Can you describe a little bit about you know why you had to go outside for that training? Maybe some of the maybe the medical doctor training on average isn't as complete. And um, you know, why you really started to go in this new direction. I'm sure you know that medical doctors typically get um bad flack because it it almost always feels like here's a pill for your ill. And so it's very apparent that that's not the way you practice. And I'd just love to hear your perspective on that.

SPEAKER_00 25:51

Right. You know, I guess I was always a little bit of a renegade. And one I one of the reasons I went into OBGYN is because I was just appalled to what they were doing to patients on the medical floors with chronic illness. And it just was almost inhumane in some ways, and I just wanted to get away from it. When you look at obstetrics and gynecology, it tends to be more open-minded than other fields of medicine. Um, but it was acute intervention. I could save the day. It was great. I mean, just you know, you you you you uh uh uh diagnose an ectopic pregnancy, or you have somebody that has an arrested labor and the baby starts going into stress and you do an emergency C-section and save the day. Oh man, there's just nothing on earth that makes you feel better. And I did some really innovative things. Um, it was a different time, though, in that we had guidelines, not strict protocols. So I could work and think outside the box to a much higher degree than physicians today. Um, for example, I started using biodential therapy uh very early in my practice instead of some of the stronger estrogens that were um uh associated with breast cancer. And I was talking to people about health habits and and you know, and how they could actually prevent illness early on. So, but you get caught in situations, and I look back at my journey now, and it was almost like it was supposed to be, and somehow I was a candidate for that, and I was set up for it. So when I was in the middle of you know, suffering, it was like, why me? Why is this going on? This isn't fair, you've ruined my life. And I turned it around at some point. I said, okay, what am I supposed to learn here? And teach me things. And it's like, you know, the mold thing, um, it seemed like everything that I needed to learn about, I experienced firsthand. You know, I, you know, and and that caused me to see the stark limitations of what we were doing in conventional medicine. But, you know, once I got outside of that, I became certified in holistic medicine. And for a period of time, I was doing functional, I tried to do functional medicine and integrative medicine. But I was looking at, you know, these elaborate testing protocols and all this stuff, and it's like, it's not helping people, it's not getting them where they needed to be. And I learned that if I just spent time talking with the person, and instead of learning how they were ill, what their diagnosis was, I tease out why they became ill, what kinds of things came together in their lives. And it wasn't typically a tick bite. In fact, a lot of people that have virtually all the symptoms of chronic Lyme, they may not be carrying borelia because there's so many other microbes out there. These stealth pathogens are very common. And I realized that this was much bigger than this thing called chronic Lyme disease. And then I really, and the herbal thing, it's it's almost like the only option I had with herbs, and I didn't even think it was going to work, but it did. So now I've spent all these years really understanding that. I studied all the tri herbal traditions, um, ancient Chinese medicine, um, you know, Ayurvedic medicine, all the rest. But my Western science mind carried me to looking at the evidence of how the phytochemistry of the herbs, these complex chemistry, was actually affecting our body at the cellular level. And that's when I started thinking differently about herbs and realizing their remarkable power. And, you know, so it's hard not to talk about it. And it's uh it's something that we all ought to be paying attention to. And when I look at the state of medicine today, it's driven by a medical business engine that is built on generating revenues, not serving patients. And a lot of doctors caught are caught in this and they don't like it. And, you know, so a lot of doctors are unhappy, but they don't know where to turn because in their training, they were trained, all they have in their toolbox is drugs and surgery. That's it. They don't know how to use anything else. And again, we do a great job at acute intervention, but we're not keeping people from getting sick. You know, I mean, a couple of years ago, the CDC defined that six out of ten people were chronically ill. Just last month, the World Health Organization defined that seven out of ten people worldwide were chronically ill. And it's because we're living outside the parameters of cellular health. We don't have built-in programs to manage all these, all these uh modern stress factors that we're exposed to.

SPEAKER_01 31:26

Well, you know, you kind of uh started to allude to what I think I'm gonna ask next, which is obviously this podcast is called Never Been Sicker, and uh 60% of the U.S. population is dealing with chronic illness. As you just mentioned, 70% of the global population. Those numbers are uptrending, right? Uh they're they're getting worse. So it sort of fits this narrative that we have never been as sick as we are today. Oh I know, you know, I know, I know we've talked a great deal about cellular health here. And um what I think we're gonna probably talk about next is all the ways that cellular health gets impacted. But why do you think, why do you think we have this this uptrend when we have modern medicine, when we have modern technology? I mean, where are we going wrong?

