by Dr. Bill Rawls
Posted 11/11/22

If you have brain fog, you might be concerned that your symptoms could be indicative of something more severe, such as dementia. But is there a brain fog-dementia connection? Here, Dr. Rawls explains how compromised cellular health is the root cause of many illnesses, including those that affect memory, cognition, and overall brain health. Plus, he shares insights about his personal road to recovery from chronic Lyme disease. Read more about his journey here.

Video Transcript

Question: What is the brain fog-dementia connection?

Dr. Rawls: You know, I think we’re all caught in this world that you’ve either got one diagnosis or you’ve got another diagnosis, and all of these things are separate. And that, you know, one person has Alzheimer’s, one person has Parkinson’s. And that’s only in the later stages of a disease process when certain areas are starting to break down in a well-defined way.

But in my journey, what I found personally and what I found in patients so often is everybody ends up falling between the lines that diagnoses aren’t very specific. I mean, I struggled with, well, do I have fibromyalgia or am I developing M.S.? And then I found the Lyme microbes.

But wait a minute. Chronic Lyme disease isn’t recognized by the conventional medical community. And yeah, I was starting to wonder, am I starting to get Parkinson’s? I was starting to develop a hand and a head tremor. Am I getting demented here at age 50, which is what I was at that time. And now I realize that it’s not different things. It’s all the same thing. And when you look at this concept that I’m talking about of cellular health and when all of our cells are functioning at full capacity, we feel great.

So what disease is, is when cellular health has been compromised, and cells in the body can’t function. So you look at it, and it’s a combination of things, but microbes are huge. And it’s not just the microbe you picked up from a tick bite, it’s things you picked up for your entire life from the time you started putting stuff in your mouth when you were a baby. To tick bites to flea bites to scratches and then microbes trickling from the garden through our sinuses.

And then it wasn’t just COVID, it was all the other respiratory infections that we got and Epstein-Barr and toxoplasma and yeah, the list goes on, and I think we’re just scratching the surface. So I’m coming to appreciate that we all have microbes that become dormant inside ourselves.

Not just one or two, probably hundreds of them. And we’re just scratching the surface and what we understand so far. But if your cells are healthy, these things can stay dormant inside your tissues. Your cells keep right on functioning like they’re not even there.

There’s even some evidence that some of these things might even be symbiotic, that our cells need them to function. But if you trash yourselves with bad diet, poor sleep, toxin exposure, mold, petrochemicals, all of these things, and your cells become stressed, then these things reactivate.

And it’s not just one microbe. It’s a lot of different things. So I think what we sometimes see with Lyme disease or COVID is we have this infection that kind of tips the balance, and it starts this reactivation syndrome that these things start coming out. So we’re pretty early in the stages of this. It’s not something that your conventional physicians are going to know about. This is piecing all the parts of what’s in the scientific literature.

But when you start piecing this together as a possible explanation for chronic illness, it really just hits the nail right on the head. I mean, it really explains everything. Because different microbes affect different cells in different tissues in the body in different ways. And that’s why we had different illnesses.

So ending back to that question, Jenny, I know that, yeah, I think it is a progression, but the good news is I was 50 when I was having these things and going, is it a M.S.? Is it Parkinson’s? Where am I going to be in 10 years? This is bad. I’m going to be demented by the time I’m 60.

I’m 65 now. My brain works as well as it’s ever worked in my entire life. I have zero symptoms of brain fog. Everything’s firing on all cylinders, and it’s from years and years of using herbs and sticking to a clean diet and doing all the things that I need. Now, it took a lot of work. Five years of hard work to get my health back completely. But all the symptoms cleared, and I’ve seen this happen over and over. So don’t get uptight about the diagnosis. Get uptight about the causes and what you need to do to restore cellular health and get your health back so you don’t have to worry about these things.

Dr. Rawls is a physician who overcame Lyme disease through natural herbal therapy. You can learn more about Lyme disease in Dr. Rawls’ new best selling book, Unlocking Lyme.
You can also learn about Dr. Rawls’ personal journey in overcoming Lyme disease and fibromyalgia in his popular blog post, My Chronic Lyme Journey.