Adapted from episode 118 of The Perfect Stool podcast with Bill Rawls, MD, Medical Director for Vital Plan* and Lindsey Parsons, EdD, and edited for readability.
Lindsey:
So I understand that you have your own story of illness and healing that moved you from practicing obstetrics to what’s now a more holistic practice and a focus on herbs. So can you share about that with us?
Bill Rawls, MD:
You know, I started my journey as a conventional physician, went into OB/GYN because it was more dealing with health and wellness. But at the same time, a small town practice, at that time, required me to be on hospital call every second to third day, and every second or third weekend. So if you can imagine most of my nights on call, I got very little sleep. And then, on top of that, balancing family and community, and I just went for 20 years without any sleep at all, hardly. And I crashed, and first identified with fibromyalgia because I had all the symptoms. But that’s kind of a nowhere diagnosis that really just gets you treatment of symptoms. And that’s about it. So like a lot of people, I kept searching. I finally found that I was carrying the microbes associated with Lyme disease. Now, I don’t really look at any of those things the same way that other people do. I think most illnesses have a microbe component. And Lyme disease. Yeah, that particular microbe is associated with a lot of other things. So the margins start to blur when you really get into it. But anyway, conventional therapy failed me, antibiotics made me sicker. And I finally turned to herbal therapy and became certified in holistic medicine and over about a five year period got my health back. And I was severely ill, you know, I had gut issues, heart issues, brain issues, neurological issues, everything, and got my health back completely. That’s been almost 20 years. I’m now 66 and in great health and really enjoying every minute of it. Now I spend most of my time really preaching that message and trying to get people to listen.
Lindsey:
Right! Yeah, well, I got your book in the mail, the Cellular Wellness Solution. So I’ve been reading that and enjoying it and love your thinking and approach to herbs. I know that a lot of our pharmaceutical products are derived from plants and herbs. And of course, since I’m not an MD, I use herbs and nutraceuticals primarily, but can you explain the difference between pharmaceuticals and the herbs themselves?
Bill Rawls, MD:
Well, yeah, it is true. I think we have this idea that our pharmaceutical scientists are these brilliant people that sit in a lab and develop these chemicals that have all these actions in the body. Quite frankly, we’re just not that good. Most everything that we use is pulled from nature. But the difference between what we’re using an herbal therapy, and what might end up being a plant, or a plant extract that ends up being made into a drug is that we’re using the synergy of the entire plant system of defense and protecting itself. So it’s hundreds of chemicals working in synergy. And typically, the things that I use for herbal therapy really don’t have drug like effects. They exert their actions by balancing systems in the body, protecting cells, suppressing microbes, and balancing the microbiome. Whereas most of our drugs actually come from plants that we would define as poisons. Very true. So when you get out on that spectrum, there are a lot of poisonous plants out there, actually, there are more plants that are good for you. And that will help you more than poisonous plants. But there are a few that are poisonous. And typically that’s where drugs come from. But it’s not the whole plant. It’s one chemical that they pull to do a specific targeted action, whether that’s an antibiotic or a heart drug, it all comes from just one specific chemical. So you lose that synergistic system that the plant is using to take care of itself. You don’t get that. You just get this targeted, potent action plant. Typically, then we take that chemical and we manipulate it in various ways to make it more potent.
Lindsey:
And patentable, right? Well I guess you can probably pull one chemical and patent it.
Bill Rawls, MD:
Right. Yeah, and that’s the other thing you can’t plant in a plant. You can patent a single chemical that’s been manipulated in some way. Not to say that drugs are bad. I think there is a very important purpose for every drug. But you have to understand that the drugs are restricted to affecting manifestations of illness. They are good for blocking symptoms or blocking abnormal hormone pathways. But they don’t address any causes. And they don’t affect things in a positive way at the cellular level. So most drugs really don’t actually promote healing, they can be important in acute phases of an illness to prevent someone from dying to block those really bad manifestations. But it’s unlikely that the drugs themselves or drugs alone are actually going to cause someone to heal.
Lindsey:
An example that that I see a lot is that people will take antibiotics that just kill bacteria, and then they’ll have yeast overgrowth as a result of multiple courses of antibiotics. Whereas an herbal supplement that is antimicrobial tends to have a wide range of effects over both bacteria and yeast and fungi.