SPEAKER_00 32:15

Yeah. Um well, uh again, modern medicine does great for acute intervention. And um people are living longer than they used to, right? So 1900 in the United States, the average life expectancy was 45. Now that's skewed. You know, people think, oh, nobody lived over 45. A lot of people lived over 45, but a lot of people died before 45, and that that number is skewed all the way, all by the fact. You know, when you look at modern obstetrics, in 1900, 10% of women in their first pregnancy and 10% of babies died. That's huge, and a lot of kids. So there were a lot of infectious disease, tuberculosis, polio, you know, all of these things that are the big killers. In the 60s and 70s, we started having solutions for that. Um, I'm actually fourth generation doing that. My great-grandfather practiced in the early 20th century. He died around 1916 at age 50. He uh died of rheumatic fever, which killed a lot of people. Every day, streptococcus. He got strep throat, and the strep attacked his heart, and his body uh responded by attacking his heart tissue, and that shortened his life. Modern antibiotics, we don't have that anymore. Tuberculosis, we've got drugs for that now. Um, so a lot of the things that were killing people, including trauma, and it's not just in the medical system either. You know, you think about 100 years ago, 120 years ago, they didn't have garbage collection, you know, they there were there were there was a lot of junk, and people had all these other factors, so they didn't live very long. But now these things have shifted. You know, we have vaccines, we have antibiotics that can calm these, this stop these acute illnesses and prevent them, which are really valuable. Um, but in the 60s and 70s, we started shifting toward chronic illness. So my grandfather was a general practitioner. I used to go on house calls with him. He had a black bag, we went in his car. This was in the early 60s. Um, and he had things for people, you know, shots of penicillin, pain pills, different kinds of things that alleviated acute symptoms. But we all there, everywhere we went, you know, there would be people that were chronically ill. And he didn't really have much, and he didn't really have a, there wasn't a diagnosis. We didn't use to diagnose chronic illness. So after all the successes that we had, um, people were living longer, not just in the medical system, but you know, garbage collection, um, seat belts in cars, people were dying less of trauma. Um, the systems that we built into our medical system were fantastic for those purposes. But we tried to apply all those things to chronic illness. Um, and I can give her another personal example of that. Um, blood pressure. You know, if somebody has a high blood pressure, we don't restore their vascular system to normal. We artificially block the blood pressure from going high with a drug that they have to take every day. And all those drugs have side effects. So when I was in my 30s, I was diagnosed with essential hypertension. My blood pressure typically was 150 over 100 anytime I had it checked. I tried various kinds of medications. They said, you know, you're gonna have this all your life, it's going to get worse, and you'll have to take these drugs. Well, the drugs had terrible side effects, and I just eventually said, you know, just gonna have to live with it. Ignored it, got Lyme disease, lost my health, changed my life, started taking herbs, my blood pressure started getting better. Now at age 68, with no medications, my blood pressure is typically 120 over 75. Great for my age. The hype, the essential hypertension that it was going to get worse in my life evaporated. And it's because I restored my cellular health, and that included my vascular health, so that I, you know, I didn't end up having to take the drugs, and and I, you know, so I have my and and my vascular health is amazingly good considering my heart was in really bad shape when I was in the middle of all this. So if you do the things that promote autophagy and allow your cells to recover, it's amazing how far you can go. And it's really as simple as that. So it doesn't take tons of labs, it doesn't take all kinds of, you know, complex protocols. It just takes paying attention and doing the things that matter the very most. And if people are doing that, they're going to be healthier. And, you know, so a perfect world would be that we keep our medical system. We keep it for the things that it does best, acute intervention. We go for physicals every year, but we do everything we can to keep ourselves healthy, which doesn't necessarily need to occur in a doctor's office. We keep ourselves healthy, which is now I go for a physical once a year. He gets all the labs, he does his stuff, he listens to my heart and lungs, and it's like you're not really getting anything, but you know, that's how you ching the little bells so they can get reimbursed. And um, and uh the labs are always normal, and it's like, great, okay, see you next year. Um, and that keeps me in the system. So if I do need it, which like uh, you know, 10 years ago or so, I fell off a ladder and I injured my clavicle, I needed it then. Um, you know, that that's where we should be. That's the ideal world of how we should be using our medical system instead of overloading it, trying to manage chronic illness by using acute therapies that artificially block the manifestations of illness but don't actually get to the root causes.

