The Truman Charities Podcast
Truman Charities is the only podcast that donates $250 to each of our guests' charity of choice.
Jamie Truman, connects with individuals who are making a significant impact in their communities. From New York Times bestselling authors to innovative farmers, we share the untold stories of those who are shaping the world around us. We feature trailblazers, influencers, and innovators who are driving positive change, such as the lawyer who fought Dupont for two decades to protect our water and the vital work of an organization dedicated to supporting women who have been trafficked within the United States.
Jamie Truman is the co-founder of Truman Charities, an entirely volunteer-run organization. Since its inception in 2010, Truman Charities has successfully raised over $2 million for a variety of charitable causes.
In addition to her work with Truman Charities, Jamie is also the author of the bestselling book "Vanishing Fathers: The Ripple Effect on Tomorrow's Generation." This book has generated over $80,000 for charities supporting at-risk youth, as 100% of the book's proceeds are donated to these vital organizations.
The Truman Charities Podcast
Why Most Lyme Treatments Fail, And What Actually Works | Dr. Bill Rawls Ep. 156
In this episode, Dr. Bill Rawls shares his own experience battling chronic fatigue, mystery symptoms, and years of frustration before finding answers. You'll learn why so many treatments fail, the limitations of antibiotics, and what actually works to help your body heal at the cellular level.
He's spent years researching chronic illness and cellular health to understand what modern medicine overlooks, and it could change everything for you and your family!
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Email: info@trumancharities.com
This episode was post produced by Podcast Boutique https://podcastboutique.com/
Welcome to the Truman Charities Podcast. I am Jamie Truman, your host. Today's episode hits especially close to home because we're talking about Lyme disease, which is something that affects so many people in the DMV area. If you or someone you love has ever dealt with Lyme, you know that it's far more complex than just take antibiotics and you're fine. In fact, many people never fully recover. They're left with lingering fatigue, brain fog, pain, and a long list of symptoms that conventional medicine often just can't explain. That's why I'm so honored to welcome Dr. Bill Roz, a physician who went from treating patients to becoming one himself. After Lyme's disease derailed his own life, Dr. Rawls spent decades researching chronic illness, herbal medicine, and cellular health. And what he discovered has helped thousands of people heal where modern medicine just fell short. Please welcome Dr. Bill Rawls to German Charities. Thank you so much for coming on to talk with us today. I live in the DMV area, which is like the DC, Maryland, Virginia area, which is really kind of like a hot spot for Lyme's disease. And so I've been wanting to talk to someone that specializes in it for a long time because I think there's a lot of misconceptions and there's a lot of confusion when it comes to Lyme disease. So I was reading about you, and you are this very busy physician in your 40s. And then you started having debilitating fatigue and brain fog and all kinds of skin rashes, joint pain, heart palpitations, and poor sleep. I mean, the list goes on and on. And you even say that you know what it's like to start and end your day feeling like you have a terrible flu. And I want to talk about your experience learning that you kind of have Lyme disease. And I want to go from there. But first, because I think there's so many questions about Lyme, can you tell us exactly what it is?
SPEAKER_01:Oh boy, that's a loaded question. That's uh that's always a challenge because in my 20-year journey, I've come to think of Lyme disease more specifically what chronic Lyme disease is, which everybody is struggling with, very differently than the conventional community and the Lyme community, too. And it's a an opinion that is backed up by pretty solid evidence. It's a reflection of my journey and just where I am of studying everything for 20 years. And it's important that people really pay attention to it because I've helped a lot of people get well, and I overcame it myself. And that's not true of most people. Most things that most people are doing, they're not getting well. Getting transient benefit, as soon as they stop the therapy, everything relapses. And that by itself starts to tell you a little bit about the microbes and the disease process.
SPEAKER_00:So conventionally, when people talk about Lyme disease, they say, okay, you are bit by a tick and it has to be on you for 24 hours or 48 hours for it to transmit. And then you can take a course of antibiotics, and then you're okay. What do you think about that?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Well, I've literally come in contact with thousands of people with chronic Lyme disease over the past couple of decades. And what I can tell you is that 90% of them don't remember getting sick around the time of a tick bite. So that kind of throws a monkey wrench into everything and how we think about it. So the fact of the matter is, most people, probably most people who get bitten by a tick that are carrying this particular bacteria called borelia, don't get sick.