Bill Rawls, MD:
It’s true, you know, all antibiotics come from a natural source. They either come from a bacteria, a plant or a fungus, and a lot of them come from a fungus. And then they manipulate those chemicals. So sometimes they’re far removed from the plant, but there’s always an origin. But it’s not that organism’s system of protecting itself. It’s a single chemical. And then they potentiate that chemical to kill a bacteria or a virus or a protozoa or whatever, in a very specific way. And because it’s so targeted, and so limited in its actions, bacteria find ways to get around it pretty rapidly. So we have bacterial resistance, but it’s not selective. I mean, it kills everything. And it tends to kill the fastest growing bacteria the quickest. So antibiotics are best for fast-growing, acute infections. Like if you develop a an acute pneumococcal pneumonia. Or if you’re on a battlefield, and someone has a wound that could potentially get infected in the wound, that’s an acute infection, those are fast growing bacteria. And as we know, antibiotics like penicillin back in World War II and beyond can be lifesaving in certain situations.
But anytime you’re talking about a chronic or prolonged infection of any kind, the problem with antibiotics is the longer you use them, the more you kill your normal flora, and your normal Flora are a very important part of your defense system, because they keep those rogue pathogens that we all have in our system from taking over, from flourishing and causing us harm. And you take antibiotics for any more than 10 days, and you start to kill off your normal flora enough that these pathogens can start flourishing, which can be a real problem. That’s a key element that makes herbal therapy very different. All herbs have antimicrobial properties against viruses, bacteria, protozoa, everything. It’s a broad spectrum, it affects a lot of different pathogens, but herbs don’t destroy normal flora. In fact, there are studies showing that while simultaneously suppressing pathogens, herbs have the effect of actually promoting the growth of normal flora, so they balance our microbiome, which is really cool. There’s just nothing else on earth that can do that for you.
Lindsey:
Yeah, we’ll come back to that in a little bit. But I wanted to ask you about what a stealth microbiome is, and why we should worry about activating it.
Bill Rawls, MD:
There are a lot of names for this idea that we have bacteria in our gut, you know, everybody knows that right? And on our skin and body openings, and we’re finding well, they kind of creep into other areas of the body too. But it turns out that in our internal pathways, our bloodstream, our tissues, it’s more like a freeway, things are constantly coming and going. So bacteria from the gut are constantly trickling across into the bloodstream, from our sinuses, from our skin, through all these reservoirs where we have bacteria that are technically outside of us, right. So part of our defense system is barriers, you know, we have skin to keep microbes out or keep microbes on the skin and not in the deeper tissues. We have the gut lining to keep the food, that foreign material and the bacteria that are are a part of it contained inside the gut. So we want to be separate from our bacteria. But things are constantly trickling across. And that’s part of our immune system’s job is to constantly stay on guard and mop these things up.
So it’s happening throughout our lives. Right now as we’re talking, there are bacteria that are part of us that are on our skin and in our gut and other places in our body that are trickling into our bloodstream. And most of the time, if you’re healthy, the immune system does a pretty good job of protecting you from those microbes, but also foreign microbes that try to enter your body too. But some of them get through. And this is a really interesting, a bit of science that is taking place only over the past five or 10 years that we’re realizing the extent of it, that bacteria, viruses, other things get through, they get past our defenses, and they enter our cells and invade our cells. And our cells aren’t defenseless. Our cells are part of our immune system. So if a cell is healthy, sometimes it can expel or kill invasive microbes. But another possibility, and it’s as a defense system that most microbes use very readily is they can just become dormant inside our cells. And studies are showing that healthy people, everybody, we have dormant bacteria inside our red blood cells. We have it throughout different tissues in our body, our brain has a microbiome. But most of these things, if we’re healthy, they’re dormant. They stay quiet. We don’t know that they’re there.
