Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Welcome back to Integrative Lime Solutions with Dr. Carl Feld.
[00:00:05] Speaker B: I am so excited about the show that we have ahead of us. We have some phenomenal information that could save lives. I am Dr. Michael Carlfelt, and with.
[00:00:16] Speaker A: Me, I have my co host, Tanya Hobo.
[00:00:19] Speaker B: You're going to need to tune in to what's going on today. The information is unpacked. So, yeah, don't step away.
[00:00:29] Speaker C: So excited. Let's go ahead and get this started.
Welcome to Integrative Lime Solutions with Dr. Carl Feld. And, listeners, I have a treat for you today.
So if you've it doesn't matter how long you've been on this lime journey, I guarantee you our next guest is somebody that you've heard of, that you follow and or possibly even do his protocol. So I know during my darkest part of my journey, he was a light for me as I joined all of his webinars online. So it's truly an honor to finally get to meet him and so grateful for him for joining us. So welcome. And thank you, Dr. Rawls.
[00:01:17] Speaker D: Hey, my pleasure. Thank you for the opportunity to be here.
[00:01:21] Speaker B: Well, it's so wonderful to be able to chat with somebody that has really kind of researched this area because there are directions, but there's still so much confusion as to what strategies to do, and there's so many different protocols. I'm just curious, and I want to get into that a little bit later. But first, you didn't choose Lyme. Lyme kind of chose you, right?
[00:01:54] Speaker D: Yeah, that's the way it is with a lot of happen that way, right?
Yeah. I wonder what my life would have been like if it hadn't been for Lyme disease. And I don't honestly think it would have been nearly as rich.
I've had the pleasure of enjoying normal health for almost 20 years now since that episode, which lasted about ten or 15 years. So it took a chunk out of my life, there's no doubt about it. But what I learned from a healthcare provider, from a healer point of view, I just would have never have known those things without having going through that experience, and I wouldn't trade it for anything. It was really remarkable.
[00:02:45] Speaker B: How did lyme impact you?
Because you hear your medical doctor and then all of a sudden you start to notice these symptoms. So how did that impact you and how did you finally kind of come to the realization what was going on?
[00:03:02] Speaker D: Well, my story is like a lot of people's story, and it doesn't start with a tick bite.
95% of the people that I've talked to over the past decade or several decades now, and that's hundreds, thousands of people that they don't remember a specific tick bite. They don't remember becoming ill around a tick bite. But they do have other factors that come together in their lives, and that's what happened to me.
I graduated from medical school, specialized in obstetrics and gynecology, which 30 years ago wanted to go to a smaller town. That meant taking call in the hospital. And my situation, it was every second to third night. And generally when you were on call, you worked all day, and then you worked all night too, for most nights. That was every second to third night, every second to third weekend, all weekend, friday morning till Monday morning. And that trying to balance community and being a husband and a father and all of those things. What got left behind is sleep. And it was just constant stress juggling those things retrospectively. I didn't eat a good diet. I recommended a good diet to my patients, but I didn't have time to follow it.
The only thing that I did do was exercise regularly when I could. But 20 years of sleep deprivation really wears on your body. So I started having all of these crazy symptoms. And even after I was forced to stop doing Obstetrics and started recovering my ability to sleep, the symptoms didn't go away. Cardiac symptoms, GI symptoms, neurological symptoms. I mean, I said virtually every symptom in the book, but I didn't know I had Lyme disease. I identified with fibromyalgia. I had done a Lyme test. It was negative. And it wasn't until I found that I was carrying these microbes. After seeing so many of my local physician specialists trying to figure out what was going on, every test in the book, never, nothing came out that was really definitive, which I understand now, to end up with a diagnosis of Ms or whatever, you got to be really sick. And I just wasn't quite sick enough to get a diagnosis. So I ended up being passed around and being one of those people that you walk into the doctor's office and they kind of roll their eyes and go, yeah, this is another one.
And found that I had the microbes of Lyme disease. Thought, this is it. I can take antibiotics. And one round of antibiotics actually made me worse, ripped my heart, but hey, I found other providers who would write me prescriptions. And I kept doing antibiotics and kept getting sicker and finally said, this isn't working. And my intuition by then was saying, there has to be another way. And I was at a point where financially, I could not afford a lot of things that a lot of people do, and I couldn't leave the community. In fact, I really couldn't tell people I was sick. A small town doctor, because I couldn't stop practicing. I didn't have a diagnosis. I couldn't declare disability.
So I left the practice I was in and started a small primary care practice with this idea that it was going to be a wellness practice and I was going to get well.
But I couldn't tell people in the community I was sick.
I had to hide it. And that's true of a lot of Lyme people.
I had to figure things out, and by default, I ended up doing herbal therapy. Stephen Booner published his book Healing Lyme in 2005, which was right at the time. I was going through this and I happened to read it, and I said, what have I got to lose? So next thing I knew, I was taking massive amounts of capsules and herbs, and I started crawling out of the hole and all the symptoms got better. And I've spent the last 20 years trying to figure out why and what the herbs were doing and what Lyme disease actually is, because I don't think it is what most people think it is. And that has been a journey. But I did get my health back. It was an up and down thing over about a five to seven year period. But all the symptoms, including really bad cardiovascular symptoms, all cleared up. And I've been good for 15, almost 20 years, but I've been taking herbs continually all of that time. And I've learned a lot of things that have taken me past my conventional roots. I still value that training, but more than once I've been accused of being more like a naturopath than a doctor.
