Getting to the Root of Food and Other Addictions with Dr. Jason Giles [EP. #1015]

 

This Week’s Episode Special Guest: Dr. Jason Giles 

Summary: 

In this enlightening conversation, Dr. Jason Giles shares his personal journey from addiction to recovery, emphasizing the importance of connection, spirituality, and understanding the complexities of addiction. He discusses how his experiences as a patient have shaped his approach to addiction medicine, highlighting the need for empathy and individualized care. The discussion also touches on modern solutions for addiction, the role of community support, and the deeper emotional and spiritual aspects of recovery.

 

About Dr, Jason Giles 

Dr. Jason Giles is a triple board-certified physician (Addiction Medicine, Anesthesiology, and Pain Medicine) who has revolutionized addiction treatment through both personal triumph and professional innovation. With 25+ years of sobriety and two decades practicing addiction medicine, Dr. Giles brings an unmatched combination of lived experience and clinical expertise to one of America’s most pressing health crises.

As founder and director of Addiction Doctors, a multi-specialty telemedicine group, Dr. Giles oversees the detox and stabilization of hundreds of patients daily across both coasts, partnering with America’s premier treatment centers. His mission: reaching the vast underserved population struggling with addiction by developing technology and models that expand access to life-saving care.

Dr. Giles’ journey began with his own fentanyl dependency during anesthesiology residency—a rock-bottom moment when he realized he couldn’t keep his word to himself about stopping. His recovery through a long-term monitored program (which boasts 90-95% ten-year success rates) catalyzed his career transformation from anesthesiologist to addiction medicine pioneer.
For 15 years, Dr. Giles operated a boutique specialty practice treating everyone from championship athletes and Fortune 50 executives to billionaires and their families, hand-building long-term recovery programs focused on relationships rather than quick fixes. This elite-level experience, combined with his personal recovery journey, informs his contrarian yet highly effective treatment philosophy.

Guest Resources:

Website: www.ororecovery.com/dr-jason-giles/

Book: Outsmart Your Addiction

 

Episode Sponsors:

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Episode Chapters

00:00 Introduction and Background
02:10 Journey into Addiction Medicine
09:20 Personal Experience with Addiction
13:01 Combining Science and Heart in Treatment
16:46 Recognizing Addiction: Signs and Symptoms
22:55 Addiction in Professionals: A Common Struggle
26:08 Breaking the Silence on Addiction
28:43 Understanding Food Addiction and GLP-1
31:56 The Complexity of Weight Loss and Hormonal Signals
34:19 The Role of Spirituality in Recovery
43:09 The Journey of Self-Discovery and Healing

 

[RESOURCES / INFORMATION]

SOLLUNA PRODUCT LINKS

• Glowing Greens Powder™
• Feel Good SBO Probiotics
• Feel Good Detoxy
• Feel Good Digestive Enzymes
• Feel Good Starter Kit
• Feel Good Skincare

KIMBERLY’S BOOKS

• Chilla Gorilla & Lanky Lemur Journey to the Heart
• The Beauty Detox Solution
• Beauty Detox Foods
• Beauty Detox Power
• Radical Beauty
• Recipes For Your Perfectly Imperfect Life
• You Are More Than You Think You Are 

OTHER PODCASTS YOU MAY ENJOY!

• Wellness Insights: How to Listen to Your Body for Nutritional Guidance [Episode 878]
• How the Power Foods Diet helps with Weight Loss with Dr. Neal Barnard EP. 877
• How Not to Age with New York Times best-selling author Dr. Michael Greger [Episode #873]
• How to eat to reduce anxiety with Harvard nutritional psychiatrist Dr. Uma Naidoo [Episode #867]

 

Powered and Distributed by: PodcastOne

Transcript: 

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (00:01.863)
So great to have you, Dr. Giles. Thank you so much for being here with our feel good community.

Jason Giles MD (00:07.31)
Thank you for having me. It’s my honor to be here.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (00:10.267)
Where are you calling in from today?

Jason Giles MD (00:13.96)
I am in my office. currently I’m at the, place on the East coast in New Hampshire, enjoying, enjoying beautiful weather. The leaves are just starting to turn in the fall here, although it’s still warm. It’s not, it’s not chilly yet. It’s not sweater weather, but we had a bit of a drought this summer. So I think the trees are just ready for a rest. That’s how they’re acting.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (00:21.543)
I’m giggling because I grew up on the East Coast too, Dr. Dries, I’m from Connecticut, but I don’t miss that. are like, love fall season. I don’t, sorry, I’m between now Southern California and Hawaii. Once I could choose, I really just wanted sunshine, but I appreciate the beautiful leaves. I think when people love winter, I know people that love skiing.

Jason Giles MD (00:43.626)
down the road.

You don’t miss the weather. Yeah.

Jason Giles MD (00:55.086)
Mm-hmm.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (01:06.961)
We all like different things, don’t we?

Jason Giles MD (01:08.654)
It’s a funny paradox. I’m from Southern California and moved here just a few years ago. And it was a shock. It was a shock dealing with the seasons and it gets very cold here in the winter. But I figured it out. I look forward to the change and I’m in Southern California a lot. So I haven’t had time to completely miss it. My mother is still there. So I visit her.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (01:12.637)
are ill.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (01:23.773)
Yeah!

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (01:28.689)
Okay.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (01:33.935)
Are you scared?

Jason Giles MD (01:36.32)
I used to be, and then I had two kids, one played baseball eventually at a very high level. One did ballet, eventually professionally. And so the kids didn’t want to get hurt. So we, we, we set that aside, but I do like being outside. like, I like, I like the snow. I like a good, I like a good hike. do snow shoeing here. I did some snowmobiling some years ago. I hope to get back to that. That’s, that’s super fun. Maybe skiing. don’t know. There’s it’s just hard. It’s.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (01:49.628)
Yeah.

Jason Giles MD (02:05.198)
I’m not in a ski group, but I do like it. It’s super fun.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (02:08.902)
was available.

