by Dr. Bill Rawls
Posted 10/29/21

Often, irritating gut symptoms seem to be part and parcel with Lyme disease. So then, can working on your gut health actually help you feel better? In this webinar short, Dr. Bill Rawls discusses how microbes throughout the body, including the gut, contribute to the symptoms of chronic Lyme disease and how balancing them may help you reach remission. Read Dr. Rawls’ personal story here.

Video Transcript

Question: Will treating my gut flora put Lyme and coinfections into remission?

Tim Yarborough: Our next question here is a really good one. This is from Kim: When I treat my gut flora for my Lyme, will it help or put my Lyme coinfections in remission? Will it help with any other symptoms such as vibration and ringing in my ears?

Dr. Rawls: It all goes together. It’s not one thing; everything is tied together, and it’s all about microbes trying to get at the cells of our body. So whether that’s microbes from the gut, or microbes coming in from tick bites, or microbes that we picked up as children, and if we’ve had them all our lives like Epstein-Barr, and CMV (cytomegalievirus), and Mycoplasma, they’re all affecting our cells. And so getting over Lyme disease is a process of healing cells and protecting cells. Weak cells, stressed cells, are more vulnerable to microbe invasion.

So for Lyme disease, you can imagine your whole body just being peppered with microbes — normal tissue, like normal muscle with normal cells and just cells that have been infected by microbes peppered throughout your tissues. Your immune system has to go in and take those things out individually, and they’re in your brain, and they’re in your heart, and they’re in your lungs.

And we all have a lot more microbes than just the Borrelia; we all have a spectrum of microbes. And then, you add the gut microbes on top of that, that are all invading your cells and basically peppered your body. So to get over that, part of it is healing the gut. We want to do that; we want to stop that flow, and we want to nourish our cells properly to keep them strong.

So herbs offer some big advantages in that you can take antimicrobial herbs for a long time, and they don’t disrupt gut flora. This is really important. And that’s the separating fact between herbs and antibiotics. Antibiotics are indiscriminate and kill everything. Herbs are discriminant. Plants have to take care of their normal flora and suppress the pathogens just like we do so that phytochemistry is very sophisticated.

So I took herbs, pretty high doses of antimicrobial herbs for about eight years, and I still take them regularly every day, not at the same doses, but pretty significant doses for a long time. And my gut just kept getting better every year, along with all of my other symptoms.

So when we’re treating the thing holistically, that we’re treating the gut, we’re using the herbs to not only help balance the gut, but we’re using the herbs to suppress the microbes in our system and also protect ourselves from free radicals and other damaging factors. So that the cells can heal themselves, then everything continues to get better as you move along. And that’s what it’s all about.

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.