Unveil The Lyme And Microbiome Connection

Bill Rawls, MD

Thank you too. Pleasure.

Myriah Hinchey, ND, FMAPS

It’s great to have you here. Please introduce yourself and briefly describe how you fell into treating chronic tick-borne diseases.

Bill Rawls, MD

Yes, it fell and is on the spot. I don’t think most people choose that. It chooses them. I was trained conventionally. I decided to practice obstetrics and gynecology because it dealt more with wellness and bringing life into the world. It was wonderful. But it came with this obligation of covering hospital labor and delivery, an emergency room, and then a small town that was every second to third night. I spent 20 years of my life mostly sleep deprived because when you have that call obligation that keeps you up most nights when you’re on call and then trying to balance out being active and community and being a good dad and husband, it’s just those things get shortened along with all your other health habits. 

By age 47, I had crashed. But just stopping obstetrics and research and taking more time to sleep didn’t fix me. I had just a range of symptoms: cardiac symptoms, gut symptoms, brain symptoms, and joint symptoms. My whole body was falling apart. The fentanyl specialist I saw couldn’t explain it. The most they could give me was a diagnosis of fibromyalgia, which doesn’t get you anything but treatment for symptoms. I just kept thinking, it’s got to be something else—and kept pushing until I finally found it. I was carrying the Lyme microbe, Borrelia. Then I thought, this is it; I can take antibiotics, I can get well, and I’ll be back on my feet, but I didn’t have acute symptoms. I had chronic symptoms. I’ve come to appreciate that what we define as chronic Lyme disease is very, very different from acute Lyme disease. It doesn’t respond well to the types of antibiotics we use. I was in a situation where I couldn’t travel to pursue care and ended up using herbal therapy to get my life back. Not just a little bottle of herbs off the shelf at the grocery store. I was ordering specialized botanical extracts and taking just handfuls of herbs, gradually getting my life back. Throughout five years—a big learning experience—all my symptoms gradually melted away. I’ve been well ever since. and my life’s pursuit since that time has been understanding why herbs work and what this thing is that we call chronic Lyme disease.

Myriah Hinchey, ND, FMAPS

Yes. Thank you for sharing your story. and thank God you got better, because I know you are helping thousands and thousands of people recover in the same way that you did.

Bill Rawls, MD

Well, like so many others, we give back, and, that’s you take what you learned and you try to make it available to anyone else that might be able to benefit.

Myriah Hinchey, ND, FMAPS

Yes. That’s the whole point of what we’re trying to do here. Thank you. Let’s start by talking about the impacts Lyme disease has on our gut health and microbiome.

Bill Rawls, MD

Yes. Well, when we say the word microbiome, a lot of people immediately think about the gut. But the microbiome is all the microbes that inhabit your body or a part of your body, and we have to respect that. Our gut is walled off from all the rest of our tissues. The gut lining keeps the food and microbes contained. They’re active in there, but they’re often active independently of us. Our skin microbiome. We have different microbiomes in the body. We have our gut microbiome, skin microbiome, and the microbiome of our sinuses and nasal passages, and all of these microbes are different. I mean, there’s even evidence that the microbes you have in your left arm pattern are different than the microbes you have in your armpit, which is interesting. 

But all of these things are outside of our tissues. What has piqued my interest is that what is being defined is the tissue and blood microbiome. We have microbes that slip across these barriers—across the gut, across the skin, across the sinuses—and enter the bloodstream along with all the other foreign things we pick up—tickborne microbes, respiratory infections, anything that makes it to the bloodstream. This is constantly happening, and it turns out that our bloodstream for microbes is more of a freeway than this sterile, calm place. 

Microbes are constantly coming and going. Of course, the immune system has to manage all of that. But some of those things slip by and end up in our tissues. Our brain, our heart, and our joints are everywhere. It’s not just one microbe. What they’re finding is that we have microbes throughout our body. If we are healthy, if our cells are healthy, then these things can stay dormant, and they can stay dormant for a lifetime. It’s only when they react and become reactivated that we have symptoms. The gut microbiome is feeding that, and other parts of the other microbiome in the body are feeding that. All of that is relevant in that way.