Jason Giles MD (02:10.85)
Yes. Yes.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (02:12.027)
Dr. Giles, coming down to business here, you have a really interesting focus in your work on addiction. And even when I hear that word, it feels like there’s so many ways in which we can get addicted. We can addicted to coffee, to sugar, to drugs, to sex, to working overtime. Well, first of all, tell us how you sort of narrowed into this.

focus in your work, I imagine it wasn’t something you may have set out to do when you were starting out.

Jason Giles MD (02:47.186)
no, that’s good pickup. Not, not, not at all. I, I went a traditional route college and then medical school and my, Achilles heel, suppose is that I was interested in all sorts of things. liked pretty much every rotation I went through when I was on pediatrics. I wanted to be a pediatrician. And when I was on neurology, I was going to be a neurologist. I liked all kinds of stuff. There is a specialty that embraces all the specialties and it’s anesthesia.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (03:16.669)
Mmm.

Jason Giles MD (03:16.994)
And that’s, that’s, that’s what I wound up doing. And anesthesia is, you know, taking away pain and awareness so that the surgeons can work their magic, fix whatever needs to be done. And I, I liked it. It was really, it was great. All different people, right? So from newborns or premature newborns all the way up to centenarians, ever, ever need surgery. They all have all different medical problems. So pretty much everything in the book.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (03:40.562)
Wow.

Jason Giles MD (03:46.85)
can be a complicating factor. And then there’s all different surgery. So I liked it all. I wound up doing a specialty that I liked it all. But two things happened along the way. I wound up being a cardiac anesthesiologist. So doing the big cases, transplants and heart surgery and stuff like that. But along the way, two things happened. One, I went through the recovery process myself. So I developed my own addiction and needed to get help for that.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (04:03.229)
That was intense.

Jason Giles MD (04:14.24)
And that changed my perspective. That was sort of the first blow. then there’s a drug that many, years ago when I was telling this little story, I would have to repeat it because people hadn’t heard of it before. So I would say it again and they would say, well, what’s that? What does that do? But unfortunately, I’ll say it that way. I don’t have to repeat it anymore. It’s the drug that I was on was called fentanyl.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (04:17.329)
What were you addicted to?

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (04:38.651)
When we hear that term, think, that’s what’s in drugs that kills people.

Jason Giles MD (04:42.466)
That’s what’s in drugs that kills people. And it nearly killed me. I got very extremely fortunate that it didn’t. Very, very lucky. Due in large part to my department chairman who had his snivers out or his antenna. And I thought I was being clever and only using after work and, you know, being meticulous. But…

He w he watched my decline over, over about a year and made, made a move and, suggested that maybe I had a problem and it was well deep up to my neck by that point. And this is grace here, by the way, this is, this is a divine part, which is I accepted to help. didn’t, I didn’t try to keep running. So that led me on a journey of self discovery.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (05:28.53)
Yeah.

Jason Giles MD (05:37.006)
The stuff that you talk about in your show, it runs through all of that, right? So early motivations and self-concept and the drive to become one of the most difficult types of specialty doctors is the same drive that I didn’t feel comfortable with myself. I didn’t think I was okay. I thought there was something missing. In some part, the fentanyl is what I thought was missing because…

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (06:01.021)
Mm-hmm.

Jason Giles MD (06:05.036)
I couldn’t relax. couldn’t settle down after work.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (06:08.231)
How does it make you feel? it like a painkiller in that?

Jason Giles MD (06:11.214)
Yeah, it’s like a super, yeah, super intense painkiller, like super like the kills all the pain, all the suffering, all the worry. Say again.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (06:21.703)
like Valium?

Jason Giles MD (06:23.678)
different, different. It’s if, if Valium gave you energy, it’d be kind of like that a little bit. So if it gave, if it, if it made you feel, safe and comfortable as well as, alert and capable, like at ease. So those are all the feelings that I wanted. I wanted those feelings. That’s why I went in through academics. That’s why I went to medicine. That’s why, that’s why I worked so hard was to get that sense of being okay. And of course.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (06:40.455)
So how do some people.

Jason Giles MD (06:53.102)
that doesn’t come that way. You don’t get it that way.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (06:54.575)
Exactly. You get it from the identity and the job titles and everybody, you know, saying, you’re so smart, Dr. Giles, even though you are, it’s all this.

Jason Giles MD (07:04.558)
You know, because inside you say, if you only knew, if you knew the real story, you wouldn’t say that I was smart, which is of course, arrogant, very arrogant to reject compliments, to reject reality. And that’s where I was. I was miserable and cut off and isolated and separate.

And my work performance was fantastic. I overdid at work, I over-prepared. But that’s like being on farther and farther out on that bar that they carry to get across the high wire. It was like being on both ends of it at the same time.

Fortunately, I had a very gentle intervention in the form of a loving phone call and.

I was terrified when I got that call. My heart’s pounding and my mouth is dry and my palms are sweaty because I could not see that there was anything good going to come of this. couldn’t see that there was a life on the other side that I was about to go on a different kind of adventure. I didn’t know that. I was really, really scared. But Dr. Moore was my department chair. It’s very warm.

Australian fellow, super achieved academic himself. And he told me, said, we saw this before. had another doctor in the department a few years ago who we found too late. He overdosed and died and we found him in the morning in the call room. And I could see that the things that you were doing, the way you looked, your responses, while your work was preserved, while you’re…

Jason Giles MD (08:57.094)
you know, your casework was still great. That frightened him enough, he could see the pattern. And so that was my exit. in beginning, so was step one, was this new life as a sober person.

Yes.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (09:14.813)
Dr. Giles.

Jason Giles MD (09:19.586)
Are we having bad internet?

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (09:24.797)
Hold on, I’m gonna log off and log back in.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (10:46.874)
Hey, so we were 10 minutes into the show and it froze and it kicked him off. So I just logged off and logged back in. Can you call him to come back?

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (11:00.268)
Okay, thank you.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (12:25.486)
Dr. Giles.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (12:33.656)
There you are. You know, technology, it’s okay. Our editor will fix it. It happens sometimes. It’s not all the time, but don’t worry. So go back to your story. Remember, yeah, when we got cut off. And we’ll just patch this part right back.

Jason Giles MD (12:36.531)
There I am. I don’t know what happened. We had problems.