[00:08:38] Speaker B: Those are foul words.
[00:08:41] Speaker D: I take pride in that compliment when somebody tells me that.
[00:08:47] Speaker B: I'm curious. Why did you since you had tests that showed negative, why did you kind of bark up that tree again?
[00:08:58] Speaker D: Yeah, I call it the second tick bite.
I had started doing things. I changed my diet, I did just lifestyle modifications, I was improving my sleep, all of these things. So I was getting out a little bit, and I was working in the yard one weekend, and the next week I had what I thought was a chigger bite on my rear end that just itched. And was getting worse.
And at the end of the week, I pulled off what I thought was a scab, and it was a tick, and it ended up being a bullseye rash and the whole thing. And all my symptoms came back in spades. And it's like, yeah, it was Lyme disease all along. And that's when I tried antibiotics, but really didn't get a lot of support with that in the local community.
[00:09:48] Speaker C: You said second tick bite. I thought it was going to be like a joke or a story. Didn't really think it was actually a second tick.
[00:09:56] Speaker D: You know, I grew up in the woods. I mean, I got tick bites my whole life. And this idea that Lyme disease doesn't exist in North Carolina. No, it very much exists, along with a lot of other things. Every tick bite, people get something.
But I cured those things in my system for 20 years. And it wasn't until all of these factors came together to really stress my body that these things reactivated. And that's really important.
[00:10:28] Speaker B: Yeah, that's such a factor.
It's when the system is brought down that all of a sudden you become symptomatic. So I'm curious. You're talking about that these 20 years you've been trying to figure out what Lyme is and that it isn't what people may think it is. So I'm really fascinated to hear what your picture of Lyme is.
[00:10:54] Speaker D: Yeah, well, if you truly understand chronic Lyme disease, you understand all of chronic illness. It's a window to understanding everything. At least it was for me. And I think all chronic illnesses are actually a variation on the same theme.
So this idea that I picked up things from ticks when I was running around in the woods as a kid that reactivated, that just stuck in my mind. And my latest research over the past five years has been studying microbe dormancy. And this is a very common survival mechanism that all microbes use at any given point in time. If you look at the total microbe mass on Earth, 60% of it is in a dormant or quiescent state. So if conditions aren't just right for microbe growth or they're hostile to microbe growth, they can just go dormant. And that, turns out, happens a whole lot more than anybody ever recognized that we have things that enter our system from the time we start picking up things and putting them in our mouths when we're kids and things that we're supposed to, like Epstein Barr and Chlamydia and mycoplasmas and the list just goes on and on. That these things in our systems and we become symptomatic. But some of those microbes, viruses, bacteria, everything gets past our immune system and invades our cells. And if our cells are healthy, they become dormant. Our cells keep right on working, but the microbes are dormant inside the cell. And that's happening with a lot of things tick borne microbes things, respiratory infections. We hear about long COVID. I think that's something that's happening. But I read a paper the other day about long colds that really, any virus can do that. It can stay in your system and become reactivated at a later time. But it's more than that. It turns out that things are constantly crossing over from your gut, from your sinuses, from your skin, entering the bloodstream, getting past the immune system and becoming dormant inside cells of your body. There's evidence that we have a microbiome of the brain of dormant bacteria.
And getting this information is hard because we don't cut healthy people up and look inside their tissues, right? So you have to get at pieces of information from autopsy studies and different kinds of things that gather. But that research is coming in. There have even been, I found, like, half a dozen studies that they took blood from healthy people. Blood is pretty easy to get, right? It's not something you don't have to take a chunk out of someone to get their blood cells. So they've found dormant bacteria, a wide range of dormant bacteria inside red blood cells in every healthy volunteer that's ever been looked at.
And these things don't show up in culture because they're dormant. So they have to do RNA recumbinant testing to actually define the presence of these things. But when they do, when they do this sophisticated testing, they find it in every case. And so turns out we've got a lot of things going on all the time with microbes and we're picking up different microbes throughout our lifetime. If you stay healthy, they're fine, you'll never know the difference. But your cells become weakened by chronic stress, by staying up late for years on end and eating a bad diet and all the things that we do and now just the explosion, this high concentration of toxic substances that we're all exposed to, these things are affecting our cells and weakening our cells. And that allows reactivation of microbes. So it's never just one microbe. And when you look at this reactivation, it's very different than the acute infection.
It's like the acute infection. If you're symptomatic with acute infection that's because you've got a brand new invasion of a new microbe and your immune system and that microbe are having a war and that's what you feel the symptoms from. But chronic infections implies not that the microbe is ultra aggressive, it's implying that your cells aren't healthy and your immune system isn't healthy and it's not able to keep these things in check.
And it manifests as a lot of different ways and it can be a lot of different microbes and there's crossover, different microbes. We've taken a disease like Ms.
A lot of people with chronic Lyme wonder about do I have Ms because they have Paresthesias and all of these symptoms and the microbe connections. Chlamydia mycoplasma Epstein but never just one. But yesterday I pulled several studies looking at the presence of Borrelia in mycoplasma.