SPEAKER_00:Does it take a certain percent of like a certain amount of time for the tick to transmit it to you?
SPEAKER_01:To a certain extent, that's true. I mean, you know, it does have to be on at least several hours. And the longer that it's on, the more opportunities, not just borelia, but all the other microbes that the tick is carrying. So, you know, we discount that. We think, oh, this tick is carrying this isolated microbe called borelia. But then you hear about all the coinfections that people will have, and then you look at the microbiome of the tick that the tick carries within its abdomen that could possibly enter our system, and it's hundreds of bacteria, and we don't know what most of them do.
SPEAKER_00:So, what is your advice to someone once they are bitten by a tick? Or if you find one on you that clearly has been feeding on you for some time?
SPEAKER_01:Sure. Yeah. I think it's reasonable to go by the CDC recommendations. And that is if you're bitten by a tick and become symptomatic. In other words, if you develop any kind of symptoms, flu-like symptoms, uh, fever, joint pain, that EM rash, the bullseye rash that everybody talks about, if you do any of those things, you should get antibiotics. But even if you get antibiotics, 20% of people still go on and develop chronic symptoms later in life sometimes. So that tells right there that the antibiotics alone aren't going to completely eradicate the bacteria. And I'm not completely sure that any course of antibiotics completely eradicates the bacteria.
SPEAKER_00:So, yeah, because I want to talk to you about that specifically, because you've written all kinds of books on this and done so many lectures and talks. And so I have a good girlfriend of mine who's a nurse who actually worked for a prominent Lyme's disease doctor in the DC area. And he had a prescription of long-term use of antibiotics. And she said that she ended up not working there anymore. And she said, I would see these people come in and they just weren't getting the results. Like they just continued to get sicker and sicker. And she's like, I just felt uncomfortable working there anymore because I don't feel that they were getting the treatment that they were paying so much out of pocket. And they're desperate. I'm sure that we'll talk about with you, like how you felt, like you're just so desperate to feel better.
SPEAKER_01:Desperate and willing to pay anything.
SPEAKER_00:Anything. Yes. And so tell me about how you kind of you were a conventional doctor, and then you were able to heal in an unconventional way.
SPEAKER_01:Sure. Yeah. Well, first off, I got sick because my body was stressed, and that's true with virtually everyone that I talked to. I probably picked up the bacteria when I was a child playing in the woods, which I constantly did, and was just tick bites all the time. So we can talk more about how the bacteria operates, but when you look at this bacteria, it has the ability to exist inside the body. In fact, that's what it wants to do. It doesn't really want to or need to make you sick. All it needs is establish a presence because what it wants to do is hang around, get some nutrients, reproduce, spread to another host. That's what they do. That is the definition of a balanced host microbe relationship. So a lot of times people don't get sick, and I didn't. It was 20 years of taking call, obstetric call, every second to third night, every second to third weekend from Friday morning until Monday morning. And I was one of those people, if I had somebody in labor or in the hospital, I just didn't sleep. So when I was on call, I averaged four hours or less of sleep. But then even when I was off call, life was so busy, I just didn't have time to sleep. So I went 20 years without sleeping. And by the end of my late 40s, my body crashed after doing that. And virtually everything. So all those symptoms of chronic Lyme disease are just symptoms of total body failure, and mine was. And I ended up gravitating toward a diagnosis of chronic Lyme. I finally found out I was carrying these bacteria. But I now know that there are a lot of different microbes that can do exactly the same thing. And there are a lot of connections between that and other chronic illnesses. But the difference between fibromyalgia, which was what I was labeled with, which has nothing that they can do for it except for treating symptoms, and Lyme disease, wow, I can take an antibiotic and I might get well. Everybody gravitates toward that diagnosis. And that's why there's so many labs out there that are doing lab results because people want a positive test, because if they can get a positive test, they are legitimized in their symptoms. Because, quite frankly, conventional doctors don't understand any of it. So I went for years kind of hobbling on, trying to figure things out, and move toward, could it be some kind of microbe and move toward the possibility of chronic Lyme? Ultimately, out of desperation, because I had to stop doing obstetrics. And so I was financially strapped, but also I had a, you know, I was still doing a primary care practice that I couldn't leave. So I couldn't go off and do long-term antibiotics and all the other things. I tried antibiotics at first, just oral antibiotics. And every, you know, after 10 days, it wrecked my gut, it made me sick, and I would be back to square one. Tried that several times. My desperation, I turned to herbal therapy and followed a protocol that a lot of people had been using and learned how to work the herbs and over a five-year period got my life back. But every time I stopped the herbs, I'd relapse. So I finally just made the choice. I didn't keep taking the herbs. And I just kept getting better. And that's been 15 years ago. In the past decade, has been some of the best health I've ever experienced in my entire life.