Jason Giles MD (12:45.682)
Okay.

Jason Giles MD (12:52.211)
Yeah. So I was, I, I, I got very lucky. and I owe, some of that for good fortune, to a fellow who preceded me at the department and wound up, you know, not, not making it. I never met him. I didn’t, didn’t, didn’t know him, but he set the, set the pattern so that when I followed fell into the same, trap or fell into the same, yeah, addiction fentanyl.

I had somebody who was looking out for me. So, enormously fortunate there. So that was step one. Second part was when I came back, I, at that. I fell in love with, that’s crazy. I fell in love with talking to people because anesthesia, of course, there’s not much talking going on. It’s a little bit of consent and then staring at the top of somebody’s head for an hour or two while the surgeon does her thing and.

and I, I enjoyed talking with the patients and so talking with the patients and then going through my own experience where I became a patient is what finally I stayed in anesthesia for awhile, but it finally convinced me to let that go and pursue this really very new field. know that things like alcoholics, anonymous and stuff had been around for almost a hundred years, but as an organized, discipline or specialty in medicine, addiction medicine is really very new.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (14:20.472)
Yeah.

Jason Giles MD (14:20.717)
And our understanding of it is very rudimentary. It’s not very sophisticated compared with other specialties like nephrology or that sort of thing. So it’s a frontier and that excites me. And the same drive that I had of wanting to know and wanting to learn, wanting to grow and do something exciting, now I get to do that with this. And I’ll say one last thing about it, which is…

The cool part about this field, so if you haven’t, heaven forbid, break a bone and go to the bone doctor to get it fixed, if everything goes perfectly, then you get your, let’s say broken arm back like it was. That’s the best thing that can happen. But in this field, what happens when people turn their lives around is their lives come out way better than how they started. Way better. Same with what you’re doing, right? Same with what you’re doing.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (15:13.721)
Yeah.

Well, my gosh, Dr. Giles. Well, the first thing I want to say is thank you for sharing that amazing story with us. The second thing, and I got a lot of goosebumps when you literally use the phrase, I let it go, right? Because our mind has these ideas. I’m going to have this job and then I’m going to get this specialty and I’m going to get these accolades. I’m going to go this way and this way. And it’s, you know, whether you to use the term God, spirit, universe, higher intelligence, whatever it is.

There’s the greater plan that we’re part of and you went through this experience and then you let go of your mind’s ideas. And then you, it’s like you got led into this pathway where you can really, not that you weren’t helping people before, but because you’ve been through addiction. I imagine now, can you tell me how you approach it as a, know, obviously as a doctor, with science, as a clinician, but also,

Jason Giles MD (16:04.425)
Changed everything. Changed everything.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (16:15.138)
your heart, working with people, knowing what it feels like to be addicted, to be in the throes of feeling out of control. And obviously people are because they’re feeling that lack inside of themselves, which you had experienced. How do you combine that, your intuition, your heart with the science?

Jason Giles MD (16:26.429)
Yeah. Yeah.

Jason Giles MD (16:34.779)
Excellent question. Excellent question. Yeah. And every person’s unique. That’s the thing. It’s a, is one of the, one of the challenges of the field is it doesn’t, it doesn’t standardize very easily. So you can’t just say, okay, everybody do these, these, the, you know, these, 10 exercises and it’ll, and you’ll, you’ll come out great on the other side or have this, have this surgery will cut out the cancer and then you won’t have cancer. It’s not, it’s not like that because everyone’s relationship to their story is.

is, is individual, it’s unique. So what has to change in order to get better, and this doesn’t sound very scientific, it doesn’t sound, it doesn’t sound very medical maybe, but what has to change is the story you tell yourself about yourself and all aspects, things you tell yourself about your past, things you tell yourself about your family, about your, about your future. And so to use me as exhibit A again, I was telling myself that I wasn’t okay.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (17:21.924)
So yeah.

Jason Giles MD (17:32.519)
didn’t have all the compliment of things that normal human beings had, that there was something missing, that I wasn’t good enough and that I didn’t fit. Now, those turn out to be pretty common things. A lot of people feel that way from time to time, pretty much everybody from time to time. But what’s really bad is when you think like I did, I know how to fix this. And then you set off to…

In my case, was, you know, achieve academically, be really great at work. You talked about that, about addictions to work. I definitely had that. And the better I got at work, the more that feeling grew. was like scratching poison oak. It just felt good at the time, but then a worse feeling came afterwards. So the question about connecting with people, think that’s, you know, Johan Hari says the opposite of.

addiction is connection, right? It’s this sense of alienation that we, that we amend by connecting to one another. Honestly, I think that’s critical ingredient. You know, this office has all this paper. That’s my medical degree behind me, but there’s all this stuff that says, you know, I got board certified in this and that and whatever. Nobody cares about that. Those, those things are not what matters. What matters is whether or not you care about the patient you’re talking to or the person suffering through the addiction.

and whether or not the person you’re talking to trust you. And there’s something that’s really strange. So I told you at the beginning, this story of feeling like it was that my life was over when my fentanyl addiction came to light, but really it was the beginning of my life. So the patients, there’s been tens of thousands of patients that I’ve been able to work with since then and admit and help along their way. And

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (19:15.672)
Mm.

Jason Giles MD (19:23.931)
The thing that gives me the most credibility is not the academic achievements. It’s the personal failing that then I got help with, but that turned my life around. So they know I’m not judging. I think that’s one of the most important ingredients is to meet people where they are and to not prejudice your opinions of them based on how they present or what you think you know is going on. Everyone has his own story of suffering.

Everyone’s going through something you have no idea. So coming to it from that standpoint is probably half the journey.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (20:02.554)
So along those lines, doctor, for anyone listening to this now, and they think, well, how do I know I’m addicted? And I like how you mentioned the opposite is connection. And I can say for myself, and I’ve shared this with the community many times, when I was in high school and I became bulimic, feel good, it was a sort of addiction to binging and then purging. And I can definitely say there was a complete disconnection from my body.