But I caution people it's different than an acute infection. It's not like one microbe is causing one illness. It's a spectrum of microbes that have been reactivated in someone's system. So it's like chronic Lyme disease. Everybody well knows it's not just Borrelia. They have reactivation of Epstein Barr and Ben Bartonell and Babesia and all these things and then mycoplasmas that aren't typically covered by it carried by ticks. So a lot of things are happening, but the root of it is cellular stress.
And so a big part of overcoming this is restoring cellular health in the body.
That's a key principle of the whole thing.
And I'm looking at this and you can apply any situation, any disease, you can start picking out maybe not the exact microbes, but you can see how that microbe factor and the chronic cellular stress factor would play a role in causing that illness. Whether it's Parkinson's or dementia or any autoimmune or really anything else, there's always that microbe component.
[00:18:08] Speaker B: And that's to me that's fascinating.
So regard to then what pathogens that are manifesting themselves, does that really matter or is it more just that you get a look at the cellular vitality modulating, the immune system, increasing the intelligence of the immune system rather than going hunting for specific pathogens.
[00:18:32] Speaker D: That's where I am. Yeah, I think that this idea of chasing the microbes, we have to find out which microbe is making you sick so we can kill that microbe and make you well. It just doesn't work. It's dysfunctional thinking.
It's because when you look at I'm starting to call these things reactivation syndromes, and that reactivation can manifest in different ways in different tissues with different microbes. So we have a lot of different illnesses, but it's the same thing.
It's always more than one thing. And the things that we actually know about are that's a drop in the bucket. I mean, think about it. 50 years ago, we didn't know about Lyme disease. We didn't know Borrelia. And now, when I wrote my book Unlocking Lyme in 2017, there were twelve species of Borrelia that had been identified worldwide that could cause Lyme disease. We're up to 21 now.
Five years, we're up to 21 species. And then now it's not just Borrelia anymore. It's Bartonella and Rickettsia and Anaplasmas and all of these other tick borne things.
But they found that one tick species can carry 237 different families of bacteria and all of these things.
I was at a meeting a week ago and talking to a group of people ahead of time, and I said, yeah, Borrelia and Bartonella and all of these microbes are low grade pathogens. And that raised in my brows like, whoa.
So a pathogen the ability of a pathogen to make us sick depends on whether we have immunity to it or not. It really has nothing to do with the microbe. They present borelli as being this sophisticated, smart pathogen, and it is. But you can really say that about any of them. They're all trying to survive. What really matters is whether you have built in immunity to that thing or not. And you look at something like, Ebola, that's a really bad pathogen. And it's bad because humans have never been exposed to it. We have no built in immunity to it. But think about it. Pigs have been biting humans and passing Borrelia to humans since the beginning of humans. So it's not new to us. People often don't get sick. In fact, the more I talk to people, the more I think that very symptomatic. Acute Lyme disease isn't really very common. Most people don't get very sick at all, and most people don't get sick enough to really even notice it. If they get some symptoms and happen to notice that tick bite, which people are more observant now, they'll go get an antibiotic. But a lot of people don't notice a tick bite, or they just don't get sick, so they just pass it off.
But these things, even if you don't have symptoms, they still get in your system. I can't tell you the number of people that I've met that had a tick bite, had no or mild symptoms, got antibiotics, had some other kind of stress in their lives, like six months or a year later, and came up with chronic symptoms. So even if you don't have very high symptoms, even if you don't get antibiotics, some of those microbes are going to get through, bury into your cells and become dormant.
But it's happening with a lot of things. I know that sounds scary, but the idea is keeping ourselves healthy.
In my book, I talk about the iceman.
They found a human that thought out of a glacier in the Italian Alps that was dated to be 5300 years old. It's the oldest human specimen that we have that was intact. They found Borrelia in the guy's system. He was in his mid 40s. This guy was hiking across the Alps, and he had Borrelia in his system, and he had a little bit of arthritis and wasn't in perfect health, but he was age 44, which was pretty old back then for the harsh lifestyle that they lived. But he was hiking across the Alps. He didn't have Lyme disease. So these pathogens are more stealthy.
Their thing is surviving. They don't care about making people sick.
They care about having a warm body to get food from and being able to pass along to another host. And historically, that happened all the time that people regularly got bitten by ticks and other bugs. Our great ancestors basically lived in the woods, on the ground, and so that was happening continually.
You have to understand.
Are they pathogens? Yes, they are pathogens, but they're stealthy pathogens that don't typically make people acutely sick. But if your health, if you're exposed to all these factors that affect your health, then those and other things can reactivate in your system.
[00:24:16] Speaker B: And why do you think there's been such an explosion of these type of diseases? Like you're saying 50 years ago, we really didn't know much about this.
[00:24:27] Speaker D: Right.
I think there are a couple of factors there one is awareness.
My grandfather was his first career was a fur trader in the early 19 hundreds. And he was an avid hunter, an outdoorsman fisherman his whole life, but I didn't really know him that way. I came into his life pretty late, and the story I always heard was, by his 40s, he started having chronic symptoms of fatigue and arthritis and migraines and neurological symptoms, and they never knew quite what was wrong with him, and he just remained that way.
He did pretty well in business and real estate, but he was always a broken man.