But go for 20 years with no sleep, and a bad diet and constant stress. And you stress your cells and you weaken your cells. And these things activate. And they start killing off the cells, you know, they basically use the cells for food, and then they start invading other cells. Well, at that point, the immune system looks at the thing and says, oh no, we’ve got all these bacteria emerging from the cells, and it starts attacking the cells. That’s what autoimmunity is. And it’s a key element of most any chronic illness where the microbes are emerging. What kinds of things you pick up has a greater bearing on what chronic illnesses you might end up with than anything else in your life. But if you keep your cells healthy, if you stay healthy through your whole life, that won’t happen, it’s really important to look at chronic illnesses from that point of view. It’s a really big incentive to have good health habits.
Lindsey:
Yeah, no, I definitely see a lot of people whose illnesses started with a period of stress that obviously weakenek their immune system and started the cascade of poor health.
Bill Rawls, MD:
Yeah, most people I talked to with a chronic illness, it’s a perfect storm of factors. And sometimes it’s acute, like they were in an automobile accident and ended up with a long hospitalization. But a lot of times, it was just things adding up and just getting worse over time to allow this reactivation. And then you know, once a thing starts boiling over, it’s hard to settle it back down.
Lindsey:
Yeah. Are there particular herbs that you like using for gut health issues like SIBO or candida?
Bill Rawls, MD:
I like herbs, but I think that there are a lot of really great herbs that we can use, or really any herbs are going to help balance the gut microbiome. There’s no doubt about that. But I think one of the first things is, let’s ask what the problem is, you know, what’s going on here. And when you look at virtually any gut dysfunction, most of the problem is rooted in slow motility. And that can can be associated with chronic stress. I had a lot of GI issues when I had so much stress. Also, diet, you know, these processed food diets that are high in carbohydrates and fat slow down motility. When you slow down motility, things get backed up. And you have to think about this thing. We have bacteria throughout our GI tract. We have bacteria in our stomach, not very many, the lowest concentration of anywhere in the GI tract, but they’re still there. And we have low concentrations of bacteria in our small bowel. Anything we eat is food for bacteria. And if you don’t keep things moving, you’re going to have bacterial overgrowth, bacteria grow as long as food is present. So it’s really important to keep things moving through our GI tract, because we’re going to keep growing bacteria and we need to get them moving on down the track and out.
But when things are slow, when you have slow motility, you know in the stomach what that manifest as is you don’t empty your stomach and food just sits in there splashing around and it causes reflux, it splashes up into the esophagus, but it’s also food for bacteria and just food sitting in there a long time starts to erode the protective barriers of the stomach. Well, bacteria like H Pylori, and others are just sitting there waiting. You know, when that stomach lining starts to erode, they start digging in. And so that’s where ulcers come from. So it’s not the H. Pylori as much as the H Pylori has an opportunity. So moving down to the small bowel SIBO, slow motility, when bacteria grow, they ferment. So you have overgrowth of bacteria, and that produces gas. Well in the small bowel, it can’t go back up. And it’s a long way for it to go all the way down and get out. So it gets stuck. So you get bloating, you get gas. But not only that, that overgrowth of bacteria starts to erode the lining, that protective mucus barrier that protects the cells in the gut. So you start to get a leaky gut and other kinds of problems. And it just works, it’s all the way down with irritable bowel syndrome and gut dysfunction and everything else.
So the first thing is addressing some of those issues of stress and diet, cutting out those processed foods, a more wholesome diet made of whole foods and fresh vegetables, the right kind of fibers, vegetable fiber, not whole grain fiber. Now some grains are okay, like rice is tolerated well by most people. But we tend to, if you have this going on, if you’ve got this irritation of the gut already, it really irritates the gut more. So you end up with issues of gluten intolerance and that sort of thing. Moving on to herbs and then we want to reduce the concentration of bacteria, we want to help things move through, and we want to protect the lining of the gut. So three herbs that I often use are slippery elm. Slippery Elm has a substance called mucilage. And it basically replaces that deficient mucus barrier that’s protecting the cells that the gut lining is made of, really important.