Jason Giles MD (20:28.494)
Butter croissants, if I recall.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (20:31.33)
my god. Anything like fatty butter. And you know, sometimes there’d be blood throwing up and no connection, right? So someone is saying, okay, because sometimes we throw around the word addiction a little bit, casually, like I’m really addicted to coffee or this or that. How do we know or how does anyone know or they’d be like, okay, I’m doing, you know, doing the

Jason Giles MD (20:35.677)
Mm-hmm.

Jason Giles MD (20:41.161)
Sure.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (20:56.95)
whatever, weed, cocaine sometimes, and like you said, you thought you were in control. What are some of the defining signs that we can say, hey, we need to take this a bit more seriously?

Jason Giles MD (21:09.149)
Sure. Excellent question. Well, first of all, what we think of addiction, think of as addiction is actually, it’s actually normal behavior. So it’s, it’s normal to do something over and over again, until you get good at it. That’s what we all did when we learned to walk or learn to speak. Certainly when you learn to ride a bicycle or learn to host a hit podcast, you know,

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (21:32.505)
Yeah.

Jason Giles MD (21:38.409)
We’re bad at it in the beginning and we’re awkward and we’re crummy and we don’t know what we’re doing. And then one foot in front of the other. And the next thing you know, you start to get some speed and you figure it out and you can ride your bike around the neighborhood or, or help, you know, help many, many people. And, and it’s the same with when you, when you pick up a substance. So alcohol is probably the most common one. I don’t know. I don’t know anybody who the first drink was delicious and it went down great.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (21:59.31)
Yeah, good example.

Jason Giles MD (22:05.957)
Everybody is like, this doesn’t taste very good. And they, they work through it and overshoot or causes them embarrassment. to develop a problem with alcohol, you have to keep at it. You have to keep learning how to use it and keep pursuing that feeling until you’re really good at drinking to manage your feelings or using fentanyl to manage your feelings or eating butter croissants until you feel like I can do this. The rules don’t apply. And I’m just.

I’m putting words in your mouth, but the rules don’t apply to me. I’m different. And then, look, I can eat and not have the consequences if I just do this thing, but then the thing makes you feel bad. And that whole, that whole nexus of emotions that go together, that is something that we figure out when I do this, I feel a certain way. The reason that’s important is we want to control our feelings. want to manage our internal world.

That’s what success is. Yes, that’s what success is. We want love in our lives. And so we present a certain way, we say certain things, we go to the gym, we get good at whatever, and then we attract love in our lives and then we feel that’s a lot of work. But that’s what’s necessary to have a authentic good relationship is to be the best you can be in the relationship, which is a lot of effort. But we pursue the feeling.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (23:05.216)
Control.

Jason Giles MD (23:31.441)
Addiction is just pursuing the feeling. It’s just another learning loop. So that’s why it’s not a disease. You know, people give me dirty looks when I say that because it’s so popular to say, it’s a disease. It’s just something that you learn. Unfortunately, the things that we use too much of or too many, it could be anything, right? I’m drinking a little glass of water, but if I was drinking gallons and gallons of water, I would get sick. And if you, if you…

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (23:59.086)
Yeah, exercise too much.

Jason Giles MD (24:01.979)
If you eat a croissant, you’re probably okay. But if you eat 20, you’re definitely not. If you exercise to the point where you break down your body and you develop all sorts of problems or where you cost you other things, right? some like ultra marathoners or triathlon people or people pursuing excellence in the Olympics or professional realms, those things take a lot of time.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (24:31.268)
Yeah.

Jason Giles MD (24:31.569)
And they affect the rest of your life. There’s only so much time. So it affects your relationships. It affects your earning power. It affects your health. All these things are affected by whatever we’re disproportionately doing. Drinking, cocaine, work, religion, even religion can become ripe where people are murdered to be around. They’re insufferable because they’re just, everything is that and they’re over.

They’re over invested in it and they don’t, and it, and it ruins their relationship. So addiction is just like that. And everybody has something. Everybody has something. Your question is, how do you know if right? I get this question all the time. So if I go to a party and it gets around to the, do you do? What do you do? And I tell them people have a glass of wine or they, or something. And they say, well, do I have a problem? So this is very, very common question.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (25:11.587)
Yeah.

Jason Giles MD (25:30.118)
And

The way to answer that question is, know. So if you’re asking that question, you know, you know, you know.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (25:36.121)
Bye.

I agree, you know, and maybe you don’t wanna know because it’s giving you that comfort, you know.

Jason Giles MD (25:44.989)
You can, yeah, because you don’t know what to do next. You don’t, I didn’t know what to do next, right? If somebody said, Hey, do you, yeah, yeah. The shame part and the confusion part. And I don’t want to, and I don’t want to look bad. And on the way, I don’t know what to do next. And a lot of people, and me included, made the mistake of trying to save my ass and my face at the same time, trying to look good while,

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (25:49.942)
Yeah. And then there’s the shame part, right?

Jason Giles MD (26:13.523)
feeling bad and not knowing what to do next. So, yeah.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (26:16.142)
Well, can I you a question, Dr. Giles? You’re a high functioning doctor, and so you’re doing the fentanyl at night or after work. then imagine you’re tired the next day. And I just wonder how, you know, to take the shame out of it, how common this is for professionals of all types. We had a couple months ago, Dr. Patrick Kennedy, who’s cousin of Maria Shriver. They both been on the podcast.

Jason Giles MD (26:22.845)
Yep. Yep.

Jason Giles MD (26:38.838)
yeah.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (26:42.251)
And he was, you he’s very open now talking about his cocaine addictions while he was in Congress. And he’d it after work, but he’d be exhausted the next day and drinking coffee all day. It just started to be this imbalanced life. So is it common? We just don’t talk about enough doctors, professionals are carrying out these sort of secret lives.

Jason Giles MD (26:47.251)
Mm-hmm.

Jason Giles MD (27:04.498)
So doctors and congressmen and lawyers and podcasts are not different than anyone else. They’re the same. there’s no protected specialty or protected job. If you’re a surgeon or a backhoe operator or a school teacher, you’re still a human being first. whatever we call this, addiction.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (27:17.838)
Well said. If you’re human.