SPEAKER_00:Wow. So tell me a little bit about how you were able to find out, did you take some sort of test to figure out that you had Lyme disease, or because you're a doctor, you were able to kind of put the pieces together? And let's I really want to talk more about the herbs. Like, how did you even come across this? What type of herbs did you have to like guess and test a lot of them? Like, how did you figure out the right combination for you? And is that, you know, is everybody going to be different?
SPEAKER_01:Uh that's a lot to talk about. I know, sorry, right from from one shot there, but but we'll get to all of it because it's all important, right? So in my particular case, it was what I define as a second tick bite. I had stopped doing obstetrics, I was limping along in life and gradually getting better because by then I had changed my diet, you know, looked at causes of disease and eliminated most things. I'd become certified in holistic medicine by then. And I was getting better. And I had been working in the yard. And over a week, I just started feeling bad again. And you know, I had this chigger bite on my rear end that I kept scratching. And, you know, toward the end of a week, I scratched off a scab that turned out to be a seed tick. And it was like, oh, that's why what's been going on all along. Because I, you know, I just had a reactivation of all my symptoms and did testing. And even then, the testing, the Western block, was somewhat equivocal. And that's true with most people. In most cases, chronic Lyme disease is more of a clinical diagnosis. Because, you know, you put the symptoms in the picture together and the tick bite and all of that sort of thing. Because what happens is when you have an acute infection, that's very different than a chronic situation where your symptoms are chronic and long term. As far as the herbs go, about the time I was struggling with this, it was around 2005, the herbalist named Stephen Booner had written a book called Healing Lime. It came out just serendipitously right when I was going through this. And he made a pretty good case for the antimicrobial properties of herbs. He presented some good evidence. He did it from a scientific point of view. So my Western science thinking it resonated with me. And so I took that protocol. It wasn't things you'd get in an average health food store. You know, I had to order things from all over the place, and I was taking really high-grade concentrated extracts and taking a lot of it. That's the thing. You have to really, you know, to get enough phytochemistry from the herb to do a difference, you have to take a lot of it. Since then, I've learned about a lot of other herbs. I've gone, you know, beyond that work and spent the past 20 years really understanding why the herbs worked. And to understand why the herbs work, you have to understand the nature of the bacteria. And that's very important.
SPEAKER_00:When you first started taking the protocol of herbs, was there a detox period? Did it get kind of worse before it got better? And is everybody different in their type of herbs that they would need, or how's that work?
SPEAKER_01:Not necessarily different types of herbs because, you know, once we talk about herbs in more in-depth, I want to talk about the microbes first, but we can come back to the herbs. But I did not have Herzheimer reactants as much as some people do. So everybody is different in that respect. I had them, but I tend to be a rather stoic person and I just pushed through them in most cases. So it's really variable from person to person. And, you know, I saw it as, yeah, you got to just push through this and to get to the other side. And it was a sign to me that, you know, something was happening that was actually actually positive.
SPEAKER_00:So then you have mentioned and you talk about kind of Lyme as a chronic immune system dysfunction. Can you talk a little bit more about that? What exactly that means?
SPEAKER_01:Yes, a lot of people talk about chronic immune dysfunction. I've talked about that in the past. I've come to around to appreciate, I mean, that was that was like a decade ago when I was really thinking in those terms. So the body, our body is made of cells, and and the immune system is cellular. So really all of chronic illness is related to cellular dysfunction. And it's driven by the microbes, it's driven by just other factors that are driving the cellular stress. So it's part and parcel, one big thing. But we can come that back to that. I mean, it's it's really about the nature of the microbes, it's about how they affect cells in the body, including immune cells, and how the herbs are a good fit to solve that problem. And antibiotics are very specifically not.