He died in his mid 70s, right in the mid 70s, about the time they discovered Lyme disease. So he had Lyme disease, there's no doubt about it. He had this thick borne illness. He grew up with it, and nobody knew about it then. Right.
My other grandfather was a general practitioner and I used to go on house calls with him back in the there were people he had stuff in his black bag to help with symptoms, pain and acute infections.
He had antibiotics for strep throat and things like that.
But there were sickly people that he had nothing for.
And so I think part of the problem is we're just starting to put labels on it.
Our conventional medical system did exceptionally well through the 70s with vaccines and antibiotics and new surgeries, but it was all addressed to acute illness. We really didn't do much with chronic illness and didn't recognize it. So it was only after the 70s that we started really naming, treating chronic illnesses. And the pharmaceuticals companies found how lucrative that was.
Part of it is awareness. But the other factor is our world is changing extremely rapidly. We've had more change in the past 30 years than the past 300 years.
When I was born, we had 3 billion people on this planet. We now have eight. And about 5 billion of them drive cars every day.
And that does a lot of pollution.
So we've got this low grade petrochemical pollution that is just permeating everything now. And every day I read UN reports or who reports talking about the level of air pollution, water pollution, food pollution that we're getting.
So I think that's a factor. People are more stressed.
So there's so many variables that I don't think people are paying attention to. They don't want to hear about them because they don't know what to do about it. But it's real. And so part of what I do is try to teach people how to live around that as much as they can so they're not affected by it.
But I think that's a big reason. So I think part of the thing is awareness.
We are aware about things. We're treating them more. The conventional system has built an industry around chronic illness.
And the conventional system actually thrives on people remaining chronically ill.
And it's a trillion dollar industry. It's crazy.
But also people are getting sick more. According to the CDC, 60% of the population has some kind of chronic ailment that they have to deal with that requires medical therapy. 60%? That's crazy. That's all ages.
[00:28:47] Speaker C: That is crazy. And I've said for several years, I think the majority of the population has Lyme disease.
Their body's been able to keep it dormant.
[00:28:57] Speaker D: Well, yeah, like I said. But it's not just Borrelia or these other tick borne microbes that people are picking up. Other things.
Where we are now is we don't have the ability to really do an analysis of what is in someone's tissues. So there's some unknowns, and it may be that some of these things in our tissues, in our cells, are actually symbiotic. But they're calling it the dormant blood and tissue microbiome. And it really offers a very elegant explanation for every chronic illness. We have different illnesses because everybody picks up a different spectrum of microbes and we have different factors that come together.
But I think it explains a whole lot. It's going to be a long time before the conventional system really recognizes that though, because it's going to challenge absolutely everything they're doing.
[00:29:58] Speaker B: And you mentioned the word symbiotic a lot of times you have bacterias can either be beneficial or not good for us depending on the environment that they're in and also depending on the quantity, the balance of these different bacterias or so called pathogens.
Talk to me a little bit about that because could that mean then that some of these, like the lime spark heat or Epstein Barr or some of these different so called pathogens could be beneficial in the right environment and in the right situation?
[00:30:40] Speaker D: It's hard to know. I would still characterize these things, the tick borne microbes, as being pathogens.
But the research I'm reading with researchers that are really embracing this idea of this dormant blood and tissue microbiome are suggesting that maybe some things because a lot of things cross over from the gut and the skin and that includes normal flora. So possibly some of these things that are part of us from day one, actually, maybe they do have some protective effects in our tissues. But I think we're a ways off from really defining that. That's going to be some tough research to figure out in living individuals because.
[00:31:35] Speaker B: It is fascinating with an individual from the day they're born to the day that they die that the length of their DNA is quite a bit longer. So then you look at the addition of viral DNA absolutely to the genetic material and also then the impact then on the behavior and our ability to adapt to changing environment and so forth with kind of information probably from these microbes.
[00:32:09] Speaker D: It's true. Yeah.
But I think it all gets back to cellular health though, as far as keeping your microbiome balanced, keeping your hormones balanced, everything working in your body. It gets back to that idea of keeping your cells healthy because if you're keeping your cells healthy, they're going to manage everything in your body. And so that's really the key that's the simplification is getting to the root of cellular stress and understanding how to keep your cells healthy is so vitally important to prevent any chronic illness.
[00:32:55] Speaker C: Yeah, that's amazing.
We've had a few different doctors on the show recently and we always talk about kind of getting to the root of it, to your gut, your microbiome, because it really is so much of our body and now adding in at a cellular level.
It makes sense.
It does, yeah.
[00:33:21] Speaker D: Well, most of the time if you do the things you need to do to take care of your cells, you're going to take care of your microbiome too.
It's all going to work together. But yeah, that idea of cellular health is just starting to take hold, I think. But it does simplify the equation a good bit.
Your whole body is made of cells. Everything that happens in your body is a result of actions of cells. And so if you take any one cell, that cell needs just basic things to stay healthy. It needs the right foods, it needs the right nutrients. And that varies. Like thyroid cells need iodine to make thyroid hormone hard cells tend to burn fat, brain cells tend to burn carbohydrate. So it varies. But if you're eating a whole food, well rounded diet, you're going to supply the nutrients that your cells need. Your cells need a clean environment. Every cell in the body needs a clean environment. So here we're talking about all these petrochemicals that have made their way into our food and our water and our air. Those are basically inhibiting cellular functions. It hobbles your cells so they can't work as well. And so clean environment cells need regular good blood flow and we get that maximally by being physically active. People are very sedentary compared to the way people have always been. Our normal thing. If you go back to our foraging days, we were basically digging roots and walking all day long and moving. All that blood flushed our cells with fluid that carried away toxin and delivered nutrients and oxygen. And being sedentary, you don't get that. So stuff gets collected, junk gets collected around your cells so they can't purge toxins.