Myriah Hinchey, ND, FMAPS

How does getting a tick-borne disease infection break that balance and push someone into a situation where they no longer have healthy cells and the cells can no longer protect themselves from all of these different microbes?

Bill Rawls, MD

Yes. Often, it doesn’t at all. When you look at all of the tick-borne microbes, whether you’re talking about Borrelia, Bartonella, or all of the other things that you hear about, they are all low-grade pathogens. A lot of people raise their eyebrows and are surprised to hear me say that. But how do you define a pathogen? Is the ability of that bacteria, virus, whatever, to cause severe acute illness? Ebola is a severe pathogen. That’s a high-grade pathogen. Smallpox. That’s a high-grade pathogen. When you look at everything out there, the SARS virus is a medium- to low-grade pathogen. The mortality associated with Ebola is about 60% of smallpox, even higher than that. COVID: about 1%. Killed a lot of people because it infected so many people at one time. However, the actual mortality was 1% or less. For tick-borne microbes, pretty close to zero. Tick-borne microbes do not kill people acutely. The chronic manifestations may kill people, but they don’t kill people acutely. They wind by stealth. Their motive is not to make you severely ill. Their motive is to have a place in your body to hang out and wait for another host. They don’t have to make you sick to do that. Very interestingly, when I was researching my book on Lyme, I came upon the evidence that a person, a human, thawed out of a glacier in the Italian Alps. He was 5,300 years old, in his mid-to-late 40s, had some arthritis, wasn’t in perfect health, and was crossing the Alps. He had Borrelia and Lyme in his tissues. This guy was crossing the Alps. 

That just shows what happens in a lot of cases when these things enter the body. They do it very stealthily. They bypassed the immune system, and you in the system mopped up a lot of the microbes. But if you get through and if they can and her tissues and enter cells, they can become dormant inside cells and just hang out and wait. When our health is compromised in other ways, that’s when we become sick. That’s when these things reactivate. But it’s typically not just Borellia and not just Bartonella. It’s the Epstein-Barr virus and all the things that we know to measure and ten times over that, maybe even 100 times over that. We do have these microbes that, science is showing more and more. We have these things that are dormant in our tissues. Tickborne microbes can become dormant in our tissues. It’s not until we do that that other things happen. I’ve interviewed thousands of people over the past decade, and 95% of the people that I talked to do not remember becoming ill around the time of the tick bite. 

Myriah Hinchey, ND, FMAPS

Yes. I use the analogy a lot of times with my patients, where it’s, the straws in the back of the camel. The camel has an immune system. It’s, finally just too much of an overload. That’s when you have this huge change.

Bill Rawls, MD

Yes. Yes, absolutely. It’s other factors, years of a bad diet, sometimes a perfect storm of stress factors of mental stress. My wife left, in my office, I got fired from my job, and my house burned down. That happened all at once. Or I had a bad automobile accident and ended up in the hospital, recovering for 2 or 3 months. Those kinds of stresses seem to precipitate the reactivation of these microbes. Then what the microbes are doing when they reactivate this? They want to create a food supply. They start breaking down, the things that you talk about. They use enzymes and inflammatory cytokines from the immune system to break down our tissues and cells and create a food source to grow more microbes. When that starts happening, it’s a pot boiling over that just feeds itself. That can affect everything in the body, including the gut microbiome and everything else.

Myriah Hinchey, ND, FMAPS

Yes, absolutely. Then, there are a lot of things when you’re trying to treat these infections that can cause further disruption of the microbiome all over the body. Would you like to comment on that a little bit?

Bill Rawls, MD

Well, there’s that delicate balance in the gut that is so important. Everybody talks about the immune system, but we have four levels of defense, and it’s important to recognize all four. The first level of defense is barriers: the gut lining the skin and the lining of our sinuses. What those things are designed to do is keep microbes out of our tissues. But those barriers are leaky. Things are constantly making their way across these barriers and getting into our bloodstream. Our backup system, and most important for acute infections, is our immune system. It’s our immune system that’s managing these things, which are sometimes a trickle, sometimes a flood of not only things that are part of us from our gut, our skin, and our sinuses, but also respiratory infections, tickborne microbes, and everything else. Our immune system is the backup plan. That’s a second level of defense. 