SPEAKER_00:So I have kids and they play outside all the time and they camp and they do all those things. So if I'm a mom and my kid is, or myself, you see a tick, what do you think is the best protocol for that? Is it just going to the antibiotics route for the couple weeks? Is it that an herbs? Is it just herbs? Like what would you tell someone to do?
SPEAKER_01:Child or otherwise, um, I suggest following the CDC recommendations, which their doctor should be doing too, that if they have a tick bite and they're symptomatic, they should get antibiotics. And that is as much for the possibility of Rocky Mountain spotted fever as chronic Lyme disease or Lyme disease in general, because that can be something that is uh can be catastrophic.
SPEAKER_00:What is that?
SPEAKER_01:Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever is another tick-borne illness caused by a bacteria called Rocketsia. And it's all about what cells the body in the body these microbes invade. So racketia invades small blood fill, the lines, the cells that line small are arteries and organs. So it can blood flow and people can get sick. But oddly enough, a lot of people contract it just like borelia, never get any symptoms at all. So it's not that uncommon that that's the case. So I recommend CDC recommendations for antibiotics, but I typically tell people not to stop there. There are plenty of herbal protocols. There are herbal protocols in my website and other places that people can do in addition to that. And I suggest that people do that for a couple of months. And then if they become symptomatic or more symptomatic, continue them until there are no symptoms.
SPEAKER_00:You know, I had a question because I have a very close girlfriend of mine and she's been dealing with chronic Lyme disease for, I don't know, 15 years. And she's tried just about everything. She's gone on health retreats. She, I would love to have your opinion on different diets. So she went complete plant-based, like no process, no nothing. And then she also just tried recently 28-day water fast to try to help. So, what are your thoughts on diet when it comes to Lymes? And I was interested to see what your thoughts are on the water fast.
SPEAKER_01:Okay. Yeah, I'm not a big fan of long-term fasting with people that are chronically ill. I mean, it's all about cellular recovery. And your cells need to be nourished. And if you're not doing any nourishment, you're not nourishing your cells. Short-term fast, they're maybe okay. Intermittent fasting is a good idea, but long-term fasting, you're not nourishing your cells. Plus, that you're not having bowel movements, you're not moving anything through your gut. So you can't get rid of toxic substances very well unless you move things through. Pouring in water alone just isn't going to do it. So it's not logical. Let's talk about the body as a cellular organism. Perfect. So we tend to think the body as a whole. You know, we have organs, we have heart, we have liver, we have all of these parts, and we consider that kind of the smallest functional unit. You know, our heart is pumping blood. We need a liver. But it's a dysfunctional way to think about it. So the smallest functional unit in the body is a living cell. The heart isn't a unit by itself, it's a composite of billions of cells. Same with the liver, same with everything. Every one of our cells comes from one cell. So that cell, when you're in your mother's uterus, expands and develops into all the other cells. And then when we're children, we're building cells. So we're more vulnerable when we're kids because so much is going on in the body. When we get to age 20, we pretty much have five to ten times more cells than we need to survive. And through life, we gradually lose cells, and that's what aging is. So a cell is basically an individual functioning unit, and it is like a little microscopic machine that does a job. So different cells have a job. Heart cells have the job of pumping the heart. You know, they work in conjunction with all the other heart cells. Thyroid cells produce thyroid hormones. So everything that happens in the body is done by cells. But all those cells are structurally the same. So if you think about them like a tiny machine, they all have very specific operating requirements. So all cells need five things. And this is the basic formula for wellness. It's this simple. So every cell in your body needs nutrients to function. It needs carbohydrates and fats to produce energy. It needs amino acids to build and replace proteins. So proteins are kind of makeup in the machinery of the cell. It needs different kinds of fats for its cell membranes and other kinds of things that it makes it its parts. And it's constantly working, so it's constantly having to replace those replace parts. So you need very specific nutrients. So if you're eating a diverse whole food diet, you're supplying all the nutrients that your cells need. So my recommendations for diet looking at human history and what our design, our cells are designed to function, is I recommend a whole food diet as much as you can. Whole foods