Speak Plainly Podcast
Hosted by 2 time best-selling trauma author, Owl C Medicine. A veteran of the US Military, Owl's no nonsense approach to mental physical and relational health is exactly what you didn't know you need. Listen in for ideas worth chewing on and science based tools for living life after trauma.
Speak Plainly Podcast
Curing Chronic Illness with Dr David Clarke MD
Step into a transformative conversation with Dr. David Clark, president of the Association for the Treatment of Neuroplastic Symptoms, as he presents a revolutionary perspective on health and healing. During our dialogue, Dr. Clark uncovers the powerful concept of neuroplastic symptoms—conditions generated by the brain in response to stress and trauma, without any physical changes in the body. With compelling examples like phantom limb pain, Dr. Clark shares his journey from a traditional Western-trained physician to an innovator in understanding the brain's role in producing symptoms. His story begins with a case that challenged his medical understanding and led to an epiphany about the brain's capacity for change and healing.
Prepare to be enlightened by groundbreaking research in chronic pain management using neuroplastic psychotherapy, a method that could reshape patient care. The Boulder Back Pain Study is a testament to this approach's success, showcasing a 75% reduction in chronic pain after just eight therapy sessions, with effects lasting up to a year. Dr. Clark passionately discusses the potential of this therapy to surpass traditional methods like spinal injections and cognitive behavioral therapy, offering new hope to those with persistent symptoms that often baffle conventional medicine.
We also delve into the profound impact of childhood trauma on health, drawing insights from Gabor Maté's book "The Myth of Normal." Learn how adverse childhood experiences can shape personality traits, leading to chronic stress and high-stress lifestyles in adulthood. Dr. Clark emphasizes the importance of understanding patients' stress histories and the hidden psychological factors that manifest physically. Through powerful stories, we uncover the potential for healing when healthcare practitioners address these deep-seated issues, ultimately empowering both patients and medical professionals to achieve significant improvements in a relatively short time. Join us for this enlightening episode that promises to reshape your understanding of health and healing.
Music by Wutaboi
Email us at speakplainlypodcast@gmail.com
Patreon
Buy me a coffee at
www.buymeacoffee.com/owlmedicine
Social Media
Facebook: www.facebook.com/owlcmedicine
Instagram: www.instagram.com/owlcmedicine
Twitter: www.twitter.com/owlmedicine
My Websites
www.rethinkingbroken.com
#rethinkingbroken #CPTSD
#chronicstressadapted #ComplexPTSD
#childhoodtrauma #Authorpodcast #bestsellingauthor #queerauthor
#adhd #dyslexia #dyscalclia #Queer #queerpodcast #queerhost
#adultswithadhd #veteran #therapist #nonfictionauthor #traumaauthor
#undiagnisedadhd #childhoodtrauma
#trauma #lifeaftertrauma #PTSD
Thank you Well. Hello everybody and welcome back to another episode of the Speak Plainly podcast, where we speak plainly about things that matter. Today I have a very special guest for you I am so excited to introduce. His name is Dr David Clark. He is the president of the Association for the Treatment of Neuroplastic Symptoms, or ATNS. It's a nonprofit dedicated to ending the chronic pain epidemic, and it truly is an epidemic.
Speaker 1:Dr Clark holds an MD from the University of Connecticut School of Medicine, not just once, but twice board certified as an internal medicine specialist and a gastroenterologist, which I find really important because every person I know with lots of chronic stress and the symptoms affect them GI for some reason. But his organization's mission is to advance the awareness, diagnosis and treatment of stress-related and brain-generated conditions. You can learn more about this at symptomaticme. Dr Clark welcome. Thank you so much for being on this show with me. What exactly are neuroplastic symptoms and why are they different? When we think about diseases or injuries and things that we go to the doctor for, what is the difference between a neuroplastic syndrome and what we commonly think of in the layman's world?