Our third level of defense is ourselves. A lot of people don’t appreciate that. Our cells, brain cells, and heart tell us that all the cells in our body can expel or destroy microbes. They use a process that’s called autophagy that the cell uses to rebuild itself. Well, it’s also how it gets rid of microbes. Our cells can defend themselves. But all microbes. This is a fascinating thing to study. All microbes are found to have the ability to become dormant. If conditions aren’t favorable for the microbe to grow, then it just goes into a quiescent, dormant state, and it can stay there indefinitely. If you look at all the microbe masses of all the microbes on Earth, 60% of them are dormant at any given time. That dormancy is a key thing that microbes use. You have to think about the fact that, a bacteria is 100 to 1000 times smaller than one of our cells, and a virus is a whole lot smaller than that. You can have a bunch of microbes and a bunch of bacteria inside your cells. But if they’re dormant, the cell just keeps on working. That’s the third level, is our cell’s cellular defense. 

The fourth is our normal flora. We have bacteria in our gut and on our skin. Other places in the body that protect us from pathogens. We all have these opportunities that are there, just waiting to digest us and cross into our bloodstream. Everything else and our normal flora keep them in check by secreting substances that suppress the growth of these other microbes. They don’t do it for us. They do it because they want all the food to themselves, in the gut, on the skin, or anywhere else. They’re suppressing their competition, which just works well for us. We’ve had this long-standing relationship with them, and it’s okay. Yes, we’re going to let you hang out there because you’re doing us a favor so our immune system doesn’t attack them. It’s an interesting balance, but it’s easily disrupted. Antibiotics, stress. There are so many factors that can disrupt the gut microbiome. Once you do that, you lose that fat. An interesting study that I came upon was a study in 2015. They found that we do have a trickle of microbes—bacteria, pathogens, and normal flora—that flow across the gut and into the bloodstream. This is happening all the time to everybody. When you have dysbiosis, you disrupt the balance of normal flora with pathogens in the gut. That trickle becomes a flood of pathogens. That’s one way that, the treatment of Lyme disease, if you’re not careful, can disrupt the gut and, aggravate your situation because then, not only if you get reactivation of the Lyme microbes and all the other things that you’ve picked up in your tissues, you got this flood of pathogens coming in from the gut and layering on top of that. Yes, you have to be careful about not disrupting that gut balance, or the gut can get any of these microbiomes that exist outside of our tissues.

Myriah Hinchey, ND, FMAPS

It’s a delicate balance because it’s a double-edged sword. How do you get rid of the infection without using means that disrupt the microbiome, and not only the microbiome and the normal flora that helps to protect us, as you just explained, but also that can exacerbate the breakdown of the tight junctions, for example, in the gut, and then allow all of these toxins and pathogens to enter into the systemic circulation, causing more toxicity, oxidative stress, etc? It just seems like a vicious cycle that starts feeding itself.

Bill Rawls, MD

Yes. It does. Yes, that’s why you have to be careful about using antibiotics. I think there is a place for antibiotics and Lyme therapy, but I think they have to be used very judiciously. When we get down to it, antibiotics do what they’re designed for: kill fast-growing pathogens—things that are growing fast. If somebody gets acute pneumococcal pneumonia, those bacteria are invading the lung tissue, and they’re growing very fast. They’re doubling time, which is roughly about 15 or 20 minutes. They’re moving. Antibiotics depend on that fast growth to kill those bacteria selectively. It’s not that they can target the pneumococcal bacteria. What we’re targeting with an antibiotic is fast-growing bacteria. They’re growing a lot faster than normal flora. But still, with prolonged use of an antibiotic, you’re going to start killing your normal flora. They’re not turning over as rapidly. Let’s look at the doubling time of Borrelia, the Lyme microbe: 12 to 24 hours. Then if it’s growing inside a cell, you’re not going to get it at all. That presents a real problem with using antibiotics, because to kill those bacteria, you’re going to have to use those antibiotics for months on end. Whatever therapy you’re going to have to do, you’re going to have to do it for months on end to get rid of that bacteria.