SPEAKER_01 38:47

Yeah. I love that. I think that's really important because I I do see that we have really built-in over dependence on drugs societally, you know, and uh obviously you have the doctors that are, you know, uh educated to prescribe them, but then you also have people that want instant gratification. Sure. And so that creates this perfect uh flywheel here where uh once you get on it, you don't get off of it. Um, I think one of the things that I wanted to know from you, you've you've been in practice for 40 years, you've been around, you've been through traditional medical training. I'm curious what, from your perspective, what is one of the biggest lies you've encountered just in the overall medical system that you've really had to overcome?

SPEAKER_00 39:34

Oh, there's just so much misinformation. I, you know, it's sometimes I get frustrated with the arrogance of the system up at the top of thinking they know everything or and just not. And um, you know, the it's it's it's a tricky thing. I mean, it's like we need pharmaceuticals and we need the pharmaceutical companies, but they benefit from people getting sick and staying sick. I mean, it's like we haven't had new antibiotics since I was in medical school in 1985 because it cost a lot to produce a drug and people aren't using them continually. So our whole pharmaceutical system is based on um just producing drugs that people stay on for the rest of their lives, you know. The medical system, the medical business model benefits from people remaining chronically ill, you know, and and and that extends to cancer, you know. I mean, we I constantly uh all the time I hear of oncologists who are just patting themselves on the back because we have these new therapies that are reducing cancer deaths. So fewer people are dying of cancer. That's great, but the rate of cancer is going straight up, you know? And they're not looking at causes, they're just looking at treatment protocols to kill cancer cells. And we should be looking at protocols of, you know, why did the cancer occur in the first place? And yes, there is a very strong microvariable in that, um, and doing things to prevent them, you know. And you know, and it's just as simple as taking herbs. We discount this. Every herb I've ever investigated has anti-cancer properties, everyone. Why? Because it protects cells and it has antimicrobial properties. And yes, I'm finding more and more connections between cancers and these stealth microbes that I'm talking about. Borelia, the Lyme bacteria, has been found in breast cancer cells. Wow. I didn't know that. Find it anywhere. You find it in MS, you find it in dementia. Um, so but that's not the only one. And my my list of these microbes that we would define as stealth pathogens that can be in the body, not cause illness. But if they have an opportunity, if the body is weak and start start breaking down tissues, it's over a hundred microbes long. And I think that's just scratching the surface, really. And you know, this this idea that we all have um microbes within our cells, not, you know, we we everybody knows we have lots of bacteria in our gut and on our skin, but they're outside of our cells. Um, they're outside of our tissues. So what I've been investigating is that, yeah, things are crossing over from our gut, from our skin, from our gums, and they end up buried in our cells. And some of that may be good. I mean, I'm investigating uh things in animals. Uh the latest is the naked mole rat that has this really important relationship with a long-standing relationship with an intracellular bacteria that it needs to optimize its mitochondria. And that's another thing. Our mitochondria are one of the factors that are the signaling factors that define whether an invasive microbe in a cell goes dormant or starts breaking down the cell. So our mitochondria do play a role in managing this relationship. So exploring that relationship just from an academic point of view is really fascinating. And just finding it in virtually every every creature. So, you know, I'm I'm able to say more and more strongly that we all pick up things that end up buried in ourselves in our lifetime. And some of those things could potentially be associated with illness. And the way to stay healthy is keeping your cells healthy.

SPEAKER_01 43:47

Now we talked about basically the incentives. The incentives uh unfortunately are more so on making money off of sick people. Yeah. As opposed to the famous saying announce a Prevention is worth a pound of cure. And so we've got it a little bit backwards. And what we're seeing is obviously increasing balance sheets of pharmaceutical companies, but yet we continue to get sicker and sicker. And so obviously we have to do something about that, or we're not going to live the quality of life that we're all looking to live, even though we are living longer, which obviously is something to applaud. But I did see recently that the life expectancy actually decreased for the first time just the other year, right? And so, you know, there's there's obviously we're starting to hit ceilings with all this chronic illness as well, which I think is uh you know another thing to really consider.