are whole cells. Like an apple is made of cells. All the carbohydrate is inside cells. So when you're eating an apple, you're getting the parts of those cells, which are nutrients for your cells. You eat a donut that just has raw carbohydrate and extract and fat extracted from seeds, and you're missing all that, even though they're the same amount of carbohydrate. So whole food diet. More vegetables than anything else. We have to have vegetables. That's what's missing in a long-term fast. You have to have vegetables to bind toxins to get them out of your body to enhance lutility. It's essential. You have to do it. We're built that way. So more vegetables than anything else, and then just divide up everything per healthy foods. Third on my list is cut your carbohydrates off at about 150 grams a day. That's not ketogenic. It's enough that you can live comfortably and have a little bit of fruit and that sort of thing, or cake on your birthday, but it's not enough that you're going to harm your cells because too much carbohydrate is going to kill your cells. Our cells are designed to run lean. And the fourth thing is intermittent fasting. Cut your eating window down to about six to eight hours. That leaves time for your cells to rebuild. So those are my food recommendations. Second on the list, and this is a big one, is they need a clean operating environment. All cells need a clean operating environment. So every cell in your body is now exposed to an environment that is full of petrochemicals and pesticides and plastics that were not here before 100 years ago. And what these things are, they're organic molecules that were once plants or algae before they became petroleum and coal. But being in the ground for millions of years distorted those chemicals, so they're not compatible with biological life anymore. Everybody knows what happens if you drink gasoline. But because they're organic molecules, they get in our body really easily and they get in our cells, and then our cells can't use them and they just get stuck. And so they inhibit cellular functions. So clean environment. And that's probably driving our epidemic, you know, bad food and bad stress and all these things are driving our epidemic of chronic Lyme and all the other things that we're getting, autoimmune illnesses a lot more than ticks are. So third on the list is we need downtime. You need eight hours of sleep a night for your cells to recover from working the day before. If you're sleeping six and a half like most Americans, you're starting your next day with a deficit that your cells haven't recovered from the day before. And that becomes cumulative. And that's what happened to me. And it was really bad. So pushing that stress button too much and not sleeping. Fourth on the list is sedentary. We need to move blood to flush away debris and congestion that builds up around our cells that keeps our cells from getting the nutrients and oxygen they need and keeps them from purging and getting rid of toxic substances. You gotta move, you gotta move throughout the day. So if you're sitting at a desk for eight hours and not moving, you're not getting rid of that stuff that's congested in your tissues. And the fifth thing is our cells need extra protection. Their arch enemy is microbes of every variety. Microbes do us harm by killing ourselves, but we're food. Our cells are food. That's how to think about it. Everything is food for something else. And we are food for certain kinds of bacteria and viruses and protozoa and yeast. They want to get in our body because they need the nutrients we have. And so a lot of microbes have different ways of doing that. So when you look at microbes, they all have different strategies. And this is really important to know because it's the difference of why you might need an antibiotic in one case and you might not in another case. So certain microbes have the strategy of breaking down the door and making us sick quickly. They want to just basically consume us. So if you get a virus and on top of that, you get a pneumococcal bacteria that causes pneumonia. That bacteria is very aggressive and its doubling rate, it's doubling itself every 20 minutes. And that means somebody can get really sick really fast, really fast. So it's aggressively invading the tissues in our lungs. And antibiotics depend on fast growth to work. They're single chemical agents that depend on something turning over very, very rapidly. So with that pneumonia, you're going to make somebody well pretty quickly. They're going to respond to that. And that's important because you've got about 10 days to complete that task. Because antibiotics have several really bad problems. So the first is the longer you use an antibiotic, the more you disrupt the gut. You know, you're killing the fast-growing bacteria a lot, but you're also killing the bacteria in your gut. And after about 10 or 20 days, you start disrupting the gut. So that can be really bad. Second thing is, all it takes is 10 days to generate antibiotic resistant pathogens. That's a huge problem. That is an enormous problem. So when we hear about