Berberine or berberine-containing herbs like golden seal and coptis and others. Berberine is exceptionally good, just exceptionally good for suppressing pathogens in the gut. Certain kinds of garlic preparations that can be good, ginger, wonderful for calming the stomach and suppressing some of those bacterial overgrowth. So those are just a few herbs. Dandelion is good for promoting liver function. But also it’s a really nice bitter so bitter herbs promote motility. So we want to restore that motility, we want to get that gut moving again because that’s the only way we’re going to get better. Bitter herbs like berberine, like dandelion. Another favorite herb is andrographis, we use andrographis for a lot of things. It’s got exceptionally good antiviral properties. It’s got some adaptogenic properties. But there was actually a study, there been a couple of studies actually, showing that andrographis works as well as drugs for managing ulcerative colitis. So even far down in the gut, andrographis is exceptionally good for protecting the liver and promoting bile function flow. So there’s just a few herbs that are just really nice herbs to have. There are many others, you know, peppermint, cardamom, others can just slow some of that. You want calm, some of that cramping and distress that can be associated with it. So all of those things are important.
Lindsey:
Okay, thanks. So the dandelion, just curious, is that, I don’t know that I’ve ever seen pills of dandelion, is that used more like a tea or . . . ?
Bill Rawls, MD:
You can do it either way. It comes as an extract, but you can also use dandelion teas.
Lindsey:
I have heard concerns about certain herbs like oregano and berberine that they’re too strong and can impact beneficial microbes. And I’ve definitely seen clients who’ve taken many rounds of herbal antimicrobials and ended up depleting certain microbes like Akkermansia muciniphila. Any thoughts on that?
Bill Rawls, MD:
I haven’t seen it as much with berberine. Now, oregano is an essential oil. Yes, it has some pretty strong properties. But you have to respect that there’s a difference between an essential oil like oregano oil, and an herb. So what you’re getting in an herb is chemicals that the plant is using to protect it cells and balancing chemical signaling agents and balance its microbiome and protected cells from various kinds of microbes. So that’s what you’re getting with an herb – a cell protectant. So what you’re getting with an essential oil are chemicals that the plant is producing as a deterrent. So typically, you’ll find these oils in leaves and stems in little vacuoles that the plant walls off, and it does that because they have a lot higher toxicity. So clove essential oil, any of your essential oils are going to have higher toxicity than herbs that can have similar properties. They have wonderful antimicrobial, anti-inflammatory properties, what they’re there for is to deter insects. So when an insect comes along and starts munching on the leaf, it releases these noxious chemicals and chases the insect away, you know, the plant is not using them to protect itself, particularly. So they do have a higher level of toxicity that must be respected. So you can use certain oils like oil of oregano in little gel caps in the GI tract, but it’s a lot stronger than most of your other herbs.
Lindsey:
So I find that a lot of my clients are deficient in common minerals like magnesium and potassium, and often vitamins to like vitamin C, or the B vitamins, despite having ideal diets in terms of eating organic, grassfed, pasture-raised meats and eggs, or usually more like a paleo type diet, and good amounts of fruits and vegetables. So why would that be?
Bill Rawls, MD:
Well, first of all, any testing you do is going to have issues. It’s really hard to measure vitamins and minerals very specifically. You have to remember that most of these things are inside cells. And typically they try to measure them in just the red blood cells, but they’re distributed throughout the body. So the only way to get an accurate measurement of those vitamins and minerals is to take multiple deep biopsies from tissues throughout the body, which just isn’t practical. So when we do a blood test, we’re getting an indirect sampling that may or may not be very accurate. I use testing a lot less than most physicians, I tend to listen to the patient, talk to the patient, look at symptoms, look at the profile of the patient, and I put a lot more weight in that then I do testing. We do a lot of testing and all of the testing, it has marginal accuracy. Yeah, we’re highly dependent on testing and some testing is very, very good. But the vast majority of it is not as good as you would hope for.
Lindsey:
For the minerals, I guess probably for magnesium, I’ve seen RBC magnesium. And then I’ve seen hair tissue mineral analysis for the magnesium and the potassium.
Bill Rawls, MD:
All of those have their own drawbacks.
Lindsey:
Yeah. For the vitamin C or the B vitamins, these are usually organic acids I’m looking at. Yeah, so not not the typical test you’d get at your doctor’s. But in terms of terms of just deficiencies, whether tested or not, why would somebody eating a healthy diet still have nutritional deficiencies?