SPEAKER_00 44:40

Um you know, when you talk about that, um what you and I are doing right now is making a difference because it's all about you know, we're not going to fix the medical system. Uh the only way to fix the medical system is for people to take more self-responsibility. And, you know, the the the bad news is that there are more things that can make us chronically ill in our world today with 8 billion people on it than ever before. The good news though, and you're a part of this, is that we can avoid all of those things because we have the knowledge to do it. You know, it's diet. It's as simple as eat a whole food diet, cut out the processed foods, even healthy processed foods, eat more vegetables than anything else. So you can have meat, but eat your vegetables too. Um, cut your eating window back to optimize autophagy. Um second is clean up your environment. And and that's that's your that's your role. Uh you know, you do your indoor environment can be very clean. I mean, where I'm living now, um, you know, we built a house and we enclosed the the crawl space and put in a dehumidifier, and you know, we took all the steps that I know that I'm sitting right now in a pretty darn clean environment. My air is good. We use low VOC paints, we did everything to reduce any chemical or uh mold or other exposure. You know, you you can sleep, you can really make sleep a priority and do things to cut your stress level down. You can get out and exercise, and that can be just as simple as going for a walk. I mean, my minimum is walking at least three miles a day. That does extraordinary things for your body, and everybody can take herbs. And taking herbs isn't this big complex uh uh voodoo thing that you've got to go to a specialist. You know, there are a lot of herbs that are called adaptogens that most anyone can take that don't have drug-like properties, and and it's simple. Um, you do those five things. Those five things. If everybody in the country right now stopped and did those five things, we would cut the rate of chronic illness by half within a year. I'm very confident. So a lot of it is used up us as individuals, um, and not to the medical system.

SPEAKER_01 47:17

Yeah, that's well said. And you're you're right. I mean, it's kind of like one of those things where as citizens, sometimes we wait for the government to tell us what to do, or you know, for some laws to get passed before we start to, you know, trust in certain things. And, you know, I think that's um unfortunately not the best path. Um, I mean, I myself, you know, understand quite a bit that government regulations are far behind um in terms of actually where they should be. And so, you know, it's up to us to become more educated and be empowered by the information that we have access to. Because um, you know, when it comes to bureaucracy, that that stuff takes a long time. Um I wanted to ask you um about the built environment for a minute because of the trajectory we're headed in. Um and I think the the main important thing here is I've learned so much from you just now, like really the importance of microbes and how that impacts cellular health and how shifting that focus towards protecting cellular health and restoring cellular health is so important. And obviously, what what you've shared with microbes being one of the biggest issues and challenges with uh chronic illness in general, um, you know, we uh part of part of what we are seeing obviously is as we see this trajectory of never being sicker, we also notice that it kind of parallels the trajectory of energy efficiency. And the reason I bring that up is because part of the energy efficiency push is making buildings and homes tighter and tighter. And uh that does create obviously a set of challenges. For example, when you when you breathe out, right, there could be a hundred million particles or more that escape your body. And if you don't have any fresh air exchange, right, we're now putting more particles out into the environment that we're then recirculating and breathing back in. You then you have water damage and mold and bacteria that grow from that, the toxins that those produce, the chemicals we use, especially if we're not mindful about switching to more natural, you know, botanical products, et cetera. Uh, sometimes we like it to smell nice and we use glade plug-ins and other things that push chemicals into the air. And so, you know, we we start to really live with toxins and toxicants that we continue to recycle into our bodies. And I can't help but wonder, you know, the role that plays. And of course, part of what I do in educating people is let's reduce those things and let's see how we feel. And I can't tell you how many people when they just do this one exercise. And the exercise is go away for a weekend, see if you feel better when you're away versus when you're at home.