Jason Giles MD (27:32.477)
You know, a malady or a maladaptive learning loop is what I like the way I like to think of it. Whatever we call that it’s doesn’t, doesn’t respect, it doesn’t respect sex. doesn’t respect age. doesn’t respect job. It doesn’t respect race or religious background or sexuality or any of that stuff. doesn’t, doesn’t care. It doesn’t care at all. So that is the good news is that there’s no,

There’s nobody who’s more likely to be in this situation than somebody else. The other thing about your question is, it common? I won’t say it’s common because the overall prevalence of substance use disorder is probably somewhere around 20%, maybe as high as 25 % lifetime prevalence. So if you get to later years and ask people, did you ever have problems with this? About one in four will say, yes. I used to drink too much or I used to whatever.

whatever the circumstances are. One in four. If you broaden that to include the stuff that you and I have been talking about, know, over half of America is obese, and that’s an eating disorder, and that’s an addiction to food. It’s one way to look at it. There’s hormonal implications, there’s processed food as a problem, there’s a bunch of reasons why it’s gotten easier to be obese, but it’s about, you know, half the country is overweight, maybe a little more even.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (28:31.042)
in four?

Jason Giles MD (28:59.357)
That’s a lot. Then you add, then you add sedentary lifestyle. That’s three out of four people don’t do any exercise a week. Sedentary lifestyle is its own kind of maladaptive learning loop. So I think if you keep adding those things up, you’ll get to everybody. But your question is really aimed at, there doctors who are high and going to the operating room or are there pilots who are drunk and who are flying? And, the point prevalence. So today those numbers are actually pretty small. They’re probably, probably around.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (29:00.569)
I think it’s.

Jason Giles MD (29:29.225)
2%. Now that’s still a lot of people, 2%. And we’ve made strides. It used to be that nobody said anything and there was a conspiracy of silence and there was no programs for doctors or pilots or attorneys or people in positions of public trust, bus drivers. But now there are programs. And so it’s easier than ever to get help, employee assistance, state board programs, medical board programs.

and so forth. So it’s easier, but no, your anesthesiologist is not high and your pilot is not drunk and your school teacher is probably not on cocaine today. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t weekend problems or nighttime problems or that, yeah.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (30:15.246)
I asked Dr. Giles because, again, this whole shame culture we live in, it’s more to say, again, as you so eloquently put, we’re all humans. We’re all suffering from feeling lack of wholeness inside of ourselves in different ways. And so there isn’t shame, because I know I felt shame doing what I was doing. And then it wasn’t until my co-captain on the track team saw me cough up blood.

Jason Giles MD (30:21.982)
Yeah.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (30:44.024)
And then there was shame, I was trying to hide it the whole time. I think we try to hide things and it’s like, Hey, this affects everybody. and I know Patrick on the podcast was saying he had to get over his shame to be like, Hey, I’m a Congressman. And by the way, I’m a Coke head, know, and it’s okay because I’m struggling and many of us struggle. so yeah, I just, I just made that point to say, you know, a high functioning professional, any, or any sort of job people can be struggling and you

Jason Giles MD (30:57.683)
right?

Jason Giles MD (31:12.681)
Clergy, right? Clergy. yeah, you know, homemakers, people staying at home and raising the kids. It doesn’t have to be just a professional thing. yeah, it’s not rare, I will say. It’s not rare at all. If you, when I give a talk, ask,

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (31:15.633)
yeah, thank you for bringing that up too.

Jason Giles MD (31:41.073)
I ask the audience if anyone knows someone who went through some sort of substance use issue. And it’s always 100 % of hands go up. So there’s one degree of Kevin Bacon right there. Everybody knows somebody that had trouble, right? Everybody knows somebody. Very common in that sense.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (31:51.713)
yeah.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (31:57.25)
I haven’t heard that in a while.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (32:04.27)
Dr. Joss, can we go back a moment to what you were talking about with food addiction, which is really interesting because now there’s GLP-1, right? Variations. so now it’s so funny, we used to joke, there isn’t this magic pill or this magic thing that’s going to make you lose weight, but now there is. Taking this stuff and losing the weight and we know it’s, you know, sort of altering the way their body digest food.

Jason Giles MD (32:08.137)
Of

Yes.

Jason Giles MD (32:20.509)
Ta-da! Yeah.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (32:32.078)
But underneath that, the root of why they couldn’t stop eating in the first place is still there.

Jason Giles MD (32:40.201)
Is that what you think? you think that the GLP ones fix what’s wrong?

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (32:49.879)
I said, no, they’re taking something but the root of why they’re on it is still there. That’s what I’m saying.

Jason Giles MD (32:53.15)
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I agree with you. And, and I got in hot water for saying that I was at a conference last weekend in Berkeley, California, and I wound up chatting with, a bariatric surgeon. So a surgeon that does the gastric bypasses and gastric sleeves. For the, for the, your, for your listeners, there’s a, it’s been around now for a long time. They’re called gastric exclusionary procedures and the idea behind them.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (33:13.795)
Yeah.

Jason Giles MD (33:25.277)
At least when I was doing the anesthesia for these things, the idea is that if your stomach is really small, then you can’t eat very much and you’ll eat less and then you’ll lose weight. That was the very simplistic way of thinking of it. What we learned later with these operations is assuming they all go with, you they all have a risk of complications, but assuming everything goes just right. What’s probably happening is not the volume of the stomach, though that’s part of it.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (33:32.772)
Right.

Jason Giles MD (33:53.989)
It’s that there are receptors in the stomach that release hormones that tell the brain, Hey, we’ve had enough. We’re Well, a common one that people know about is insulin, but there’s these, but there’s another one called glucagon and that’s what the G is in GLP. And they, they basically say, there’s plenty, we’ve had plenty, but there’s other ones, there’s other communications going on. There’s a hormone called ghrelin and another one called leptin.

And so we learned, we were talking recently about the heart being a brain of itself. The gut is definitely a brain of it, of itself. In fact, when you’re hungry, the feeling of being hungry is in the stomach, right? When you’re hungry, like, I’m hungry. Or when you’re full, I’m full. But actually it’s not in your stomach at all. It’s it’s in your brain and the brain maps it to the stomach because we’re used to thinking of ourselves that way. So.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (34:27.608)
Yes. Yes.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (34:39.578)
True.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Jason Giles MD (34:50.952)
The spirited discussion I got in with the surgeon was this question that you just asked, which is once people are heavy, can they ever go back to being thin or can they become thin again? And I look at it from my perspective, which is that it’s a habit loop that produces a result. And then we overwork it until it produces side effects we don’t want like obesity.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (35:18.925)
Right.