Cells need downtime. You work all day, you need some downtime at night for your cells to recover from stress. And the last thing is all cells need protection from invasive microbes. And so our immune system, which is cellular, is designed to do that, but it's not enough. And that's where herbs come in that I think is so valuable.
[00:35:54] Speaker B: So I'm curious because you mentioned kind of in the beginning of our conversation that spent all this time trying to figure out why these herbs helped.
So is it because of their impact on their immune system or do you feel that they had antimicrobial effect or do you feel that they had cellular effect, these different herbs that you were doing?
[00:36:20] Speaker D: It's all cellular.
That's the fascinating thing. So after I had this remarkable experience with herbs, I said, well, I need to learn the basics. So I went and studied Chinese medicine, traditional Chinese medicine, ayurvedic medicine, the different traditions around the world. And that was valuable. But they're observational, it's like you take these herbs for these symptoms, but it really didn't tell us what was going know. And Stephen Booner was a start in this because he was already doing a lot of this, but studying what's going on at the biochemical level with the herbs. And when I say know, we're talking about everything that ranges from culinary herbs in our food all the way to herbs that have strong drug like or even. Poisonous properties. And that's actually where a lot of drugs come from. But I'm talking about a range of herbs that are kind of in the middle, really don't have drug like properties. You wouldn't take them to acutely relieve a symptom. You take them. And here we're talking about adaptogens and what I call antimicrobial adaptogens, herbs that mainly have an effect of helping us feel better, protecting our health. And they do that at the cellular level. So the first thing is every single herb, every plant has antimicrobial properties. So no matter what herb you take, it's going to have some antimicrobial properties. Because what you're getting when you take an herb is this complex chemistry from the plant that the plant is using to protect its own cells from free radicals, from toxic substances, and from every variety of microbe. It also includes chemicals that the plant is using to balance cellular functions very similar to our hormones. So these things interact with us in a positive way. But the interesting thing about the antimicrobial properties of an herb is you're getting a whole system. When you take that herb from that plant, you're taking it its entire defense system and it has a sophistication that's not present in an antibiotic. All antibiotics come from natural sources, either a plant, a fungus or a bacteria, every single one of them. But they pluck one chemical out of that organism's defense system and then potentiate it to do to hit bacteria, virus, whatever, in one specific way. And that opens the door to resistance.
But you lose something with that system, you gain potency. Antibiotics are great for acute infections with fast growing bacteria like a pneumococcal pneumonia. But when you look at these other chronic things, you're going to destroy your normal flora by the time you make a dent. So the really remarkable thing about herbs is they have these very sophisticated antimicrobial properties against a range of bacteria, viruses, protozoa, full range of things. But it's selective our herbs, and this has been documented by science. It's really interesting. Our herbs selectively suppress pathogens but don't affect our normal floor and actually they promote growth of normal flora. So I found that actually herbs are better for balancing your gut flora than probiotics are by far.
So you can take herbs for a long time because not only are they suppressing pathogens, these vagrant reactivated microbes throughout your system. They're protecting your cells from free radicals, from toxic substances, they're balancing immune system messengers and other they're reducing stress hormones. So they're doing these wide range of things that are actually hitting all the buttons to protect your cells, to restore cellular health. And that's what's so fascinating about herbs. And typically, if you combine herbs, you get this wonderful synergistic effect that is just extraordinary.
[00:40:56] Speaker C: Wow, I got to take all this in. This is a lot of fascinating information, for sure.
[00:41:07] Speaker B: What's fascinating with herbs and plants and phenolics and all these things is that like you're mentioning that the phenolics are just fantastic prebiotics to feed the gut biome and curcumin and bosvelia and all these different things are just amazing for your gut biome. But like you're saying that the respect for the intelligence that exists within a living plant, within those chemical structures that are so complex, that evolved over eons of time, for the modulation, for protection, for activation, all these different components that exist within these plants. To me that's just amazing. To us, I'm just at awe what exists within plants. That intelligence that we get benefit from when we ingest.
[00:42:08] Speaker D: Yeah, it is amazing. It's changed my life in so many ways. Not only did it give me my health back, but it's just changed who I am as a physician. And I think there's a place for drugs, I think there is a place for every drug made, for every medical procedure made. But I think they are mainly important for early stages of illness, for suppressing manifestations like symptoms and inflammation, but they don't actually get to the root causes of the cellular stress. So people don't get well. And that's a big limitation.
We've got this whole conventional system built around addressing symptoms and inflammation and hormone imbalances, which are all manifestations of illness, but they don't address the root cellular stress. So people never get well, they just have to keep taking the drug. And that works really well for the drug companies.
[00:43:16] Speaker C: I say. Wasn't that their plan all along?
[00:43:19] Speaker D: Yeah, they haven't designed new antibiotics in years because cost a lot of money to bring a new drug to market and an antibiotic. They don't get that long term chronic use, so they just don't invest in those kind of drugs anymore.