Speaker 2:Yeah, the symptoms actually feel the same. The main difference is that, unlike most cases of disease or injury, there's not a physical change in the body that's responsible for these symptoms. Neuroplastic symptoms are generated in the brain. Basically, all pain is generated in the brain. What you get when you whack your thumb with a hammer is a signal that there's been tissue injury to your thumb, is a signal that there's been tissue injury to your thumb. That signal goes up to the brain and then the brain has to actually decide if you're going to have a feeling of pain there or not. A classic example of the brain deciding you're not going to have pain is if you sprain your ankle. While you're running from a predator or running from a dangerous situation in combat, which I know you've experienced, your brain may decide well, you know it's not a good idea for you to be feeling pain in your sprained ankle at this time. We're going to wait until you're in a safe place and then you can feel the pain. So it's actually a decision that your brain is making, depending on your circumstances, but it absolutely can create pain or illness anywhere in your body, from head to toe.
Speaker 2:The classic example of the brain doing this is in phantom limb pain. Somebody's had an amputation. They feel pain, sometimes at the location of the missing limb, and the limb's not there anymore. So where is that pain coming from? It's generated by the brain and it shows the power of the brain to do this. And why is it doing this to people? Well, it's usually in response to stress or trauma or repressed emotions. So the diagnostic approach has to be not looking for organ disease or structural damage, but looking for stresses, trauma, emotions and other life challenges in the person's life. So, in a nutshell, that's what we're dealing with in neuroplastic symptoms. There are lots of synonyms for it, but neuroplastic is actually an encouraging term because, yes, neuro refers to the brain and the nervous system, but plastic in medical jargon, as you know, means a capacity for change, and that's a hopeful message.
Speaker 1:It is. It's a very hopeful message because if we changed before, we can change again, and it's a little harder when we get old versus kind of those changes that we had when those developmental windows were open as kids, but it's doable. That's really cool to hear. So I this is infinitely interesting to me. I would love to know how did you get started in this? Was stress related illness is something that you always did or was like they were always interested in? Or was there one story or one patient or something that happened that was the impetus for you to head down this path?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I was the most traditionally Western trained physician you could imagine. I mean I was headed toward a career of putting endoscopes inside of people very happily, snipping things out and cauterizing bleeding ulcers and seeing all the interesting things that people have in their GI tracts, occasionally removing foreign bodies. I mean it was a great career and two thirds of my practice that's exactly what I did. But the other third I kind of had to be dragged into it. It wasn't part of my training. Nobody had given me the idea that your brain could actually produce real live symptoms in your body. And then in the eighth year and it's a little embarrassing to admit this, that it took until the eighth year before I encountered any of these ideas. But there was a patient who was referred to UCLA, where I was in training from another university, because she was averaging one bowel movement per month and she was taking four different laxatives at double the recommended doses and it wasn't working. I mean this had been going on for two years and they did all the usual tests at UC San Diego and they couldn't find anything wrong with her. So they sent her to us because we did some specialized testing of the nerves and muscles of the large intestine and my department chair and I we knew that that test was going to show what the problem was, because as far as we were concerned no other explanation was possible and we had this focus on if you've got a disease or injury or disease or illness, it's got to be from an organ problem or a structural damage. But that specialized test that we did that was also normal. So it left us baffled and I had to do her exit interview and just basically tell her you're going to have to live with this.
Speaker 2:But not wanting the conversation to be over in 30 seconds, I asked her about stress. She didn't have any, her life was going along fine. So I asked her about stress earlier, thinking maybe something happened two years ago when her illness began that could have triggered this. And she interpreted the question to mean the remote past and told me that her father had molested her and I had never heard that before from a patient. I had no idea that that might be an important piece of information to acquire from a patient. I didn't know how to follow up that information. I was just in an ocean of my own ignorance, basically.
Speaker 2:But I fell back on basic physician training and took a history and said you know what exactly happened. And I was a little concerned. She might, you know, completely break down and that I would make her condition worse. But no, she was able to tell me the story, which was a horrific story, one of the worst I have heard. In 40 years of practice I've interviewed 7,000 people with these neuroplastic symptoms and I don't think I've heard a story worse than this one. But in any case, sexual abuse hundreds of times. But it all stopped when she was 12, and almost a quarter century goes by before she becomes ill. So the idea that this horrible abuse that she suffered and her illness in the present day could in any way be connected just didn't seem possible.