Jason Giles MD (35:19.786)
Eating feels good. Feeling full feels good. So let’s just do the hell out of that. And of course then there’s other problems because you’ve got too many calories and the body puts on weight and now there’s issues. There are set points or hormonal problems, but I know lots of people who’ve lost a lot of weight. mean, a a hundred plus pounds. Uh, one of my, one of my close friends, Mike has lost over a hundred pounds and kept it off now for 10 years and is in the best shape of his life. And it’s now no longer.

It’s not a struggle. He’s not, he’s not, it’s not. Yeah. No, naturally he lost weight. I know people, I know people who’ve over a lot of people who’ve overdone GLPs until they’ve gotten all kinds of secondary problems, kidney problems, liver problems, weird facial issues. and, and so we’re messing around with something much more fundamental than the, feel full signal.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (35:51.534)
You mean natural, not with GCP.

Right.

Jason Giles MD (36:16.874)
It’s it’s this ancient conversation, these hormonal messengers going back and forth between the gut and the heart and the brain. There’s all this whole other conversation that’s not neurologic. It’s not nervous. It’s not a nerve based conversation. It’s it’s it’s endocrine conversation. And it’s complex and the feeling of I need something that is blunted by GLP is it blunts smoking, it blunts alcohol use.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (36:32.972)
Right, it’s complex.

Jason Giles MD (36:44.488)
I just read an article yesterday that said it blunts sex. it, it, so the GLP is having a diminishing effect or reducing effect on libido. Now the flip side is sometimes getting in shape increases your libido because you feel good. You feel good about yourself. You feel sexy, you feel fit. And, and so there’s, there’s trade-offs. It’s not, it’s not all one side. Bottom line on all of this is I think.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (36:56.537)
interest.

Jason Giles MD (37:13.342)
There’s, I don’t think it’s a stomach issue. don’t, I don’t think we’re mimicking the full stomach feeling. I think it’s affecting our sense of lack, our sense of not enough, our sense of needing something to fill an empty space. It causes people to drink less alcohol, which is, which is great. and all of that’s good. All of those things are good. Personally, and for my patients, I’m after something bigger.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (37:17.85)
Right.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (37:30.777)
Yeah.

Jason Giles MD (37:43.25)
I’m after something more than just getting by and managing to get through. I want them to have a beautiful life. I want them to be free. I want them to be fully actualized. I want them to be a light that lights others. And so I’m not opposed to these medications. I think they can help people get unstuck. I think they can be the beginning of something. But I don’t think we’re born

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (37:52.602)
That’s right.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (38:09.955)
Yes.

Jason Giles MD (38:13.078)
ozempic deficient. I don’t think we come into the world missing a dose of Manjaro and that we need that in order to be okay. They’re, they’re helpful. they can, they can help people get on track. And then this is where I parted company with the, with the surgeon. He thought he thinks you need to be on him the rest of your life. They’re new medicines. So we don’t know, but, I think if, I think if they are, then we have to come up with something else because

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (38:34.327)
Right.

Jason Giles MD (38:43.551)
We need a better solution than that.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (38:46.586)
I agree. know that, you know, I’ve talked to proponents as well, doctor, I get, you know, doctors have said to me, well, obesity is the most dangerous condition, right? From, you know, heart, cardiovascular incidences, diabetes, there’s so many issues that are correlated with being obese. So that’s step one, we’re saving people’s lives. And I don’t argue with that, but like you said, as a starting point. And then can we work on the deeper roots of, you said your brain is saying, I’m hungry. And it’s often not,

You know, food is the most physical, easy thing to stuff in, but hungry for feeling whole, hungry for feeling, you know, our cup is over filling, self-effulgent, self-love, self-compassion, all this connection that can be worked on in conjunction. So like you said, it really isn’t just a magic, like I’m going to take this and be on it for the rest of my life versus, okay, I’m going to use this to get my weight problem, you know, manage it at first, but…

which we talk about so much in the community with our four cornerstones, the spiritual, the emotional part of us. not just, you know, we’re not robots walking around. There’s a wholeness that needs to be restored. And once that’s restored, it’s a huge part of not feeling so tied to the food or the alcohol or whatever we’re talking about.

Jason Giles MD (40:02.684)
agree completely completely agree. It’s the same thinking that I need a drink to be okay. Or I need, I need a drug to be okay. Or to feel, to feel all right. And, that just, that just, that can’t be, can’t be true. It can’t be true for a couple of reasons. First of all, your brain and body are smarter than any drug we’re ever going to come up with. So they figure out a way to adapt or minimize or become tolerant to no matter what it is, no matter what, what

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (40:10.564)
Yeah.

Jason Giles MD (40:31.975)
we’ve tried to give people to change the way they feel, the body adapts to it over time. So it’s adapting to this stuff too. We just haven’t been able to show it yet. That’s my feeling anyway.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (40:37.506)
Right.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (40:44.164)
So Dr. Giles, I’ve heard people talk about the success of 12 step programs like Alcohol Anonymous, attributing it at least partially to the aspect of surrendering to a higher power. People connect with it in different ways, but there’s this surrender on part of something greater. In your work, how, if any ways, do you work with people on that deeper part of themselves, connecting underneath the surface?

to their soul, to their wholeness. How does that come into your work?

Jason Giles MD (41:20.572)
Excellent question. Excellent question. it comes into my work in every single time I interview a new patient who comes to one of our treatment centers to get help with drugs or alcohol. I ask the patients what their sense of spirituality is. Just that way. What’s your sense of spirituality? And that’s partly because everyone’s is different. Some people have a religious structure to it. One of the great religions or one of the

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (41:38.84)
Mmm.

