Introducing: The Immune Edit with Dr. Doug Jones!

Welcome to the Podcast

I’m Dr Doug Jones, and I’m so excited to have you with us. This is a new podcast show that we’re launching and we’re going to be answering questions, busting myths surrounding the kind of the immune system. In this era of information, we’re also in a massive, massive era of misinformation, and it’s due to a lot of marketing, or I use the other word manipulation when it comes to marketing, I think that’s what it is. But there’s, so much marketing and manipulation out there that it’s easy to take this mass amount of information and make it into misinformation. So this space is to edit that, edit that misinformation, correct some things, answer your questions, and really kind of get into it, to empower you through education.

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My Background and Training

And why am I qualified to talk about this? I’ll just give you a little bit of my story. So I grew up in a rural town in Idaho on a farm, and eventually went to got my bachelor’s degree from the University of Utah in biology, and then went to medical school at Penn State University, got my degree there continued more training in internal medicine. Was board certified in internal medicine, and then did subsequent training in allergy and immunology, which was another couple of years past all of that. Once I finished that training, I started my own clinical practice, and we, at that time, started from scratch, just me, a nurse and a receptionist, and it was tough, but it was also a lot of life lessons learned of just having that nose to the grind, boots on the ground, getting this clinical practice off the ground.

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Pioneering Food Allergy Treatment

We started with just the typical allergy clinic that you may go to, but a few years after I started that clinical practice, I started to pioneer a food allergy treatment. So many, many people suffer from life threatening food allergies, and even if they have like, a microscopic amount of exposure that can lead to a potentially life threatening reaction. This affects many, many people, and the statistics on this have actually skyrocketed over the last couple of decades. But years ago, there was no treatment, really. It was, you know, this concept of telling people you just have to avoid it carrying up an effort injector and hope nothing bad happens. Long story short, I did not like the answer that I was giving them.‍I felt really bad, and didn’t want to give that answer. So started working with some colleagues of mine who had piloted several treatments in their clinics, and learned from them directly, and started that in my own clinic, and helped to pioneer this. And over the course of time, my clinic grew quite rapidly through that space. I mean, we, I’ve treated patients from, I think, almost 40 states and multiple countries across the world from this, and so became known in the Food Allergy space for these types of treatments.

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Expanding to Gut Health and Immune Disorders

As a consequence to that, what happened is we started seeing patients, no matter what the food reaction, it could have been a sensitivity and irritable bowel syndrome, some kind of other intolerance or exposure, but really, anything that happened to those patients with food we ended up getting, being, seeing those patients and evaluating them, and interestingly, kind of simultaneous with that, I was starting to struggle with my own health issues. And so as this food allergy treatment program grew, my health actually started to decline a bit, and I was not getting the answers that I wanted there, either. And so I had to go out and pursue various aspects to try and get myself treated and to take care of my own health. While I was going through this journey with my patients. I was going through my own journey of trying to figure out my own health, but then I started realizing, you know what, a lot of what I’m learning about myself and my own health I can apply to my patients. And so I started develop programs to implement different aspects into our treatment program, got into gut health, got. Microbiome and and then into more complex immune disorders when COVID hit, because I had kind of a reputation of thinking outside the box, of innovation, of listening to patients who had previously been unheard of of, I guess, having the courage to start treatments that hadn’t been done before. I actually started seeing a lot of patients during COVID for whether they had adverse reactions to the vaccine or were suffering from something called Long COVID, which is kind of a complex neuroendocrine immune disorder, and so I started to get a lot of experience in those areas as well. And so combining all of that together is kind of a summary of my clinical career.‍

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My Personal Mission

But I also went on my own personal journey with my own health obstacles and my own issues, and I’ve tried to apply that to my patients like all along the way through this journey I’ve had, I’ve seen firsthand this also explosion of the wellness influencers and the relentless onslaught of unvalidated tests of misinformation, of proprietary blend of these quick fixes or easy cures that people are promoting, and it sickens me honestly, because people are vulnerable. The immune system is complex. They’re sick, and they’re getting preyed upon by individuals or companies, we’re just trying to sell them their own proprietary blend of what I call bullshit. And I want to stand up and guard, help you guard against that, to where you feel more empowered through education, to where I can help you see through some of the red flags that are out there. And really, instead of feeling like within your own health and life, many people are exhausted from wheel spinning and in this life spin class, what I want to do is help you try to get some traction in your life and understand things a little bit better, so that you’re making more educated and well informed decisions about your own health.

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Building an Empowered Community

And I want to help you kind of see through a lot of that hook and reels that happens, or that click bait that happens, and then you might get your hopes up on certain things, and then it not pan out, and then it you’re back to kind of that cycling. We want to break those cycles. We’re going to get you traction. I want you to feel a lot more comfortable when you’re looking at headlines, not only looking at the headlines, but seeing beyond the headline, seeing beyond what’s just put there for you to consume. And so that’s kind of my goal is, with this is to build an educated, empowered community where you’re taking responsibility for your own health, well being, but also have some guidance along the way. And you know, I’m not here to say I know everything, but I’ll give you everything, you know. I want to give everything that I can to helping you in your journey and helping you along in this space.

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The Focus of The Immune Edit

And that’s really kind of the the crux of the immune edit. Again, we’ll be focused primarily on the immune system, because that’s where my background and training lie. But we’re also going to get into how the immune system interacts with other systems within our body, and how we can balance these things.‍We want to dispel myth along the way. We want to redline those things that perhaps are myths and help you just better understand so hopefully you’ll come along with me in this journey, and I’m excited, so leave some comments below.

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Join the Conversation

What I would love for you to do is ask me some questions. Propose some topics. What are some myths that perhaps you’ve heard that you’re not quite sure of, or what are some headlines that you’ve seen that you wonder, is this something that’s legitimate or not? Let’s look at it together.

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