Speaker 2:But now at least I had an angle for somewhere else to refer her, and there was a psychiatrist at UCLA named Harriet Kaplan, also board certified in two specialties, and hers was internal medicine, like mine. So she had this combination of ways of thinking and I sent her off to see Harriet, forgot all about her, got back to my endoscopes until three months later I run into Harriet in an elevator and this was the elevator ride that changed my career, because I asked her what happened to the patient and, to make a very long story short, she had cured the patient with about 10 weeks of counseling sessions and just blew my mind that you could alleviate a serious physical condition like that just by talking to somebody. Nobody had you know, I'm in the eighth year of my training and nobody had indicated that such a thing was possible. So I'm getting off. The elevator Mind is completely blown. I'm in the eighth year of my training and nobody had indicated that such a thing was possible. So I'm getting off. The elevator Mind is completely blown. I'm turning around. I'm saying, harriet, how did you do that? Yeah, you know.
Speaker 2:Later I caught up with her and she started teaching me because I thought, you know, I want to be a complete doctor. I might see a case or two of this in the future. I should know what to do. And so in the next 18 months, the last 18 months of my formal training, she gave me a way to think about this and I never thought I would use it in any regular way. But once my eyes had been open to this possibility, anytime I had a patient whose endoscopy or ultrasound or CAT scan tests or blood tests were normal, I would use this framework that Harriet had taught me.
Speaker 2:And patient after patient after patient had these major stress issues in their life that frequently nobody else knew about, especially not in the healthcare profession. And by treating these things people got better, just like that first patient. So I was hooked. I mean the professional rewards of being able to heal somebody just by talking to them. And it turned out to be five or six patients a week that had these issues. So I learned quickly. I had a long learning curve to climb but you know, over the next four or five years I reached a decent level. Wow.
Speaker 1:Wow, what a story man. Oh, my goodness, that's, that's wild and that really is. It's this bucket thinking is what I call it. I mean like we specialize and as as human beings. That's part of how we have advanced as a species. As we specialize in medicine, we've done no different. We specialize and we have these buckets of of endocrinology and neurology and all of these things. But there, when it comes to stress, stress is a fully like. It's a systemic response and we think of it a lot of times is just as like a nervous system response at least a lot of us lay people kind of do. But it really is. It involves every single aspect of the body and we don't really have a bucket that big. So that's really cool that you found someone who was able to make such incredible impact in 10 weeks.
Speaker 2:Yeah yeah, it was completely unexpected and then, as time went on, I became able to do it myself with patients, and that was proof to me that this approach was valid, because even as a bumbling beginner in my early years, I was getting results with this that were better than the rest of the healthcare profession was getting, and I'll admit, I had to be dragged into believing in this. But I couldn't ignore the experience of my own eyes and seeing patients get better with this approach, and it just encouraged me to keep going with it.
Speaker 1:Oh, fantastic, and it does seem to make sense that you're like, oh, I'll put this in my back pocket for an occasional use, and it winds up being five or six patients a week, you said.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, for you know, decades. So I estimate over 7,000 were all successfully treated with this approach. And these are people that you know you could be sitting next to them on an airplane or, you know, in the next office, and they have incredible stories to tell about the stresses that they have somehow coped with that are manifesting in their bodies. It turns out that stresses can physically alter the neuroanatomy. The nerve circuits in the brain can be physically changed by stresses from childhood, stresses in the present day, and the good news is that it can also be changed back if you are able to successfully treat people with this. And there's a variety of techniques that have been developed now and gold standard science, randomized clinical trials from across North America that have shown the same thing dramatic benefits to people who had been suffering for years, sometimes for decades, when these approaches are applied and compared with control groups. The control groups that they've used in these clinical trials are all kinds of things that have been used in the past and found not to be very effective, but they're good. Control groups that they've used in these clinical trials are all kinds of things that have been used in the past and found not to be very effective. But they're good control groups, you know. An injection to the spine, cognitive behavioral therapy, mindfulness-based stress reduction all kinds of things that have been tried for patients with chronic pain in the past and they work a little bit. They work better than placebo. But the new approach, the pain relief psychology, or we can call it neuroplastic psychotherapy dramatically better.