Bill Rawls, MD:
Well, if they’re not absorbing these substances, you have to get them to cells. Correct. So if they’re in the diet, but they’re not being properly processed in the GI tract, then you may have some deficiencies there. And that’s why I do typically supplement in patients with chronic illness, with you know, vitamins, minerals, etc. And healthy people that are eating really good diet, I don’t know that they need it quite as much; there’s not very much evidence that it really changes outcomes. But chronic illness, I think having that extra is worthwhile. But again, it’s really hard to get accurate measurements, that’s tough.
And you have to define what is a nutrient doing. And a nutrient is basically raw materials that cells use to function. And so when you look at vitamins and minerals, those are cofactors, used for different cellular processes or mitochondrial processes. You know, if we’re loading in even a lot of supplements, if cells have a ready supply of those things, they can only use so much. The first thing I do is try to get good food in people. And as far as any person, I think, looking at gut function, which is what you’re doing there, is supremely important. Supplementing in early stages, especially to make sure they at least have an opportunity to get everything they need. And kind of going from there. I’ve done more of that pathway than testing. I went through a phase in my practice that I did a lot of testing and found it didn’t make as much difference as I thought it might. Sometimes I was just kind of chasing my tail with it.
Lindsey:
In your book, you outlined some herbs that you think are great for just maintaining health and restoring vitality, shall we say, for someone who’s just maybe a little rundown? What are those herbs that you think the average person who’s in good health should be taking on a daily basis?
Bill Rawls, MD:
Well, there are a lot of different herbs, but over the years I’ve cultivated my own personal list and these are herbs that I put in some primary products that I just think, you look at the evidence, and you look at the broad spectrum of what they do, they’re really valuable for anyone. So one of those herbs is rhodiola. Rhodiola is is defined as an adaptogen. So an adaptogen is an herb that has the effect of basically protecting our cells, protecting our systems. So it has this overall balancing, restorative effect, it helps balance stress hormones, so it’s a normalizer. It pulls us back into balance from wherever we are. So Rhodiola is really good for that. It’s been used in athletes to optimize performance. It’s known to improve oxygenation of tissues, so it’s used when people go to altitude, I’ve actually used it in skiing in Colorado to reduce my risk of altitude sickness because there’s some good data showing that. So rhodiola is a really nice herb.
Second to that, reishi mushrooms are mushrooms in our herbs or plants, but we kind of throw medicinal mushrooms in with the group because they have similar properties. And reishi mushroom has been studied in Japan, it has some of the most potent anti-cancer chemicals known. It’s a good immune modulator. It helps balance our immune system functions. Excellent cell protectant has some great anitviral properties. turmeric, everybody’s heard of that one, the yellow in curry and turmeric is really nice as an anti-inflammatory. It has some really wonderful properties for protecting the brain. It reduces inflammation, but unlike a drug like ibuprofen, that actually helps to heal ulcers instead of cause ulcers and it just really has this wonderful range of protective effects. It has some antimicrobial properties that are really nice.
Lindsey:
I think I read it had action against H Pylori in your book is that right?
Bill Rawls, MD:
It has some effects on H. Pylori, but a number of other microbes too. So just to tell a little story, our company, we have a product called joint care. It has turmeric, boswellia, which is another herb, some really nice things for joints. And you know, it’s a product that I put together years ago that’s helped a lot of people. My dog is now nine and when they get to a certain age, they start developing arthritis and that sort of thing. My last dog started doing that at seven, this dog hasn’t but I thought, it’s time we’ll go ahead and start giving it to him, so I gave him a couple of these joint care tablets in the morning. He’s really vital. But the problem he’s been having is his teeth, for several years. His teeth had been terrible, terrible bad breath, having to have his teeth cleaned every three months, bad plaque, all this mess in his teeth. We were really afraid that he was going to lose his teeth. About six months ago, I started doing this joint care for his joints, right? His breath cleared, his teeth cleared. And he has no dental problems now, it’s like wow. So what it was doing was balancing his whole microbiome, including his gingival microbiome.
Lindsey:
Were you opening up the opening up the capsules and shaking them on to his food?
Bill Rawls, MD:
Just stuffed two capsules down.
Lindsey:
Interesting. Easier for a dog than a cat.