[00:43:35] Speaker B: Yeah, the key is not about fixing problems, about managing problems.
That's always how it is. So if you have for an individual, then that is diagnosed with Lyme in your mind, what should that journey look like for them to get to the other side?
[00:44:01] Speaker D: First of all, I think it's important for people to take personal accountability, which is hard.
I tell people all the time what you do is as important as anything that anybody can do to you. And so I think building that foundation of restoring cellular health, thinking about, well, how do I reduce these things that are driving this cellular distress in my body?
Better diet, getting decent sleep, just general health habits for improving things, taking a core regiment of herbs and there are different ones out there. I think the mistake people make is people hear that herbs are good for Lyme disease, so they take a small bottle of an inexpensive tincture and think that's going to do anything and it's just not giving them the phytochemical concentration. So we know a lot about herbs that we can use for these reactivation syndromes. With Lyme disease being chronic, Lyme disease being a model, we've done a lot of work in looking at how in fact, today I've been collecting all of the research that I've accumulated, just looking at the herbs that we're using and cataloging all of the things that they're doing.
So it's not just killing the microbes. We do want to suppress the microbes. And certain herbs are going to be really great for one microbe, but not as good for other microbes because it really depends on the microbe stress in the plant's natural environment, what it's going to be good for. So combining herbs gives you a wider range, but they're also doing a lot of things like normalizing cytokines that have been disrupted by the microbes, the chemical messengers that are throwing the immune system out of balance. They are inhibiting enzymes that bacteria, variety and even viruses use to break down tissues and break down the barriers that prevent microbes from entering into cells and breaking down collagen. So they inhibit all these enzymes that the microbes are using.
They balance stress hormones. They protect cells.
A core regimen with enough of the phytochemistry to actually do some good.
Our products. I built a regimen after I had my experience.
I built a regimen that kind of mirrors my experience and things that I've learned since being with the Booner protocol. But there are others out there, too. And so herbs as a core and then working with a practitioner who can fill in those gaps and possibly accelerate.
Working with a practitioner, working with a health coach to go beyond that to enhance it. I mean, it took me five to seven years of fumbling around to really get well because I tell people you have to learn to work the herbs. So sometimes you do have to trade around and bring in new herbs as you're going along.
There's a little bit of trial and error with every individual, and I think a good practitioner can accelerate that course.
There are certain kinds of things, and I won't mention everything, but sometimes ozone or hyperbaric oxygen or sometimes rife machines, red light therapy, sauna, all of these things can help accelerate that recovery back to a normal state of cellular wellness. What wellness is healthy cells and dormant microbes. You're not going to get rid of the microbes, but if you can get rid of the cells that have been infected and restore that state of dormancy, then that's what it's all about. That's your end goal. So I think I'm still carrying all the microbes that I had when I was ill. But I've been well for 15 or more years and I have good health habits. I take the herbs every day. But at 66, I'm not getting arthritis and heart symptoms and all the things that I thought for sure I would be a broken man, kind of like my grandfather. At this point. I'm not. I'm doing everything that I want to in life, and that's what it's all about.
[00:48:53] Speaker C: Wow. So going back to when you said when you incorporate all these different herbs, it's kind of a trial and error. So I know a lot of people that are going through this journey, they always want to know or they always ask, how long do I know if something specific is working for me? When am I going to know that maybe this combination of things isn't my ticket? When should I change things up? How long do you go without noticing changes before you want to change things up?
[00:49:28] Speaker D: Right. Well, as I said, I think you need to work the herbs.
I did a core regiment of herbs that I kept and I still take a lot of those same herbs. I don't take the quantities that I once did, but I learned that substituting in a new herb from time to time, a new antimicrobial. Unfortunately, there's a lot of them out there.
It seems like I'd do really well and I'd kind of reach a plateau and I'd go through my list and see what could be holding me back. Was it something that I was doing or some new toxic substance I was exposed to or a food sensitivity or whatever? I'd work through that and if I didn't find anything, I'd rotate to a new herb and that would give me a list for a while and I would do that one for six months or so. And then when I seemed to be reaching a plateau, I'd rotate that one out and a new one in. All the while keeping that core, whether it is actual bacterial resistance to the herbs, which is going to be a lot less of a problem than with an antibiotic, or whether we just start metabolizing the chemicals faster, it's not that unusual for somebody to reach a plateau. So it is something you have to work. But I truly believe that herbs should be a core for every person.
And I think if you learn how to use the herbs properly, then you're going to get benefit. But what I can tell you from the information that we have, we've been running our protocol for probably about seven or eight years and we've crossed the line of about 12,000 people having used it periodically during that time, we've sent out questionnaires to like several hundred people. And granted, not everybody fills out a questionnaire though we really encourage people to and try to get as many of them back as we can.
But the information from these kind of informal studies that we've done is that at three months, about 30% of people have significant reduction in their symptoms.
By six months that goes up to 70%.
There is no drug out there that works that well. By nine months it goes up to 90%.
So the longer you're on the herbs, the more benefits you get. So here's the deal. The cost of the herbs relative to a lot of other things is not outrageous. I mean, I've talked to so many people that have squandered hundreds of thousands of dollars chasing IV antibiotics only to be destroyed by it.