Jason Giles MD (41:50.41)
lesser known ones, they have a formal understanding of the spiritual approach. Others have a more naturalistic sense of it, nature or the great outdoors or an activity, surfing or gardening or something like that. But, you know, we’re spiritual creatures. We’re made in the divine image and we’re here part of the universe.

We’re not outside of it. That’s the, that’s the, that’s the biggest tragedy of all is walking around feeling like you don’t belong here when it’s impossible not to belong here. You couldn’t belong anywhere else more than you do in your body on earth at this time. That’s it’s, it’s literally, there’s no other possibility. It’s easy to forget that. And when I asked the question that way, I, know, it’s a leading question. It’s, it’s with the intent of reminding them on what’s often their worst day.

Right. They’ve just checked into treatment. The good things haven’t started yet. They haven’t got any relief. They still have to go through detox. And, and I say it as a, as a fellow traveler, as a, as a friendly reminder that there’s something bigger going on here. This is not just you sitting on a chair in a rehab talking to the doctor. This is, this is your life. It’s it’s in play and

and you’re part of something much bigger. You’re part of humanity. You’re part of the sweep of history. You’re an integral atomic part of the universe. And when you start to think that way…

it can help break the spell of being, you know, outside looking in or hopeless or too far gone. Those are very common ways that people feel when, part of, part of depression and part of sadness and part of the sense of defeat. And, and, and oftentimes the way people respond is with a historical perspective. They’ll say, well, I used to go to church when I was, when I was a kid or well, you know,

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (43:32.1)
you

Yes.

Jason Giles MD (43:54.826)
I like to meditate, but I’ve gotten away from it. There is usually some connection. Most people have some connection. even the atheists, I mean, they have a confidence that I don’t have, that there’s nothing, but they have a sense of faith. And you can usually connect to that in some way, because even the folks that don’t believe in a higher power as such believe usually,

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (44:03.31)
Right.

Jason Giles MD (44:22.832)
in their fellow man or in the goodness of man or in the nobility of certain acts, there are ways to behave. And really that’s what I’m trying to get at is, look at the path that you probably feel like you should be walking versus the one you’ve been walking. And it’s just a question of changing direction. Yeah, just changing direction.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (44:48.056)
Wow, that’s so beautifully said. is individual. You know, it’s such an individual approach you take because we all connect to that in a different way. And then it just, you know, back to connection with each person, you’re not going to connect with everybody in the same exact way. And

Jason Giles MD (44:56.308)
Mm-hmm.

Jason Giles MD (45:08.478)
That’s cool part about it. I mean, everybody’s got their thing and yeah, we’re not all going to like each other, we all are all brothers and sisters in this journey. If you go far enough back, we’ve got a common ancestor. So we’re at least cousins. We’re at least related to each other that way. And God has no grandchildren, right? So everyone has a direct relationship with whatever this mystical force is, this force we can’t understand.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (45:38.914)
never heard that said. That is wonderful. We’re all direct children. No grandchildren.

Jason Giles MD (45:44.04)
Yeah, yeah. I used to think about it that way, right? Yeah. Like, call my dad, you know, call my mom and have a conversation. It’s available to you right now is the sense of connection. I got the sense of connection. So what happened to me in the context of, the treatment center that I went to was, we’ll say 12-step influenced. I think that was it. It was very scientific. was full of doctors, a state of the art.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (46:09.443)
Okay.

Jason Giles MD (46:14.1)
But there, but there’s more to it than science. The same way there’s more to it than GLP ones or, or suboxone for opiate use disorder or anti-abuse for alcohol. There’s more, more to it than science. It’s because it’s a, it’s a, it’s more to it than counting calories. Exactly. Exactly. For sure. So I got this assignment, which was step two, step two in, in alcoholics anonymous is,

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (46:16.878)
Right.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (46:24.41)
Everything.

It’s more important than just counting calories, right?

Jason Giles MD (46:41.706)
came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. Now that’s a, that’s a, that’s a, one of those sort of tricky steps. says, basically to take it, you have to concede that you’re insane. You remember I’m a, scientist, right? I’m a, a, I’m a, I’m a doctor. I made it this far. I have self-interest. I’m, trying to get better. And basically it says, Hey, you got to admit that you were crazy, right? Which is difficult for me to do.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (47:11.491)
Mmm.

Jason Giles MD (47:12.68)
Until I recognized that this belief I had, which was I’d be okay if I could do a drug or I could have a drink or I could, you know, be awesome at work. I’m not okay, but if I did these things, I could be okay. Well, that’s crazy. That’s nuts. And not only could I not do a drug to be okay, but the drugs were ruining my life.

The drugs landed me in that treatment center. The drugs threatened my career. The drugs were going to kill me. And so that’s pretty much on the nose definition of crazy. If you think, okay, I just need to do a little more of this and it’s all going to be okay. When the thing is killing me. So I was like, that’s just a little, just a little, not all at once. Yeah. Rat poison. so I was like, Hmm. Okay.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (47:59.64)
Right. a little.

Jason Giles MD (48:10.962)
So I was crazy. And, and when I got that epiphany, the rest of the flood gate opening was if I’m wrong about that, if I’m mistaken about using drugs as a way to make myself okay, what else am I wrong about? How else have I got it off the mark? And then, then I started questioning everything I thought about myself, right? Not good enough, don’t fit, don’t belong, worthless, washed up, can’t help, never, all those negative thoughts.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (48:27.62)
Mmm. Very humbling.

Jason Giles MD (48:40.478)
I started adding question marks to them because if I was wrong about fentanyl, maybe I was wrong about what I thought about myself. And then everything changed.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (48:50.074)
That’s amazing. And in your program, doctor, I know that there’s a 90 to 95 % 10-year success rate.

Jason Giles MD (48:51.428)
Mm-hmm. Lucky again.

Jason Giles MD (49:02.474)
in the, in the medical program that I went through. Yes. So the, the program I went through for doctors, the physicians health programs, they’re, all over the country. It sounds, this sounds funny, but I wish everybody in the country could be a doctor. Then if you had, if you had trouble with drinking or substances, then you could get into the program that I was in that that program is a, it’s a five year program with monitoring and you have to be sober.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (49:08.654)
Yeah.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (49:21.562)
Thank

Jason Giles MD (49:30.684)
I mean, you can’t practice medicine if you’re not sober. That’s part of, part of the catch. And so what happens if you stay and I had a chance to have a conversation with the president of the organization that oversees all these doctor, you know, like doctor treatment programs. And I, and I asked her, said, Linda, said, is it the license that keeps people sober or, or what she said in the beginning? Yes. In the beginning, you, you don’t want to lose your license, but at five years, it’s not that anymore.