Bill Rawls, MD:
Right before he eats to make sure it all goes down. So he’s done exceptionally well with it. So other herbs on my list: goto kola is really good as a brain protectant, it has some nice calming properties we all now need. Shilijat is an herb from the Himalayas. It is well known. It’s been used for 1000s of years. It’s plant matter that’s been compressed in the soil with bacteria. So it has substances called humic acid and fulvic acid that are really good for gut healing and helping to balance the gut microbiome. So that’s a nice herb.
Lindsey:
Before you go past shilijat, just let me ask you about that. Because isn’t it one of those that has the California proposition 65 warning on it?
Bill Rawls, MD:
Yeah, I think you do have to be somewhat careful with shilijat because it’s collected everywhere. And we use a special extract called PrimaVie that’s by a company that they spend a lot of time looking for the purest form of this substance. And they do a lot of testing to make sure there are no heavy metals and that sort of thing. So yes, buyer beware with that one; you do have to be careful. But if you get good stuff, it’s really amazing. And it’s not just from the Himalayas. This substance has been used in Alaska. I’m in Canada, a lot of the northern latitudes, they find it. Milk thistle, everybody knows that one for protecting your liver, and it actually can enhance regeneration of liver cells. And that’s really important because one of the reasons our cholesterol goes up and we started having more problems is because we replace our liver cells with fat. And as we’re doing that, we lose our ability to manage our blood sugar, to manage our cholesterol and to process toxins, really important. So this herb that can regenerate liver cells is really important. It sets up a condition in which it protects liver cells so that they can regenerate. Basically, I’ve been taking it for 15 years, my cholesterol is better than when I was in my 40s. And so it really has nice effects. But there are always surprises. I was researching milk thistle the other day, and I found that it protects osteocyte cells that rebuild our bone. So it’s actually found to be favorable for protecting against postmenopausal osteoporosis. So we may pick an herb because it has this known effect, but then you find out well, it’s protecting cells throughout the body, it doesn’t have a specific effect like a drug. So that one’s really nice. Hawthorn, really good for the vascular system. I put some of that in there. And pine bark, also is very good for the vascular system. So that kind of rounds out everything in the body.
Lindsey:
I had heard of the pine bark extract, pycnogenol.
Bill Rawls, MD:
Pycnogenol is a particular brand of that.
Lindsey:
Okay. And I’d heard of that for migraines, in particular.
Bill Rawls, MD:
Yes, because it’s protecting the vascular system. And we know that migraines do have a vascular component. So that’s where the herbs really work. Well, you know, instead of addressing the symptom, they’re addressing the underlying causes. And that’s really important if we want to promote wellness, instead of just suppressing symptoms.
Lindsey:
Tell us about Vital Plan*.
Bill Rawls, MD:
Oh, Vital Plan is a company I started about 10 years ago with my daughter, Braden. I was still in my practice, then. You know, I had to stop doing obstetrics because I couldn’t do the night call anymore. So I started a wellness practice that ended up being kind of like what you would know as a functional medicine practice. Now, I was using a lot of herbs in the practice. So everything I was using I was passing along to patients. I found that I just had a really hard time finding the level of extract, the purity, the potency, and the combinations of herbs. Because I was by then looking at it differently. So much of traditional herbology is observational; they didn’t have science to see how things are actually working in the body. They just made observations, you take those hundreds of years of observations, and you apply that to herbs that might be beneficial. And it works pretty darn well. But where I was going is taking that one step further to say, okay, how is the chemistry of this herb affecting things at the cellular and biochemical level? What were we achieving with it.
So it was coming up with different combinations, guided by newer science coming out over the past 20 and 30 years that was helping me make those choices. And a lot of times, I just wasn’t finding the level of product that I wanted to achieve the goals that I had in front of me. So I found that I could actually have products manufactured. And I started doing that to very specific specifications. And that grew into a pretty significant business. And finally, we carried it online to take it to a larger audience. The bigger the company got, it gave me more power to have more and more control over the extracts and manufacturing process and everything else. So we have been growing it ever since, so far with a focus more on chronic illnesses like Lyme disease and things like that. But there’s so many applications that apply to every person out there. We’re growing much beyond that.