Speaker 2:The Boulder Back Pain Study. They took three groups of 50 people each with back pain averaging 10 years and they gave one group just their usual care same thing they've been getting for 10 years and they gave one group just their usual care same thing they've been getting for 10 years. Another group got this big injection into the spine and the third group got the pain relief psychotherapy and the pain scores in the psychotherapy group dropped by 75% in four weeks and you have to imagine they've been having pain for a decade on average before this and it 75% dropped just with eight sessions of counseling. And even the big injection into the spine it got, you know, maybe 10 or 15% improvement in pain. So after the four weeks in this study they you know they didn't want to just stop there because you know, who knows, maybe the pain would just come right back as soon as you stop the therapy. So they followed them for a year to see what would happen.
Speaker 2:Pain stayed down. Wow, 75% drop. They didn't do anything more with them. They just gave them these eight sessions, brought the pain down, followed them up no relapse of the pain. And they scanned their brains before and after they did the psychotherapy and the brains physically changed. Just the talk therapy led to neuroanatomic changes in the brain. Just absolutely stunning result that they got with this. It got national publicity, washington Post, today Show, cbs News and it opened the floodgates for more money to do even more research studies. Good, those are in process.
Speaker 1:Oh fantastic. I actually found that study yesterday when I was digging around and I saw the MRIs and it's like they had all the highlights of the areas that were lit up from pain and then it was dramatically reduced. That's-.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we've got a great video about this on symptomaticme. If you just scroll down a little bit, there's a video where some of the scientists who were actually involved in this research are shown in the video. It's just seven minutes. It's got also patients describing their outcomes from this approach. But the scientists are what I focus on.
Speaker 1:Oh man, that's fantastic. So you listeners you heard that symptomaticme. Please go check that out, because this is. There are so many people that I know and I understand that my demographic is a bit skewed because I'm a trauma specialist, that's what I do. So it's those people, but so many of us either are one or know someone who has said the title of your book. No one knows what's wrong with me, and that's the way so many things start and a lot of people are very much kind of giving up on Western medicine because they're not able to solve the types of problems that we have.
Speaker 1:Now. When I look at stuff, I'm trying to look at stuff from as large of a perspective as possible, and at least that my little brain is capable of and I'm looking at, like Western medicine is absolutely incredible. We've, like we came up with germ theory and lots of other things and we've eradicated a lot of like exogenous disease issues. But when it comes to endogenous diseases we were kind of struggling so and for a lot of that.
Speaker 1:As a as a person who, like loves tcm and acupuncture and does all of that stuff, I I've always kind of pointed people over toward other forms of alternative therapy for things that might be kind of endogenous, but there is a lot of resistance to that just for lots of reasons. So to have a place where people can go, that they trust, that they know works, that has good science backing it. For people who no one knows what's wrong They've done the imaging, they've done the tests, they've pulled seven gallons of blood and sent it to 700 laboratories and no one knows what's wrong. This is such an exciting thing for people who have. I think the most important emotion in the world is probably hope.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and there's huge hope. With this I mean the patients that I've seen who have had this and again. Western medicine is great for organ disease and structural damage that's what I practiced for two-thirds of my patients for decades but it's not so good at taking care of people with brain-generated neuroplastic symptoms. But the Western doctors that I have taught how to do this, they absolutely love it. All of a sudden, 40% of the people that are coming through the door of a primary care doctor who have neuroplastic symptoms are turned from being very frustrating where the doctor can't cope with the fact that all their tests are normal. Now, all of a sudden, there's an approach that works. One of the doctors I taught this took me aside at a conference and said these ideas have put the joy back into my work because all of a sudden she could make people better with these diseases that were so mysterious absolutely real symptoms With these diseases that were so mysterious absolutely real symptoms and the severity.