people being on antibiotics for six months, here's the problem with that. Not only do you generate antibiotic resistant pathogens within your body, you also generate antibiotic-resistant pathogens in the world at large. Right now, I mean, you look at chronic Lyme disease. How many people does it kill a year? Not very many, right? People died of other things uh down the line. Antibiotic-resistant pathogens kill a million people every single year. And that's been growing since the 90s because we haven't made new antibiotics since 1985 when I was in medical school. Oh. Over a million people every year die of antibiotic-resistant pathogens. So every time somebody uses antibiotics for months and months on end, they are contributing to that problem and putting themselves at grave risk. So it's a pretty significant problem. Save the antibiotics for fast-growing microbes that you can save somebody's life, right? But that can be a real problem using them long term. So let's talk about the Lyme bacteria, Borelia. We said pneumococcal pneumonia, that bacteria turns over every 20 minutes. Really fast grower bacteria. In its most active phase, borrelia turns over every 12 to 24 hours. It's really slow. That's a defense mechanism. It doesn't have a strategy of knocking you over or knocking you down. It just wants a presence. So one way it does that is it grows very slowly. But when we talk about the co-infections, Babesia, Bartonella, Anaplasma, and all the other things you pick up, like mycoplasmas and chlamydia's and Epstein bar, they all grow very slowly. That's a defense mechanism. That's one thing. Makes them very resistant to antibiotics. That's why 20% of people that get antibiotics get sick later. And why I don't necessarily think that antibiotics get rid of all the bacteria in any case because of the second thing they do. So their strategy is getting past the immune system as quickly as they can. So they're moving through the bloodstream as fast as they can to invade tissues. And when they invade tissues, they invade cells. And when they invade cells, and this is cells in your heart, cells in your joints, cells in your brain, they invade the cells and they can go dormant. And this has been very well documented for a whole spectrum of different kinds of microbes. And they can stay dormant for a long time until you're in you and your body are stressed, like I was taking call, or somebody like I've talked to that had a bad trauma and ended up in the hospital for several months, or somebody who's chronically exposed to mold or pesticides at the They're just their body is taking a continual hit all the time. So when I see people that are sick with chronic Lyme, typically they have a story of a perfect storm of factors coming together. And the people that get sick at the time of a tick bite, I talked to somebody yesterday and I asked them, well, you know, what was your stress level like when you got bitten by a tick on a scale of one to 10? It was like, oh, be way beyond 10. But other people get a big load of bacteria, like the ticks on for a long time, or they get lots of tick bites. You know, I've talked to people that got like a hundred tick bites after they came out of the woods in bushes, you know, and they get sick because they got such a big load. Most people, these things are it's insidious. It gets in your system. And once they're there, it forms this reservoir. So when your body is stressed, they start reactivating. And when they start reactivating, they start breaking down your cells and breaking down your tissues, basically generating a food supply to grow more microbes. So your body becomes a food supply for them. And they start taking over. And your immune system is fighting that. So your body becomes this just massive turmoil. But the problem is killing the microbes alone, you just kill the active ones. You don't kill the remaining reservoir of dormant ones in your system. And I'm not sure you ever get rid of them. So the answer to chronic Lyme is you can't let up the pressure. So you have to continue the therapy years, years until all your symptoms are gone. And then if you're smart, even beyond that. And the only thing you can do that with is herbal therapy because herbs are unique. They have very good antimicrobial properties that have been well documented. But it's not a chemical, it's hundreds of chemicals. We're basically borrowing the plant's defense system. So you have defenses against bacteria and viruses and protozoa and yeast. But there's an intelligence that the herbs are specific for pathogens. They don't disrupt your gut, they don't reform resistant pathogens, and they're actually doing things to enhance cellular health. So you can take them for years. In my case, 20 years. And I've just, my health just kept getting better.
SPEAKER_00:Do you think that if you hadn't been under that enormous amount of stress from not sleeping for 20 years, do you think that you would have had the reaction that you did?
SPEAKER_01:If I had not been.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, if you had been doing all those normal life. Right. Okay.