So the cost of the herbs isn't that great. The toxicity of the herbs is really low. And not to say that someone couldn't have an unusual reaction to an herb.
We have that from time to time, but severe reactions are really uncommon. And again, I've been taking herbs continually for it's going on almost 20 years now with nothing but benefit. So it's kind of like, why would you not do that?
But even I would go as far as saying that every person on the planet should be taking an herbal product every day, just a core regiment of herbs. And there are a lot of reasons to look at that and say, here we're talking about herbs more like adaptogens, turmeric, rodiola, things like that, to take on a daily basis, and I'm sure you know those herbs, but there's a lot of ways you can argue that that's a good idea. But one of the most interesting is if you go back to when we were foraging. So humans foraged for wild food for over 200,000 years. We've only been eating grains and farming for about 10,000 years. Out of that, 200,000 served us really well for a long time. And in that forage food, there's evidence that about two thirds of what people ate was vegetable manor.
It was wild berries and roots and leaves and whatever might have calories. And they had to eat a lot of it because wild plants don't have a lot of calories in them. And so they were getting all these rich phytochemicals that we now don't get in our cultivated foods because we bred our cultivated foods to produce calories, not protective phytochemicals. So we don't get what's in wild plants anymore, but humans did for hundreds of thousands of years. So they were getting this rich phytochemistry that was helping to protect them from microbes and balance their microbiome. And when you look at modern day cultures, they're still doing that.
The Haza tribe in Africa is a common example that's used, and these people have a very well balanced microbiome. Well, they're basically eating herbs all day, the equivalent of it in all these wild plants. So that in itself is an argument that the main thing that's missing from our food today is these protective phytochemicals. Not to say that broccoli and celery and all of our vegetables don't have them, but they don't have them due to the degree of wild plants, because we've trained it out of them with our cultivated foods. We grow them for calories, and we don't want them stressed because we want them producing as much calories in the form of seeds or whatever as we can. And all of these plants, we've been doing that for 10,000 years. So we've cultivated these protective properties out of our food plants. They're not there anymore to the degree that their wild ancestors were. So that's something that's really missing.
And the best way to do that is taking herbal supplements.
Herbal teas and everything else are great. But to get that concentration that they were getting in that ancestral diet, you just about have to take a supplement.
[00:56:15] Speaker B: Because you have tinctures and you have capsule form. Do you prefer tinctures versus capsules or it doesn't matter to you?
[00:56:22] Speaker D: I like it all. There are a lot of different I like that answer.
Teas. But you don't get the concentration, the full spectrum of the plant. You're just getting the aqueous chemicals. So three main ways that people are getting commercial preparations. So the first in capsule form is a whole herb capsule. And basically what they're doing is they're taking the herb, drying it, the whole plant, and crushing it into a powder and then putting that in a capsule.
And so what you're getting is a lot of fiber. So if you go to a health food store and you're buying Hawthorne and it costs $15, you're not getting much phytochemistry. You're getting mainly fiber from the plant.
So that's probably the least valuable thing. And when you look at products on the internet that have powdered herbs or capsuled herbs, and they don't tell you anything but the name of the plant or the herb, that's what you're getting. You're getting the lowest concentration of the things that's going to help you. So kind of the next step up for that is tinctures. So a tincture, they take the plant soak it in water and alcohol. So the water is pulling the aqueous chemicals, the alcohol is pulling some of the fat based chemicals. So you're getting a full spectrum from the plant, so you soak it. And the concentration of the plant parts that you put in the extract determine the concentration. So after you do that, you throw the plant parts away the fiber, and all that's left is a bottle of this liquid preparation with the phytochemistry of the plant in it. Tinctures are really good. I like them very much. I use them regularly. But one step up from a tincture, the downside of tincture is a lot of times you're getting a lot of alcohol. They can be really bitter. And if you're taking the volumes of herb that I'm taking, you're doing a lot of liquid every day. So the next step is what's called a standardized extract. It's powder. The capsule looks just like that whole herb powder, except what they're doing with that is they take a tincture, spray it out on a surface, dry off the water and alcohol, and collect the powder.
So a good standardized extract in powder form, one capsule is going to equal ten of those whole herb capsules or a couple of teaspoons of a tincture. So there's some things that are better done in tincture, but I get the core of my herbs from standardized extracts just because you can get so much more phytochemistry in you doing that than just tinctures alone. And I typically use a combination, but my core, I'm using those standardized extracts because it's easy. The capsules just make it easier to get those things down.
[00:59:39] Speaker C: Yeah, I've taken some nasty tasting things along my journey. That's the least fun part. So how do you know the difference between does it actually say an extract on it or how does somebody know that's?
[00:59:57] Speaker D: The thing about a lot of products out there is you don't know. And what I find is a lot of companies, and this isn't all companies, it's probably about 50 50. Half of companies are making really great products. Half of companies are really putting all their money in marketing hype and science jargon to wow people.
But the telltale sign is if you go on the website or you go on the product and it's hard to find where the ingredients are, that's a red flag. They're hiding something.
But if you look on the bottle or you do find the ingredients and all it says is Hawthorne or rodiola, that's all they tell you. And maybe the milligram quantity. But often what they do is they put that they'll put six or so herbs in a proprietary blend and a proprietary blend.