SPEAKER_00 50:08

You know, I used to tell that people too. It's you know, people would ask, how do I tell if it's my house? I said, go find a vacation and a really clean place and go there. And if you feel better in a couple of weeks, you got an issue with your house. That's that's uh that's about the best testing you can do. So I agree with you 100%. It's um, yeah, you know, what we have though that is so important is knowledge. You know, we have the what we we know about so many things. And um, and and we we live in this time, you know, so through my lifetime, all the wonderful things that have made my life better, more interesting, more exciting, being able to hop in a car and hop on a plane and travel and live in a temperature-controlled environment. And no, I'm not quite ready to give up my house yet, you know. Um it's all made by possible by petroleum and coal. And when when I was born, there were three billion people on the planet, and most of them didn't drive cars. And we had pollution in the 70s of just industry dumping in rivers and things like that, but the environment as a whole was not polluted. So now we have over 8 billion people, 2 billion cars, and all of the energy that it takes to clothe and entertain and feed all of those people. And that, you know, so we're using petroleum at a rate that we never have. And I, you know, right now I know that's a big issue out there. And so it's this wonderful thing that have made so many things possible in life that we wouldn't have, but it's on the other side, it it has a penalty, and that penalty is these chemicals are unnatural to us. Um, you know, and if you went back a couple of million years and ate the algae that would become petroleum or the plant matter that would become coal, it'd be actually good for you. That would have been great. But what happened over millions and millions of years is compression within the earth changed those organic, healthy chemicals, distorted the chemicals into forms that were still packed with energy, but they weren't compatible with biological life anymore. And those things stayed underneath the surface. Well, we've been pulling them out and pouring them everywhere. You know, it's like the mercury you find in fish out in the ocean comes from coal. When we burn coal because mercury has cadmium and mercury and all these metals uh in it, it it brings it out to the surface and and puts it up in the atmosphere and it precipitates out in the soil, and it uh it uh ends up being uh it is concentrated up the food chain. So it ends up being a lot of animals. But virtually everything is made by of petroleum. You know, the paint inside my house is made of petroleum. The plastics that I'm looking at are made of petroleum. Virtually all the health, the skin products that people use are made of petroleum. Drugs. 99% of drugs are made from organic chemicals from petroleum. I thought that was an interesting statistic. That is so it's not that we should, you know, I I don't, it's going to be, we we're gonna have to lean off of it slowly, but I think we should be more, we should just be smarter about how we use this extraordinary thing. I mean, humanity is where it is today because of petroleum, because of the energy. You know, you you and I don't have to go out and do manual labor in a in a in a field because of petroleum. Um, you know, so most of the things that we all cherish as far as our current lifestyle, we can think petroleum. But um, but we just have to be using it smarter. So the things that you mentioned of just you know can being smarter about chemicals in our home and and how what we put on our skin and all of those things, we have that choice. It's really important.

SPEAKER_01 54:42

Yeah. Oh, well said. Yeah, I I can't I couldn't imagine all the ways that petroleum is influencing our lifestyle. And um to really to really think about that, 99%. I mean, that's that's a pretty big number. Uh certainly we can obviously do better than that. We know some of the health effects of that, and obviously, you know, we we gotta do better and start making some changes. Um just like you said, it's probably not possible all at once, but we can start slowly but surely shifting away. I bet that would make a huge impact as well.

SPEAKER_00 55:16

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We can do those things. We can, as a culture, decide we want to do those things. But you know, I think it it has to be enough people to make a difference, and we're not there yet. So um that's what's important to me is getting that message out there and and you and you know, we all have our our little areas that we can do that, and yours is extremely important. Um, so the more that people are aware of these things, the uh the smarter choices that we make, the smarter choices people make, and then we all live better, and that's what it's all uh about. You know, winning is about bringing everybody up with you. And absolutely, yep. So for sure. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 56:05

Well, Dr. Rawls, I certainly appreciated this conversation. Uh, can you let uh let people know about the books you wrote? Um a little bit more about your program. Where can people find you? How do they come see you? Uh tell us how to connect.

SPEAKER_00 56:20

Um, yeah, I yeah, I've written a series of books, but the first couple were just for my patients. Um and I wrote Unlocking Lyme in 2017. It's it's a it's a popular book. I've come a long way since then. Um, and I wrote a book just about cellular wellness a couple of years ago that's out there called the Cellular Wellness Solution. That's got a lot of great content, and that tells, you know, if you wanted to get started with herbs, it it tells you everything that you need to know. It makes it easy for you. And uh my daughter and I started a company called Vital Plan that's a wellness company, uh, Vitalplan.com, that we uh uh have products, uh, you know, uh curated uh uh complements of different kinds of high extra high potency extract herbs, um, but also programs. The latest is called Restore 180, which is a six-month recovery program. That all the things we've talked about, if you haven't done that for most of your life, it's hard to do them. So this program is designed to carry you through that whole process. It has a community health coaching. I mean, and and I did, you know, dozens and dozens of lessons just to give people just little bits of information that they might need to make better decisions. Um, so it's it's quite thorough. We've had great results with it. So that's something available too. And then I have an informational website called Rawls MD. Um, if you go to RawlsMD slash resources, that gives you information also.

SPEAKER_01 58:04

That's incredible. Well, thank you so much for taking time out of your busy day to be here with us and share this amazing wealth of knowledge that you have. Uh, I can't wait to have you on again.

SPEAKER_00 58:14

You know, so thank you so much for the opportunity. I mean, that's that's what it's all about. And you know, we've with this, we've we've made a difference today, and and and that matters. So every opportunity I get, it's important. And so thank you very much.

SPEAKER_01 58:31

I couldn't agree more. Well said, and uh, we'll see you soon. Until next time, I will see you again for another episode of Never Been Sicker. Again, I'm your host, Indo Air Quality Expert Michael Rubino. See you soon.