You always run into problems two and three. You’re going to disrupt normal flora, but you’re allowing pathogens to flourish in the gut, and you’re going to create antibiotic resistance in those pathogens in the gut. You get a double whammy. that limits the use of antibiotics. I think what everybody focuses on when they’re trying to solve the problem of Lyme disease is: how do I kill the microbe that’s making me sick? How do I kill that bacteria that’s making me sick? I have to find the bacteria and kill them so I can get well. The first thing they turn to is what they know, which is antibiotics. But it’s not a good choice. It doesn’t. It’s not a solution that fits the problem. First of all, there’s always a lot more there than we can test for. When you look at this bigger issue of the microbiome, second, they’re all growing slowly. One thing that I want to emphasize is that it’s not about the microbes. It’s about restoring the ability of the body to contain the microbes. Part of that is suppressing this overgrowth of bacteria and other microbes that are reactivating in your system—that thing that’s shifting your body toward breaking down your tissues to create an environment that favors microbe growth. But you have to restore the ability of the body to contain that thing. That’s important.

Myriah Hinchey, ND, FMAPS

Yes, I think that’s a vital point in all of this. How would you tackle this? How do you tackle this?

Bill Rawls, MD

Well, that’s the real beauty of it. Back to what I was saying, our goal is to restore the ability of the body to take care of itself and keep those microbes contained—the ones in our tissues that are being reactivated—not just tick-borne microbes, but everything else. I mean, think of all the people that are tested, and they find Epstein-Barr virus, Mycoplasma, communities, and all these other bacteria. They don’t get those ticks; they pick them up. It’s kids. They’ve been dormant in their tissues, just tick-borne microbes. They become reactive when everything else does. But it’s well beyond our ability to test. I mean, the spectrum of it is pretty mind-boggling. How do we go about doing that? It’s part of suppressing the microbes. But how do you do that without disrupting the gut flora and what’s going on in the gut and making a mess there because so many people already have compromised gut function just from the stress of chronic Lyme disease? That may be aggravated by years of poor diet and everything else. But, it’s a big deal. 

What I found to be the answer was herbal therapy. It just makes a difference. More and more evidence is pointing to that. All plants have antimicrobial properties. Every living organism has to have antimicrobial properties, and that’s even including bacteria, which have to defend themselves from other bacteria. Fungi have to defend themselves from bacteria, viruses, and plants because we have a cellular immune system that is part of our evolution. Plants use a biochemical system to solve that problem. Essentially, the plant immune system is a very sophisticated biochemical system. That system is designed to protect the plant’s cells from invasive viruses, bacteria, protozoa, yeast, and virtually everything else. Because plants are facing a lot of the same threats as we are. 

Some plants are particularly good antimicrobials, and it depends on the microbe stress that’s present in that plant’s natural environment. How robust a system it’s built. We know that a lot of herbs have good antimicrobial properties. That’s been my interest in just looking at this thing and how we can evaluate this system for Lyme disease. But the key thing about herbs is that they’re not a single chemical or antibody. It’s a spectrum—this robust spectrum of hundreds or even thousands of chemicals that are affecting microbes—not one way, but in dozens of different ways that are suppressive. It’s an interesting system. But our immune system—our immune system is selective for pathogens but spares our normal flora.

Let’s do the same thing. That system affects pathogens but doesn’t affect normal flora. That’s been documented in scientific studies, which is fascinating. It’s something that I observed throughout my whole recovery. Antibiotics would wreck my gut in two weeks. I started taking these potent herbs, thinking, well, I might get two weeks out of them. Good luck. But that didn’t happen. My gut improved the whole time I was taking herbs, and, wow, this is pretty fascinating. Years later, after observing this, so many people found somebody who took the time to document this study, but they don’t disrupt normal flora, and antibiotic resistance or resistant bacteria are unknown with herbs. It doesn’t occur in the same way that it does. It occurs with an antibiotic. We knocked down those two problems. That opens us up to consideration. Well, maybe this is something that we could use for months or years to suppress these things. But the great thing is that it’s not just the antimicrobial properties you get. The herbs are also protecting cells throughout the body. They are protecting cells from free radicals, toxic substances, and virtually every stretch you can think of. At the same time, a lot of our herbs are immune modulators. They’re balancing immune function, so they’re reducing those inflammatory cytokines. If the microbes are using them to drive tissue destruction, and at the same time, they’re blocking enzymes that are affecting our cells and affecting the ability of microbes to invade ourselves, that gives us the urge to do all these wonderful things all at once, and that allows us to use them as this foundation of therapy to do what we need to do. Again, at the same time, they’re suppressing pathogens in the gut and allowing the wall flora to recover, which is exactly what we need with all this stress. They also reduce our stress hormones. It’s just fascinating to see all the ways these things work.

