< Joan Priestley, M.D. >

Medical Director

Dr. Priestley has been associated with AIBMR Life Sciences as both a medical consultant and more recently as its Medical Director since 1992. Dr. Priestley earned her M.D., at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and completed internships in Surgery and Internal Medicine at Mount Carmel Mercy Hospital in Detroit, Michigan. Joan earned her Bachelor’s degree at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and attended the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She is licensed to practice medicine in California, and has been in private practice in Florida, Michigan, California and Alaska.

Joan is noted for being one of the first physicians in the United States to work with AIDS patients, when she had a practice in Key West, Florida, before moving to Los Angeles, where she had a large practice treating AIDS patients. In Florida, she was one of the earliest clinical investigators of the drug AZT. Recognizing the limits of AZT clinically, she embarked on the study of how the immune system might combat the devastation caused by the retrovirus responsible for this communicable disease. She presented data on her clinical experience in working with AIDS patients at several international AIDS conferences, citing pioneer work she developed in the use of dietary supplements and botanicals that when combined with mono- or poly-drug use, gave superior outcomes in reducing symptoms associated with AIDS. Her advocacy in the late 1980’s for the use of dietary supplements as complementary to pharmaceutical therapies has been heralded as pioneering in the field. In the early 1990’s she met with over one hundred members of the United States Congress over an eleven month period to discuss the importance of her clinical findings in helping AIDS patients regain their health.

Areas of special interest to Dr. Priestley include: general medicine, immune system disorders, AIDS and hepatitis, dietary supplementation, food allergies, anti-fungal pharmaceuticals and nutraceuticals, secretin, transfer factor, heavy metals, anti-viral medications, and anti-thrombotics.