Lindsey:
With herbs, there’s a synergy that happens when you bring multiple herbs together versus say taking just one at a time. Right?
Bill Rawls, MD:
Absolutely, yeah. And you know, you look at traditional herbal therapy, it’s formulas, it can be anywhere from five to 12 herbs together and you get a synergy; the analogy I use is a symphony orchestra. If you went down and sat down in the audience and you looked up on stage and there was one violin playing it would be nice, but you put two violins and then add in some other strings and the brass section and everything else and you suddenly start getting a sound that’s much bigger than any individual instruments. And that’s the way I think of the herbs working together. They’re each contributing in their own way. And you’ve got this complex defense system of a plant that synergizes with other plants. And nature’s really made to work together like that, then you come up with just this wonderful thing that can do extraordinary things for our health.
Lindsey:
And how can you tell the difference when you’re looking at an herb, whether it’s a good quality extract, or if it’s just a cheaper version?
Bill Rawls, MD:
Testing. Yeah, that’s what it takes. And a lot of companies don’t do the level of testing that you need, a lot of them do, probably about 50/50, I see a lot of products that I can tell they’re not doing testing. And typically, you find that if you look on the website, or look on the bottle, and they’ve just got a list of herbs under a proprietary blend, that’s a red flag right there. So what that tells me is they’re using the lowest grade preparation possible. And they’re going to put more of the least expensive herbs in there than anything else. And they’re going to try to wow you with marketing and scientific jargon to get you to buy that. To really make it work, you’ve got to have potent botanical extracts. So the extracts that we use in our products are typically 10 times more concentrated than what you’re going to find in average grade products. And you’re going to get the potency and purity. We do actually three levels of testing, when we get a certificate of analysis, when we purchase or wire an extract, which is from the supplier to say, okay, and it costs more to get something that has had a study, but then we take a sample of that and send it to our own labs, just to make sure it was really telling the truth. And then we test it during the manufacturing process to make sure that all those herbs are being blended properly. And again, there are other companies that do that level; it’s not the industry standard by any means.
Lindsey:
Is Vital Plan on Fullscript by any chance?
Bill Rawls, MD:
No, we’re not. And there is a reason for that. For the price that we wanted to charge, we had a choice, we can give a better quality product and take less margin, we can do a lower grade product and sell it through Fullscript at 50 to 70% off. Now we’re trying to figure out a way that we can actually do that and maintain the quality. But right now, we just haven’t quite gotten there. We do affiliate programs. But with the quality we’re trying to offer, we haven’t been able to have the margins to actually make the company work.
Lindsey:
Yeah, no, I understand you have to sell a lot to make it, especially to go through them with the wholesale. Are you still seeing individuals or . . . ?
Bill Rawls, MD:
What I’ve been doing for the past five years is doing consults that I really define as a high level health coaching. Because I don’t write prescriptions. I don’t manage medications, per se, I’ve been doing that. But I’m I’m taking a break from it right now to build a course that would teach people how to go through all those steps. So I’m taking everything that I’ve learned and building it into a stepwise course, that people would basically learn how to take care of themselves or learn how to recover from a chronic illness, and it would complement anything they’re doing with any other provider. But yeah, it’s so that’s kind of a labor of love that I’m in the middle of right now. To put together something that really takes that 20 years of knowledge and puts it in a form that everybody can use. The book, The Cellular Wellness Solution*, is kind of the backbone of it, that will be the handbook. But take people through that process of how you do the detective work or understanding why a person is having symptoms or why they’re ill. So often when we start with a patient, we start by focusing on the symptoms, because nobody likes to feel bad. Nobody enjoys their symptoms. As a society, as our medical system, we tend to focus more on symptoms than anything else. And how do we get rid of the symptoms? And what I want to know is why did the person become ill in the first place? Because illness doesn’t just happen. There’s always a reason. If you can define what’s going on, why that person became ill, then you have a pathway to start to reverse those things. So if I can create a course that can help people on that journey, we can get more people there and put people in a better place for how they think about their bodies.
Lindsey:
And if they want to hear about your course when it’s ready, where would they find you?