Myriah Hinchey, ND, FMAPS

It is; it’s amazing. I love how all of the different constituents in the herbs work synergistically. Not only are you not having side effects, but you’re also having side benefits, which is just wonderful. I love this conversation so much.

Bill Rawls, MD

It is a lot of fun. I’d like to think about it, if you went to see a symphony, you’re going to go to hear the Christmas pops, and you walk in and there’s one violin, and that would be nice. I’m sure the music would be beautiful if the musicians were talented. But you add in the other strings and the brass and all of the other parts of the orchestra, and you have this sound that’s just so much more than each of the individual instruments. I think of herbs in the same way that synergy does. Each of the herbs benefits enhances the benefits of the other herbs. When you combine them, you just get these wonderful effects.

Myriah Hinchey, ND, FMAPS

Yes, I couldn’t agree more. I think the great thing is that when you’re using herbals, you look at it as if you’re rebuilding the body. You’re restoring function to systems, you’re restoring health, you’re fixing, the immune system and helping the patient to heal, all while you’re using the various anti-microbial actions of some of the same herbs to slowly shrink that infectious load, and it’s the infectious load is going down while the quality, health, and functionality of the patient are going up, and then in the end, once you’ve restored their health and balance, their body can hold all of those infections that you’ve been talking about, in remission, put them back into their dormancy.

Bill Rawls, MD

Yes. It’s true. It’s cool to see how nature works. It’s just so far beyond what we are technically capable of. I just think it’s so important for people to consider, that boost from natural therapy. I mean, there are so many other things that have value that you can do, but building that foundation with herbal therapy and other natural therapies, I just think it’s exceedingly important to get where you want to go.

Myriah Hinchey, ND, FMAPS

Yes, I do too. Anything, if you had to, give one piece of advice to patients who are listening, what would it be?

Bill Rawls, MD

Yes, it’s the same thing. Don’t focus on killing the microbe as much as restoring it. But your body’s ability to keep all of your microbes in check in that internal tissue and blood microbiome that we’re going to hear more and more about. That’s so important. One of the most important things that I think you can do upfront is start taking a good herbal regimen. There are so many herbs that we have so much evidence for now. it’s important. Beyond that, just doing the things that you need to do to restore your health—a healthy diet, low stress, getting enough sleep— All of these things are so remarkably important. They’re not easy. Taking your herbs comparatively is pretty darn easy. But the more you’re doing, the more I think building that foundation is so important. I see so many people, and I get it; you get desperate. Nobody is sick, nobody has symptoms, and you just want to go somewhere and say, Hit me with something that’s going to make me. Well, I get it. But so many people miss those obvious things that they need to be doing that are so important. They go directly to invasive and often expensive therapies that sometimes come back and make their situation worse.

Myriah Hinchey, ND, FMAPS

Yes. With chronic tick-borne disease, I would say it’s one of the few diseases or conditions where there is no magic pill. There’s no magic pill. That’s just going to make the pain go away. No magic pill’s just going to fix the brain fog or your heart palpitations your thyroid issues, your depression, anxiety or insomnia, or, fill in the blank. Because it affects every single cell and system in the body. I think we could all learn a lot from these infections. A lot about our bodies and what our bodies need to heal because there isn’t any simple solution when it comes to Lyme disease. You’ve got to be in it for the long haul and be willing to make these lifestyle changes and, change your nutrition and your outlook. There are so many things. Then that, in conjunction with using all of these wonderful herbs, just helps someone get on their healing journey.

Bill Rawls, MD

Yes, absolutely. I think those things are always important, but it’s interesting. At this point in my journey, I would confidently say that if you understand what’s driving chronic Lyme disease, you’ve fundamentally understood what’s driving every chronic illness. It’s fundamentally the same thing: different microbes and slightly different stress factors. But that’s what’s driving the illness. What we’re not doing in our conventional system for chronic illness is addressing the underlying causes that are driving the illness. We’re just chasing the symptoms, and that’s why people don’t get well. My point is to say, Okay, let’s take everything that we have learned about Lyme disease and let’s start applying it everywhere else. Because if we do these things in a week, we can start getting a handle on all of our chronic illnesses.