SPEAKER_01:I think I would have been okay. But you know, stress comes along and part of the aging process is your cells are aging, right? Your cells have less energy, you have fewer cells. So typically it's it's really common that we see these things showing up in kids who are very vulnerable, or people that are starting to get into their 40s because they're trying to live like they did, that high intensity life that they were doing in their 30s, by the time they're getting in their 40s, that starts to break down. But when you look at the Lyme bacteria and all the other microbes that are very similar that I'm looking at, and start seeing connections between other chronic illnesses and between cancer and all of the different things. I mean, borelia has been found in breast cancer cells. We have found that most tumors, most cancers have a microbiome of intracellular microbes, of bacteria that live in there. And there's even there are a lot of connections between cancer and bacteria and viruses. Chronic illnesses like multiple sclerosis. A lot of people with MS test positive for borrelia, and people with chronic Lyme have MS-like symptoms. And there's the same kind of demyelination that occurs in MS, occurs in chronic Lyme, just not to the degree. And we know that borrelia, the Lyme bacteria, is one of the many bacteria that can invade the cells that that insulate our nerves and cause those kinds of symptoms. That's been well documented. So the margins start to blur when you look at this and other chronic illnesses. But the fact of the matter is, you know, humans have been bitten by ticks since the beginning of time, and we're seeing a lot more chronic illnesses now. And I think it's because we're living in such an unnatural world. Unnatural food, unnatural exposure to toxic substances, unnatural stress of all different varieties. I think it's catching up with us.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it seems like when we're talking, it isn't just limes and chronic limes, it's so many other different chronic illnesses that the herbs are helpful. Do you think that most people should be on some regimen of herbs, even if they don't have some sort of chronic illness, just to keep themselves as healthy as possible? So instead of waiting for something to happen, being proactive.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. You know, when we talk about herbs, there's a pretty wide spectrum of things from culinary herds that we mix in our food all the way to herbs that do have strong drug-like properties. And I like to identify the class of herbs that I'm using are herbs that don't have drug-like properties. They're the category that we would define as adaptogens. And a lot of these antimicrobial herbs fit into that category. So they are things that have a low potential to cause harm. They don't have drug-like properties or side effects, so that you can take them for a long time. And yeah, I really feel like that people would be a whole lot better off if they were taking a regimen of herbs every day. And there are a lot of reasons, logical reasons why that makes sense. So if you look at our human history, you know, you can learn a lot about what we should be doing now by what our ancestors did, because that's what genes ran for. So for hundreds of thousands of years, humans ate a forage food diet, which was about two-thirds wild plant matter and about one-third animal. And there are a lot of different ways they've evaluated that. And it looks like that's what it was on most locations on Earth. All of that wild plant matter was basically herbs. They were eating herbs every day. And so 10,000 years ago, when we started changing to seeds and beans and started farming, we kept that herbal tradition in culinary herbs and medicinal herbs. So it's only been about 100 years that we just completely gave that up and traded it for pharmaceuticals, and we've been suffering ever since. So when you look at the phytochemistry of the herbs, it's very natural for our bodies to take advantage of that. We've been infused with that for most of human history. So, yes, certain herbs, I think it is very reasonable to take them every day, and there's a lot of great evidence. You know, if you go to India, pretty much everyone in India consumes at least a gram of turmeric and other herbs every day in their curries that they eat. And despite the fact that there's a lot of overcrowding, a lot of pollution in India, they have a lower rate of Alzheimer's disease and cancer than most other locations on Earth. So, you know, when you look at cultures that are actually consuming herbs, um, they're healthier for it. They're definitely health benefits. And then you look at the science of the herbs, that's been the fascinating thing for me. I mean, I'm I'm really into less about what we learned from the traditions, but I want to know the science. I want to know what the chemistry of the herbs is actually doing to us. And there's so much great evidence. I mean, this may be sound like an odd statement, but we know a whole lot more about herbal medicine than we do pharmaceuticals. I mean, you get right down to it and you look at a monograph on a drug, and the bottom is the bottom line is well, we don't really exactly know what this drug is doing in the body. It's crazy. And we know so much about how these herbal phytochemicals are affecting our body, and it's all positive. The plant is building these chemicals to protect its cells from not only microbes, but free radicals, toxic substances, radiation, virtually every other stress factor that occurs in the environment. That plan is building a chemical defense system. And when we consume that plant, we're reinforcing all of our defenses with that plant. So it's a kind of a win-win situation. And it's pretty fascinating when you really get into studying and look at the logic of how these things are working.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. So I had, it was about two years ago, and I had an extreme case of rosacea where your face like gets completely like puffed out, and you have like really, really red, terrible pain for like a week. And I went to a couple different doctors. They gave me a steroid. They said, you know, you're getting older, you had turned 40, like this just happens. And it was painful and it was embarrassing. You can't, I like didn't want to go outside, you know, because it just looks so frightening. And I was introduced to a functional medicine doctor, and we've worked with herbs. And I have not, you know, knocking what had any issues since then. And it really opened the door to me wanting to interview all different types of individuals and doctors that are working with this type of medicine, because I really do feel it it's so beneficial for so many different things and more people need to learn about what you're doing. And I know because of this area, there's a lot of people that are dealing with chronic Lymes. And if they're listening to this and they want to be able to get in touch with you and to learn more, how do they get in touch with you?