Bill Rawls, MD:
Oh, Vital Plan. Yeah. And so it’ll all be through that I probably got another month or two. I got a lot of other things going on.
Lindsey:
But by the time this comes out, it may it may very well be out, because this will probably publish in a few months.
Bill Rawls, MD:
Go look for it then. Yeah, it may already be there.
Lindsey:
I signed up for the affiliate program through Vital Plan* (use code PerfectStool20 for 20% off your first Vital Plan order). And I noticed on the website that those five herbs that you think are like the great, maybe this is like the equivalent of an herbal multivitamin for you.
Bill Rawls, MD:
The multivitamin industry has been so unbelievably successful convincing people that they need to take a multivitamin every day. And you know, half the population does it and they’ve been doing it for 70 some years. There’s not a lot of evidence, though. There’s a little bit of evidence that it’s a good idea, especially if you are struggling with some kind of chronic illness. But the power that you get from a multivitamin, yeah, pretty scant. It’s going to do very little to protect you from the kinds of illnesses that people have. Herbs, there’s so much evidence, there’s just so much evidence, and I detailed it in the book. It’s just overwhelmingly in favor of herbs that, yes, every person on the planet would be better if they were taking herbs every day. If every person took that assortment of herbs and a high grade supplement our risk of chronic illness would go down. I think the rate of cancer would go down, it would do some pretty remarkable things. And I know that because of the scientific evidence, but also just watching in action with 1000s and 1000s of people over the past decade of how much they’ve benefited just from these basic assortments of herbs. It’s good. It’s just truly powerful. So yeah, I’m trying to buck the norm and trying to get people to say, yeah, if you want to take that multivitamin, it is fine. It’s not going to hurt you. But if you really want to protect yourself, take a daily herbal of some kind.
Lindsey:
And I noticed that there’s a product that has those five herbs, it was five, right, combined? What’s that one called?
Bill Rawls, MD:
You know, because everybody needs a multivitamin. And because I couldn’t put everything I wanted in a bottle, we typically sell it as a pair. So there’s Daily Herbal, which has those five herbs. And then there’s Daily Multi that has the basic vitamins and minerals in a form that is best assimilated in the body, which isn’t what’s in most typical multivitamins. But that’s where I put the milk thistle and hawthorn and maritime pine bark and lutein for eyes and other kinds of things. So yeah, you know, it means taking a few capsules a day. But gosh, you get so much out of it.
Lindsey:
Any final thoughts before we sign off?
Bill Rawls, MD:
Well, that’s a lot of information right there. And I really appreciate the opportunity to talk to folks.
Lindsey:
Yeah, well, thank you for being with us.
Bill Rawls, MD:
Yeah, I encourage people to read my book*, if they get an opportunity. It’s a big book, don’t be intimidated. It’s like four books in one.
Lindsey:
It’s more like a manual.
Bill Rawls, MD:
Yeah, it’s like the first book is just looking at health at the cellular level. And everybody’s telling me it’s easy to read. The second is like an herbal primer to help people understand herbal therapy from a scientific point of view. The third is just all those things that we need to do with diet and lifestyle and everything else. And then the fourth section is applying those principles to specific problems like brain and gut and heart. Yeah, so there’s a lot of information in there.
Lindsey:
You know, I’m really enjoying it. I wouldn’t say I get sent a lot of books, but I occasionally get sent books and sometimes I read them sometimes I don’t, but I was immediately pulled in when I started reading about your story and how herbs really just set you back on a path to health. So anyway, I’m enjoying it.
Bill Rawls, MD:
Well, I’m very glad to hear that.
If you are struggling with bloating, gas, burping, nausea, constipation, diarrhea, soft stool, acid reflux, IBS, IBD, SIBO, candida overgrowth, fatigue or migraines and want to get to the bottom of it, that’s what I help my clients with. You’re welcome to set up a free, 30-minute breakthrough session with me. We’ll talk about what you’ve been going through and I’ll tell you about my 3- and 5- appointment health coaching programs in which I recommend lab tests, educate you on what the results mean and the protocols used by doctors to fix the problems revealed. Or if you’re ready to jump in right away or can just afford one appointment at a time, you can set up an 1-hour consultation with me.
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