Speaker 2:I heard a quote the other day in a magazine article where it was a patient with either long COVID or chronic fatigue and that person wasn't sure which they had. But they said look, these symptoms are not mental. I have severe symptoms, mental. I have severe symptoms, meaning that because my symptoms are severe, they can't possibly be related to my brain or to my mental health. But it turns out that my patients, if anything, they are stronger mentally than the average person. They are simply coping with levels of stress that are beyond the level that a human being should have to cope with. And it absolutely is not true that if you have severe symptoms there must be a physical explanation rather than a neuroplastic explanation.
Speaker 2:One of my patients was ill for 79 years, another one for 55 years. Another one was so debilitated by chronic fatigue that all she could do every day was crawl from bed to bathroom and back for over a year. Another patient, bedridden with migraines for the better part of six or seven years. Another patient I mentioned, with one bowel movement per month. Another one with his stomach the organ, not the belly was completely paralyzed with this. We did a nuclear medicine emptying study of his stomach and nothing emptied. It just sat there.
Speaker 2:And all of these patients were successfully treated with neuroplastic psychotherapy. Every single one of them got better. One more, I have to tell you, please, 17-year-old girl, just to show you the severity of this in the hospital for unexplained abdominal pain. The pain had been going on for a year and a half. She had already seen six other gastrointestinal specialists at three different institutions still no diagnosis when I'm asked to see her. She's been in the hospital for 70 days. She's getting massive doses of morphine around the clock and even that patient was out of the hospital in a week just by finding the stress helping her to cope with it successfully. She was out of the hospital in a week and off of all of the opioids in 30 days after we met. So there's no limit to the severity of this condition.
Speaker 1:That is so amazing and I really focus on wordplay a lot. I think the language that we use is really important and there comes a moment in a lot of these chronic stress conditions where people are told it's all in your head and it's like, well, that phrase should be banned. Yes, I'm like it might be in your brain, but not head in the way we think, Like you know, it's something like that. I haven't figured exactly how to describe it.
Speaker 2:It's dismissive, it's telling people this is our imaginary you know. Just you know, grow a pair and handle your stress, kind of thing. Um, the, the level of stress that my patients are coping with is just um extraordinary and that's why and they don't, they don't even recognize, you would think, if you were physically ill because of a stress in your life, past or present, right, you would have a fully accurate idea of what the stress was. But that's not true at all. The reason it is making you physically ill is that you are not recognizing it well enough to deal with it.
Speaker 1:OK, so this this pulls me into one of my favorite topics that I recently learned about when Gabor Monte's new book, the Myth of Normal, came out.
Speaker 1:He talks about type B personalities.
Speaker 1:We're all familiar with type A personalities and the whole story of the cardiologist and the janitor and like the rubbing of the things and how type A is associated with cardiac arrest and stroke and those, those sorts of things.
Speaker 1:But then there's a type B personality he talks about in the early on, like chapter six or seven or something of the book, where they took people who have had chronic stress, it seems for so long, and they hooked them up to basically little pads on our skin that detect that the the water, to see how much stress, so we can detect the, how much stress somebody is is under, it's flashed like like you're, you'll die alone and never know love and like these mean things right.
Speaker 1:And then ask them how much did that stress you? And compared what their personal report was, compared to what the actual machine said that their stress was, and they reported a dramatically, dramatically underestimated amount of stress, that like they didn't register the amount of stress that reading those things had on them. And it seems to me from at least a from a childhood trauma kind of perspective, that would that it would make sense that like you kind of have to survive, would that it would make sense that like you kind of have to survive, so it doesn't it's not metabolically like beneficial or or worth it to continue sending those signals yeah, you have to get very skilled at suppressing your emotional reaction to what is happening to you in a dysfunctional or adverse childhood environment in order to get through, and so my patients are typically very good at burying their emotions to issues that happened in the past as well as issues that are happening today.
