You are free to become who you are. Look past your indoctrination to the genuine soul inside.

​Today's words are by John O'Donohue. 

​Healing Words is an ongoing series with the intention of shifting focus away from suffering and onto healing.
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Please feel free to share words that have helped you heal or your thoughts on these healing words.​

"This article discusses challenging topics related to complex illness and mental health. Trigger warning for suicide. Northwest Somatics is not affiliated with Vital Plan and does not receive any financial compensation for publishing these links. Publishing this interview does not constitute an endorsement of any treatment protocol or medical advice. 

Dr. Bill Rawls is a well-known friend and advocate in the Lyme community. His book Unlocking Lyme is a step by step guide to treating chronic Lyme disease naturally. In fact, it is how he treated his own Lyme disease. Dr. Rawls created Vital Plan, a supplement company with the goal "to empower people to take control of their health and provide easy access to his potent herbal blends." 

I had the opportunity to talk to Dr. Rawls on June 2nd, 2020. We spoke on the phone as he was spending quarantine at his home in North Carolina. Our topics included COVID-19, chronic Lyme disease, chronic immune dysfunction, and mental health. In this interview you will learn about the differences between acute infections and chronic infections, the mindset shift that can change your approach to disease, and why we need to be doing more research on the role of microbes in complex and chronic illness. 

What has life been like for you since the pandemic began? 

"It hasn’t been a radical change for me personally and in some ways it's actually worked in my favor. For the past couple of years, I've been writing and working for Vital Plan directly—working with product selection and sourcing ingredients, working with the staff. When COVID came along we sent everyone home, but we already were working from home a lot. We were already in the mode of meeting with each other remotely and sharing documents and doing videos remotely, so when COVID came along it was just taking that next step." 

"I'm an outdoors person and so I continue going out and walking, hiking, biking, and all the things I enjoy doing so much. The things we miss the most are grocery stores and going out to events. I'm one of the more fortunate and I'm grateful for that." 

"I recognize that a lot of people have been really, really put in a bad position by this thing. It's like anything, when you shift things, some people benefit and some people lose; and think overall a lot of people have been negatively affected. I've been very cognizant of those people and trying to do things behind the scenes and otherwise that might benefit those people." 

What concerns are you hearing from the chronic Lyme community about COVID-19?

"I have a group of people that are on our Restore program that I do a Facebook Live with. I do that normally once every two months and I stepped it up to every week during the COVID crisis to reach out to those people. What I found is, these are people who recognize they have immune system issues, so they were really, really being careful. I never was able to talk to anyone who has had it, because people were being so vigilant and staying home that they weren't getting it."

"The issue with this virus is that it's almost not bad enough. I've been following it since the very beginning and the reports that we were hearing out of China was that the recognized mortality is about 2.4%. Compare that to SARS and MERS that were 10% & 50% and Ebola at 60%. It tends to be the more severe the illness something causes, the more recognizable it is and the easier it is to contain. When someone gets Ebola virus, they get sick pretty darn quickly and you don't need a test to know who has Ebola, so you can quarantine those people.” 

"What I was hearing early on out of China was that 80% of people were not getting sick enough to need hospitalization and 50% of people were only having a mild encounter that wasn't much more than a common cold. What that means is even at that 2.4% mortality, if half the population wasn't even being tested or wasn't sick enough to be tested, then mortality is half of that or less. As they are actually doing antibody testing and recognizing that large portions of people were not sick or did not get severely sick, but contracted the virus. It looks like it's more along the lines of 0.5% mortality, which means that it's really hard to contain."

"It almost makes it more dangerous than Ebola virus, because it spreads much easier and most people aren't going to get sick, but just out of the blue some people get really, really sick. That tends to be more the elderly, but there were young people that got really sick, too. Not being able to find out who was going to get really sick and also not knowing who had the thing and didn't--wow that makes it a really, really difficult thing.” 

"But what tends to happen is the longer something is out there the less virulent it becomes, and already we are hearing reports around the world from scientists who are thinking the virulence, the ability of this thing to cause severe illness, is actually going down pretty rapidly. And this coronavirus doesn't seem to mutate like an influenza, so it may not be something that will come around again and again. In other words, there's a possibility that once most of the population is immune to it, it will go away and we'll never hear from it again. That would be a blessing. We don't know that's going to be true, but I'm optimistic about the whole thing, cautiously optimistic. and of course being careful."  