Myriah Hinchey, ND, FMAPS

Yes. I’m excited. I haven’t read your book, but I am going to now. I think you and I had a conversation a while ago, and the takeaway that I walked away from that was thinking, I wonder if someday we’re going to realize that almost every condition is caused by some microbe in the body. Everything, from all of our mental issues to our physical issues. , some viruses, bacteria, fungi, and some microbes.  That’s what’s changing our biochemistry and driving it.

Bill Rawls, MD

We are much closer to that than you might know. I’ve been following the world’s literature for years. The scientific literature and its connections are there, but they’re being ignored by conventional medicine predominantly because they don’t have anything to treat it. They don’t have any tools to treat it. Antibiotics don’t work, and drugs don’t work. If you don’t have tools to treat something, I mean, this is the big deal with chronic Lyme disease. This is why doctors don’t want to mess with them because they don’t. They don’t understand it, and they don’t have anything to treat it with. When you are confronted with something, you just want it to go away. Yes. Again, we understand chronic Lyme. Yes. When you look at Borrelia, the microbe associated with Lyme disease, it’s been connected to dementia, Parkinson’s, breast cancer, and virtually everything.

But we expand outside of that and look at these other things that we’re calling co-infections. Bartonella has been found in various kinds of cancer cells. Babesia shows up in odd places: chlamydia, mycoplasma, and Epstein-Barr. These are just the ones that we know about and that we’re commonly testing for. What I’m finding is that there’s a whole lot more. What we don’t understand is the full scope of all of the microbes that can potentially be in our tissues in a dormant state and the possibility that some of those things are symbiotic and may be important for our cells to work properly. Your cell has a lot we have to learn. But those connections to chronic illness—, 20% of cancers—are now absolutely connected with a microbe. I think, sooner or later, that will be 100%. They have been able to. It was an interesting experiment in that they took an algae that has eukaryotic cell cells like ours. They were trying to define what causes cancer. They exposed this algae to all kinds of carcinogens and all these toxic chemicals and stuff. The algae just died every time. No, cancer just died. But then they took the algae and put it in a closet so it wasn’t getting sunlight which stressed the cells. then exposed it to intracellular bacteria. That’s common in the algae that exists in that algae. Even when the algae are in a healthy state. But they exposed the stressed cells, the stressed algae cells, to bacteria that turn to cancer every single time.

What they found was that the bacteria was inserting its gene for unregulated growth into the genome of the cancer and causing it to have unregulated, unrestricted growth. You think about it; that’s the connection. All of our cells have restricted growth. When you look at a heart cell or a brain cell, you can’t have that thing just dividing randomly. It has to be in a very, very restricted environment to control growth. That’s what’s defined by the genetic program inside the cell. All bacteria have restricted or unrestricted growth. As long as the food’s present, it’ll keep growing. Throw them in a petri dish full of food, and eat all the food. They keep growing at the expense of all life around them. To add to the fact that when our cells become cancerous, they take on unrestricted growth as bacteria, and then you start looking at all these microbe connections, you can’t help but think that there has to be a microbe connection. then you look at all the different tumors and cancers that started finding intracellular bacteria, including Borrelia, but a whole lot of others inside cells. Even there was one study that talked about different tumors having different intracellular microbiomes. Yes, it’s pretty fascinating. But the herbs that can protect you all have anti-cancer properties. In every group that I’ve studied, somebody has looked at it and found anti-cancer properties along with antimicrobial properties. Something we should be paying attention to.

Myriah Hinchey, ND, FMAPS

I could not agree more. You’re speaking my language. Thank you so much for joining us once again. Would you please tell the audience where they can find you, about your books, and anything else that you would like to leave us with?

Bill Rawls, MD

Yes. Again, I’m the Medical Director for a company called Vital Plan, and you can find information about me at vitalplan.com, and yes. my latest book, The Cellular Wellness Solution. Thank you for having me.

Myriah Hinchey, ND, FMAPS

Thank you so much for being here. Thank all of you at home for watching. We’ll be back soon.

Bill Rawls, MD

It’s a pleasure.