They can hide anything in there. They can put the most amount of the very cheapest ingredient.
So you really don't know. So ideally, what you want is you want each herb listed if it's a standardized extract, and it's going to say standardized to such and such phytochemical, and it's going to be different for different herbs. They pick one phytochemical to make a standard that everybody can compare to, and they're going to list the milligram quantity of that so that's better in the right direction. And then purity. And potency is all about testing. And for our products, we typically test at three different levels. We insist on a certificate of analysis that they've defined. That the supplier, that you want to be able to trace it out to the farm. And the supplier has actually done testing to say, yes, this is Hawthorne, and yes, it is standardized to this X amount of this phytochemical, and it doesn't have heavy metals and bacteria and other things in it. But typically we don't stop there. We take a sample from that parcel of the supplement of the ingredient and have that tested in an independent lab. And then we have it tested again during the manufacturing process to make sure that everything is being blended properly. And there are a lot of companies that are doing that standard, but there are a lot of companies that aren't.
[01:02:44] Speaker C: And it's definitely hard to know which ones, especially when you're dealing with Lyme and you have Lyme brain.
The last thing we can figure out is what is so great.
[01:02:57] Speaker B: Well, Dr. Raul, this was amazing. And I want everyone, all the audience, to mean, what is your product line called? What is the name of it?
[01:03:08] Speaker D: The company is vitalplan.com. Vitalplan. And the protocol that I built is called the Restore Kit.
It's a reflection of the Booner Protocol, but also a lot of other things that I've learned along the way. And for at least half of people, that'll be all they need, that'll be the core it'll carry them through. But there will be people that will need more of various kinds of things or need that extra help. And again, the value of that practitioner that you're helping to guide them through this process is always important.
But we have an email series that is built in just to help onboard people with expectations for supplements, how to get started, how to gradually ramp up on the doses and what kinds of things to look for, but also later information about.
Maybe you do need to consider some of these other things too. So that is designed to support people who don't have access to a practitioner and make the life of a practitioner easy for those that do and really help them along. So we feel like we play a role in just making that whole process easier, of building that foundation, which I think is so remarkably important.
[01:04:38] Speaker B: Yeah, it is for somebody battling Lyme, obviously, to have that kind of customer journey where they feel supported while they're doing a protocol.
And a lot of people obviously like for yourself, it's not easy to find a Lyme literate practitioner wherever you're at.
[01:05:01] Speaker C: Dr. Roy, I have one more question. So that Restore Kit that you said, is that kind of your core basic foundation that you continue to take?
[01:05:13] Speaker D: I still take some of it.
I leave the stronger antimicrobial herbs for when I really need them because they have such wonderful antiviral properties. If I get confronted with a cold virus and all those. And we have two grandchildren that are small and seem to be constantly exposing us to them.
So I save those for when I need them.
But I have a basic core regimen of herbs and then other support nutrients like glutathione and NAC that I do take on a regular basis. But once you get healthy, you can reduce the quantities that you're taking and also you can keep some in reserve for when you really need them.
[01:06:08] Speaker C: Gotcha. All right, this has just been amazing.
So we're definitely going to put your website on your title so people can reach out and find what you're doing and all this amazingness that you offer the Lyme community. And like Dr. Carlfelt says, there's not many of you guys out there, so we truly, truly appreciate you. And all this research you've been doing is just fascinating. So I could just only imagine what's going to be to come in the years coming from Dr. Rawls. I'm excited.
[01:06:41] Speaker D: Well, it seems to be an ongoing journey.
I spend a lot of time every day, just asking questions and trying to find answers that somebody has looked at that little piece of science. And the fascinating thing is, when you look at the worldwide body of research, there are a lot of really good scientists trying to answer these questions. And it's not one person answering one big question. It's a lot of people answering the small questions and then me putting those together in a logical form to make it useful to other.
[01:07:22] Speaker B: Key. That is the key. Well, thank you so much, Dr. Raul, for taking this time and really explaining this beautifully. And I think that it's really valuable for people to understand.
And I deal with a lot of oncology integrative oncology as well. And it's the same principles there. You can't just go hunting for cancer cells. It's all about going. It's this cellular vitality, mitochondrial activity.
So all of that becomes a key.
Thank you so much, Dr. RAL.
[01:08:05] Speaker C: Yes, thank you.
[01:08:06] Speaker D: My pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.
[01:08:08] Speaker C: Absolutely.
[01:08:16] Speaker A: The Information this podcast is for educational purposes only, and it's not designed to diagnose or treat any disease. I hope this podcast impacted you as it did me. Please subscribe so that you can be notified when new episodes are released. There are some excellent shows coming up that you do not want to miss. If you're enjoying these podcasts, please take a moment to write a review. And please don't keep this information to yourself. Share them with your family and friends. You never know what piece of information that will transform their lives. For past episodes and powerful information on how to conquer lime, go to integrativelimesolutions.com and an additional powerful resource, Limestream.com. For lime support and group discussions, join Tanya on Facebook at lime conquerors Mentoring Lime Warriors if you'd like to know more about the edge integrative of Lyme therapies My Center offers, please visit thecarlfelcenter.com. Thank you for spending this time with us, and I hope to see you at our next episode of Integrative lyme Solutions with Dr. Carlfell.