Dr. Rawls stressed the ongoing importance of taking coronavirus seriously.

"I'm not suggesting complacency at all. We do still need to be careful. I'm still wearing a mask when I go to the grocery store. I think going to social events where we're cramming people together or transportation where we're cramming people together—we've become so complacent about those things anyway. We're living in a time where we are going to see more and more of these kinds of things. I hope that what this does is set a precedent in the future that we're more careful about the fact that humans do a really good job of spreading microbes and we just need to be more careful about how we go about life."

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"It's really important to recognize that when we're talking about chronic Lyme disease, we're specifically talking about someone who has been found or is suspicious that they are carrying one of the species of borrelia that causes Lyme disease. We are becoming aware of all these different co-infections. I don't look at Lyme disease in the same way as a lot of people. Fundamentally, I think chronic fatigue, Lyme disease, fibromyalgia are all the same thing. I think basically these things are on the pathway to other illnesses, like multiple sclerosis, Parkinsons, and others. The central feature to all of those things is chronic immune dysfunction. I'm not suggesting that everyone with chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia and ms and everything else have borrelia. What I'm suggesting is that we all contract microbes throughout our lifetime, specifically intracellular microbes, that live inside cells. I sat down with people with people to define over 100 species of microbes that were intercellular, stealth-like, and could be present without causing illness, but could cause chronic infections like Lyme disease if the immune system went down. There are certainly people with chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia, who have all the symptoms of Lyme disease, but don't have borrelia, so they've got chronic immune dysfunction with other microbes being active."

"Do you think the average healthy person has microbes in their brain? There were multiple studies, one in 2016 and one in 2017, they were looking at Alzheimers in one and multiple sclerosis the other, but they had controls that were people who hadn't passed away of a neurological illness. What they discovered was that every single example, whether it was a diseased brain with a neurological illness or a control brain, had hundreds of species of microbes. So we actually have a microbiome of the brain. What was interesting is that people with Alzheimer’s and multiple sclerosis had the shift toward pro-inflammatory microbes or microbes that are more apt to cause illness and more problems with intracellular microbes, so this idea that has been going on so long that our microbiome is limited to our gut and skin is false. We have microbes throughout our body, we have microbes throughout our tissues, we have microbes in our brain and our heart."

"Most physicians aren't aware of this. Most physicians say we don't have microbes in our brain. Physicians are the last people to get it. They're too smart, they know for sure about what they've been trained and they know it's right."

"So much of what we know is proven wrong." 

Why isn't the impact of microbes on our health and mental health studied more in Western medicine? 

"It's because of a phenomenon called reductionist science. There's a lot of research done around the world. People are looking at one little thing. I like to think about it as a jigsaw puzzle. When you look at my book, Unlocking Lyme, it's not one puzzle piece that I'm making conclusions from, it's hundreds and hundreds of bits of information that I put together to create a picture of how things might be." 

"So what you've got worldwide is nobody in the scientific world is doing that, they're trying to look at single puzzle pieces and trying to make conclusions from it, and it's always going to be wrong. They just have a really hard time putting those big concepts together and it's because we've lost the logic in science." 

"Scientific method is based on forming a theory and then doing the science to prove that theory, so what you've got out there, because our science is mostly driven by creating new drugs, we're not using good scientific method, especially in medical science. How do I figure out this little pathway and there's no big picture theory about why we should be looking at that, or the theories we're using are too short-sighted. We need more people to do what I do and create the big pictures so that you can start getting an idea of what's going on before you get all the pieces on the puzzle. Scientists, especially medical scientists, they absolutely refuse to make conclusions until they see everything." 

"When you look at autoimmune disease, here you've got a much expanded microbiome and we look and go what do these microbes want? Well, they want to manipulate us for our resources. This concept of intracellular microbes, that's been going on since the very earliest time on Earth. For 3 billion years all there were were microbes or bacteria. Everything has to have food, so early on some bacteria started infecting and pirating bigger cells to take over those resources. Sometimes it worked out to be useful. Our mitochondria are ancient rickettsia species." 