Speaker 2:There's a colleague of mine that refers to the type T personality for tension in response to adverse childhood experiences. I should take a step back and just say that adverse childhood experiences can be anything that you would never want for a child of your own. It doesn't have to be you know violence or sexual abuse, or you know an alcoholic parent, or anything like that. It can be a lot more subtle than that.
Speaker 2:One of my patients was told you know you shouldn't be feeling these bad emotions. Here's a lollipop. You know pretty much over and over again, having her own emotional reaction to whatever was going on in her life invalidated, which is the same as kind of invalidating you, because everybody has emotions. So to tell somebody that they shouldn't be having them and here's a lollipop, it's like telling you you should be ashamed of having 10 fingers, because your fingers are part of you, so are your emotions. And to invalidate those is a terrible message to send to a kid, especially if you're doing it over and over again and it impacts people's self-esteem. They start to feel like they're less worthy than other people, they feel second rate. In some cases they feel completely worthless, absolutely.
Speaker 2:That burden is something that a kid will react against and try to fight back against, and they will do that by trying to be perfect.
Speaker 2:They will do that by focusing on the needs of everybody else in their household and trying to fix things in that household. They will not be taking time for their own joy. So as adults, often they are on treadmills. They never get off with how busy they are taking care of everybody else. They're on high alert a lot of the time they live very high stress lives because as kids they had to always be watchful for when something bad was going to happen. So lots of personality traits that grow out of this buried emotions anger, fear, shame, grief, guilt that they're not consciously aware that they have. And then, finally, the third major consequence of adversity in childhood that my patients deal with are triggers Something in your present day that is very stressful for you because it is linked in some way to an experience of the past. The most common of those is that an adult who mistreated you in the past, when you were a kid, is still in your life today and still causing difficulty for you, even though you may not fully appreciate how much difficulty.
Speaker 1:Right, I see that a lot People being like, oh yeah, but they're my mom or but they're my dad, and they're like it's not that bad, I'm used to it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, other people have been through worse, right, everybody, you know. You hear that all the time. So my response to that, my response to that is OK. Imagine a child of your own or another child that you care about and they are back in your own childhood environment and you are a butterfly on the wall and you are watching this kid try to cope with that environment for a week or so. What's that going to be like for you? Is it going to make you feel sad or angry to watch that kid try to cope with everything you had to cope with? And a lot of people when they look back at their own lives they don't necessarily appreciate how difficult it was because they buried all that. But if they start thinking about a child of their own or some other innocent child trying to go through the same stuff, completely different reaction.
Speaker 2:One of my patients was the peacemaker for her bickering parents. I mean, they were verbally and emotionally abusive to each other all the time. She was the only kid in the family. She was the peacemaker all the way up until she was 18 and left to go to university and she insisted to me that it wasn't really that big a deal, that she wasn't abused or molested or any of those things. Her parents didn't drink or use drugs, they were just at each other.
Speaker 2:And this was a woman who had half a dozen different neuroplastic symptoms all over her body for 20 years and she had a number of the personality characteristics that grow out of an adverse childhood environment. So I asked her she had a beloved niece, five-year-old girl just absolutely adored this little kid, took her for the weekends, went shopping with her, took her to amusement parks. They had a great relationship. So I said, okay, we are going to imagine this five-year-old niece. She is back in your childhood environment. She's five years old, she's going to try to cope with your parents just the way you had to, and you have to watch and you can't do anything except look and see what's happening. What is that going to be like for you?
Speaker 2:And she was a very verbal person, but that stopped her cold. She just stared at me for a couple of minutes, which was a long time for her to not say anything, and then finally she said at the end of a week I would shoot myself. And that was the first time she realized just how big an impact her childhood experience had had on her and it made a huge difference in how she thought about herself. It brought her stress level way down to recognize the heroic perseverance that she must have had to make it through not just one week but darn near a thousand Wow.