SPEAKER_01:Probably the easiest way is our website. I've got a website called Rawlsmd.com and tell them to go to Rawlsmd.com slash resources, and that will get information about the current programs and everything that we've got going on. I've written several books. The latest one is called The Cellular Wellness Solution. Also, several years ago, I wrote a book called Unlocking Lyme that really talks about this herbal pathway. And every so many years I learn more. And everything that I learn, I try to put in a book or some kind of resource that people can have access to. So I've built out a lot of resources for people to learn because everything that I just said is very logical. It's very sound science, but it's not how the mainstream operates. And, you know, you just mentioned that you talk to a functional medicine doctor that uses herbs. That's the exception. A lot of them don't. And it's just there's so much value there that is being unrecognized and underutilized. You know, when we talked about aging and anti-aging, you know, you look at all the stuff that people are doing. Herbal therapy, herbal medicine probably offers more for anti-aging than anything else you can do because it's protecting yourselves.
SPEAKER_00:That makes a lot of sense. It does. I know that um we are running out of time. I could talk to you for a very long time because I I love the science because I find that so interesting. But is there anything that we haven't talked about that you think people should know?
SPEAKER_01:Well, you know, we covered the big picture stuff, and and I hope people will listen and just go with it from there and learn as much as they can because it's so valuable. You know, when we look at health, so much of health, wellness comes from inside your body. It doesn't come from a doctor's office. And it's really important for you to look at your environment, how you live, what you're eating, all of these things really matter in whether you're going to be healthy or not. And really the choice, everyone has a choice of being healthy. I mean, that's the cool thing about our particular time. Even though we do have a lot of unnatural stress factors in our world, you can choose to avoid them. You can learn how to live around them. And the fact of the matter is, fresh food, clean environment, all of those things are more available than they ever have been. You know, when you go back to industrial ages, London and the 1800s, when everybody was using coal to power things, and there was coal soot everywhere and overcrowding and poor food. I mean, it was a whole lot worse than. We're living in a great time, and it is a great time to be healthy. So I think people have to learn what they need to do to achieve that.
SPEAKER_00:Well, thank you so much for coming on. You have helped I'm sure so many different individuals. And I know that this conversation is going to help hundreds, hundreds of people.
SPEAKER_01:And thank you for the opportunity.
SPEAKER_00:Absolutely. I'll have all of the information so you can get in touch in the show notes. And I want to thank everybody for tuning in to another episode of the True Minute Charities podcast. I have been really trying to search and find the best doctor who specializes in Lyme's disease to really tell us everything we need to know. And I really hope you enjoyed this. If you liked this episode, please make sure to rate and review it. We are a hundred percent volunteer-based organization, and this really helps grow our podcast. So please make sure to go into the Truman Charities podcast, hit the subscribe button so you don't miss any future episodes, and write a short review on why you enjoy listening to us. If you'd like to follow me, you can follow us on Instagram at Jamie underscore Truman Charities, Facebook at Truman Charities, and you can follow me on LinkedIn at Jamie Truman. Make sure to go into Truman Charities.com, sign up for our newsletter so you do not miss any of our upcoming charity events, and also Arbethesda's best happy hour. Thanks for tuning in to another episode of the Truman Charities Podcast.