"Intracellular microbes have been there since long before we have been there. These intracellular microbes, what they want to do is they want to pirate resources from that cell, so to do that they've got to keep the immune system from destroying that cell. All the intracellular microcrobes—borrelia, mycoplasma, rickettsia, all of them—the first thing they do is infect white blood cells, that way they can hitch a ride to be spread throughout the body and it also gives them the ability to influence the immune system, to basically make that white blood cell send out erroneous messages."

"I like to think of it as an analogy: It's like our body has pathogens, well a big city like New York or Chicago has criminals. You will never eradicate all the criminals in New York or Chicago. They will always be there, no matter how big your police force is. But it would be like there was a group of criminals that specialized in hijacking police cars so they could get to the radio and send back bad messages to central dispatch that sent all the police cars to the other side of town from where the crime was going on. Intracellular microbes infect the white blood cells and send out bad messages called cytokines. It depresses the ability of the immune system to take out cells that have been infected by microbes."

"But here's the deal, so they take the pressure off so these things can get established and spread throughout the body and they infect different cells. Borellia likes things with cartilage, so it's hitting the joints, brain, and skin. bartonella and babesia, like red blood cells. Rickettsia likes lining the blood vessels. But they're all infecting different kinds of cell bodies. Initially, the immune system is thrown off guard, but it's not giving up, it comes back so that the secondary immune system comes in and creates antibodies and labels these cells as being abnormal, but it doesn't just label the cells that are infected it labels the normal cells, too. So I can't help but think that's what an autoimmune response is. If you read the literature, virtually everybody with chronic symptoms of Lyme disease has this autoimmune phenomenon. Proving it is hard, because the living model is so complex, it's hard to find it, but logically why can't you go there with a high level of suspicion?"

"Right now 20% of cancers are associated with intracellular microbes, and that's probably low. I wouldn't be surprised if there were many, many more, or possibly even all cancers are going to be associated with microbes sooner or later. I think we're going to find that all of the chronic illnesses, autoimmune illnesses, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, all of them, are associated with chronic immune dysfunction and this thing where these intracellular microbes and pathogens start to flourish in peoples' systems and make them chronically ill, because there are so many pathogens, different ways the system is disruptive, and different genetics, people get different illnesses."

"As we move forward [Lyme disease] is going to be with us more, because our world is being affected in such an adverse way. People are caught up in their own problems and they’re not recognizing that the way that we’re changing the world, especially over the past 50 years, is really affecting all of us in a very bad way."

"When billions of people around the world are driving cars and they’re all putting out fumes. It's not only causing global warming, it's also putting out fumes that are affecting everybody. So we're truly living in chronic immune dysfunction and we have to wake up and start recognizing this."

"It's bigger than Lyme disease. We need to move into a bigger conversation that's everybody's having. Working toward ways that we can all have quality of life, but we're willing to take some cuts here and there. As a culture the more that we're willing to move toward making decisions, not only protecting ourselves, but our environment as a whole, that's where we need to begin."

"I think we're seeing a rise in autoimmune disease, chronic fatigue, chronic Lyme disease, and all these other chronic illnesses, because of the impact that we're having on our immune system from how we go about life--toxins we're exposed to, the foods that we're eating. And these are all things where we have a choice."

"It's not too late, it's up to your generation to start making huge decisions." 

What are you hopeful about right now related to chronic Lyme? Where do you find the hope?

"I find the hope in that the more people that are like you, that are talking about this is the way that we are going to solve it." 

"There is a lot of turmoil right now. The big thing that we have right now is the ability to convey information better than ever before. The ability of people with chronic Lyme disease to organize and influence what is being said."

"What I'm gradually seeing is many of these doctors are starting to use herbal therapies or being more reasonable in the therapies they're offering. The Lyme doctors are gradually becoming more educated and becoming more open-minded. The more that the chronic Lyme community is talking and moving beyond symptoms. Not focusing on the symptoms, but going, 'How do we solve this problem and how do we unify to solve this problem to help the most people? How can we move beyond symptoms to purpose?'"

"I’m very optimistic that is happening." 

A big thank you to Dr. Rawls for taking the time to talk to Northwest Somatics. The Lyme community is very grateful for you. 

You can read my review of Unlocking Lyme from 2017 here. 

"We must be willing to let go of the life we planned to have the life that is waiting for us." - Unknown