It’s that you’ve developed a new habit. have a new way of managing your feelings. You have a new way being in the world. And that’s why it sticks. Because if you, if you stick with something for five years, whether it’s podcasting or a relationship or a healthful activities, right? Health, healthy behaviors, it’s going to stick. You’re just living a new life. It’s not, it’s not white knuckling anymore.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (50:04.024)
Wait.

Jason Giles MD (50:25.96)
So yes, if you can get into a program and stay in it, whether that’s with support from Alcoholics Anonymous or support from the church or support from your friends or support from the ladies in the quilting circle and you meet every Tuesday and you talk about your lives and you’re honest about what’s going on. So you have a person or group of people that know what’s going on with you and vice versa. That’s where the magic happens. And if you do that consistently along with not drinking or not whatever, your life will change and you’ll feel differently about it.

Now, I don’t recommend going back to drinking and testing the waters because these habit loops that we build, they’re still there, right?

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (50:59.802)
Bye.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (51:03.896)
or being with people that they’re all drinking, that your environment wants to change.

Jason Giles MD (51:07.924)
You hang around the barber shop long enough, you’ll probably get a haircut, right? So think about who you’re around. Think about your associates. Think about your activities. You can have a legitimate reason to be in a bar, but you can have an illegitimate reason to be there also. And like I said about, you know, just ask yourself, why am I hanging around having a ginger ale at the bar I used to drink in? Probably a bad idea, right? Probably a bad idea.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (51:36.42)
So Dr. Giles, how can we learn more about your work, if anyone’s listening to this, and back to the Kevin Bacon one degree, it’s like, I could use someone I know.

Jason Giles MD (51:46.666)
So, so if you’re.

Say again, ask me that again.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (51:55.31)
We’ll say, you someone’s listening to this and they’re like, this is really interesting. I really like this approach that Dr. Giles is talking about with connection and spirituality, you know, working on addiction, you know, with science in this, you know, in this combined way. How can people learn more about your work or potentially work with you?

Jason Giles MD (52:13.97)
Of course. Thank you very much. So if you want to learn more about my particular story or read more about these things, I wrote a, I wrote a book called outsmart your addiction. can get that on, Amazon and there’s some, some stuff about, each of the substances. If you happen to be struggling or family, member of somebody who’s struggling. you can get some education about these things and learn a little bit more about what’s really going on with addiction. If you have a family member or loved one who needs treatment,

We work with some of the finest treatment centers in the country. And if you reach out to me on Twitter, Dr. Jason Giles will help get you into one of our partner treatment centers if you need help, if that’s the kind of help that you need. And you can read about my perspectives on these things, if you like, on my sub stack, which is also Dr. Jason Giles. And I’ve got a new book coming out probably by the end of the year. It’s almost finished.

It’s a fresh set of ideas on these things. Just another round. And then I’m on a bunch of podcasts. So can find me on all kinds of podcasts. I just did Dopey Dave’s podcast. I did David Duchovny’s podcast the other day. And so if you want to hear more conversations, you can find me out there.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (53:15.086)
Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (53:27.328)
Okay, well, thank you for mentioning the book as well. We’ll link to all of that directly in our show notes, mysaluna.com. Our community definitely loves to read doctors. So that’s a really, some really nice resource as well as you sit, you all the other resources you listed on your sites. So we’ll list everything once again, at our show notes, mysaluna.com, as well as other articles and podcasts I think you would enjoy. Dr. Giles, thank you so much for

sharing your wisdom, but also your heart. I mean, it’s obvious that you really have channeled so much of your energy as a healer into, you’ve lived it, you’ve embodied it, and you can really help people so deeply in this area. And you just, like you said, you let it go. Any preconceived ideas about anesthesiology or how the direction your life was going to take you, you ran towards, well, this is where I think I can help the most.

which I think is a really true healer.

Jason Giles MD (54:31.668)
Thank you. That’s very kind. I feel like I’m a work in progress. There’s a lot, a lot to do, but also that we’re on the right track. I have a great team of people that work with me and I learned from them. And then my biggest teachers are the patients because there, there’s a, there’s always, always something beautiful in, in the struggle. And, if you, if you want good things, that’s hard, they’re hard to get. and so.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (54:45.946)
Yeah.

Jason Giles MD (55:01.01)
a life of peace and freedom and connection is worth fighting for.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (55:08.056)
Well, like how you mentioned to as we wrap up at the beginning of the show, you said something like your patients are far better off. We’ve gone through this challenge and now they’re alive, resilient, they’re wiser, they’re more connected from everything they went through.

Jason Giles MD (55:18.962)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s humbling all the time. And I long ago got out of the business of guessing who is going to grab a hold of this and not because you can’t tell from the outside. Sometimes the most gung-ho person has this just saddest tragic outcome because they don’t, they’re not honest about what’s really going on. And sometimes the most meek and timid person

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (55:46.639)
Yeah.

Jason Giles MD (55:50.652)
will do the homework and do the inward reflection and be honest with somebody that they feel safe with. And the most spectacular things happen. So I have a front row seat. I do a very tiny little terrestrial part, which is some of the science and the medicine. Mostly it’s just watching the miracles happen. And they do with regularity.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (56:01.594)
Beautiful.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (56:14.714)
So beautiful, doctor. Thank you again so much for being here with us. And thank you. It was wonderful speaking to you. And everyone, please check out the show notes and please forward this episode to anyone that you think would benefit anyone that is struggling with addiction or is close to someone struggling with addiction because this can really help them and put them on the path to recovery.

Jason Giles MD (56:20.274)
My joy. Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. Delightful.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (56:44.362)
I will be back here in just a few days for our next episode. I’ll also see you online at underscore Kimberly Snyder. Until then, take great care and sending you all so much love.