Speaker 1:Wow, wow, wow, wow, wow. Yeah, I mean, this is I. There's a whole section of my of my book where I talk about the attachment versus authenticity war and it's this exact concept of like the attachment to your parents, who literally keep you alive, because you're a little baby and can't get a job and pay for rent and all that kind of things, versus your intuition being your authenticity and that part that that is emotions, are first and foremost a physiological experience and when you can't express those things for fear of how it's going to affect your parents and how they might respond and that sort of thing, we just shut down so much of our intuition and because of that systemic response to stress that we have, there isn't a single corner of our body that is not profoundly affected by these things.
Speaker 2:Wow, it's amazing the range of different symptoms. We haven't even really touched on that, but migraines, tinnitus, ringing in the ears, pseudo seizures, visual disturbances, difficulty swallowing, lump in the throat, fibromyalgia, irritable bowel, pelvic pain, bladder spasms, genital pain, joint pain, spine pain, low back pain. Recent study 88% of people with spine pain. It turned out to be neuroplastic and not structural. Chronic fatigue, long COVID, certain kinds of rashes, functional neurologic disorder. The only common denominator in this condition is a tendency to have more than one symptom at a time. My personal record patient had 27 different symptoms simultaneously. He was my record. That's a little extreme.
Speaker 1:That's not a record I want to hold?
Speaker 2:Definitely not, but he was all. 27 symptoms went away in 30 days after we uncovered what was going on with him. So, yeah, he came back for his follow-up a month later Feeling fine. Doc, thank you very much. Yeah, it was a great case. That's why I remember him so well. Oh, my goodness.
Speaker 1:Now, I don't want to.
Speaker 2:You know, make your audience feel like everybody should be doing this. You know, healing themselves in 30 days. Some people take years of psychotherapy to achieve the same outcome, but you know a large number of people can get much, much better in a matter of weeks or months.
Speaker 1:Wow, and and the fact that the fact that one, it's talk therapy and two, it's not talk therapy for the rest of your life, like it's a pill for the rest of your life, like it's like it's a program for the rest of your life, that's incredible, okay, so I want to. I want to pretend like I'm a patient. I'm coming to you. What is it when people do come to you, what are they saying? That way, like people who might be experiencing something that says, hey, maybe I should go get this checked out, I can't. I've been to 13,000 specialists. What are they saying when they walk in your door?
Speaker 2:So if they've already had their medical evaluation, then I don't need to do that. You know, the first story in my book they Can't Find Anything Wrong was a patient who'd been hospitalized at a major university 60 times in 15 years and seen a dozen specialists, including a psychiatrist, none of whom found anything wrong with her. So that made it easy for me because I didn't have to think about a biological cause for her condition no organ disease or structural damage. I could focus right in on where's the stress. It's kind of like a Sherlock Holmes mystery that I need to find what the stress was that is connected to this person's symptoms. So they come and tell me what their symptoms are. I want to get an exact chronology. When did they start? What's been the progress over time? Can they link their symptoms, the beginnings of them, to any traumas or any stresses? Do the fluctuations in the symptoms correlate with any particular stresses in their lives? And then I'm talking to them about what did you go through as a kid? Anything that you experienced that you would never want for a child of your own? And then, finally, I'm making sure that they don't have a hidden case of depression, anxiety or post-traumatic stress, because all three of those can actually present to the health care system more with a physical symptom than with a mental health issue. So I need to ask people about you know, how's your sleeping? How's your energy level? How's your appetite? Have you lost interest in things you used to enjoy? Those are all questions linked to depression.
Speaker 2:For anxiety, people tend to have much worse symptoms whenever they're away from a safe environment. One of my patients had all of her attacks of illness take place away from home, which was a safe environment for her. Not one of her symptoms took place at her home, where she felt safe. And you know her symptoms were gastrointestinal and your GI tract doesn't know if you're away from home or at home. Only your brain knows that. So clearly the brain was involved in her condition and it was a question of an anxiety disorder for her.
Speaker 2:And then for the post-traumatic stress, I'm looking for trauma. Did you go through a terrifying or horrifying event at some point in your life that is in some way connected to your physical illness? And usually with that process of questioning, the issues come up and the rest of the health care system hasn't learned except for, you know, a couple hundred of my colleagues around the world, but most of the healthcare system hasn't learned how to look into these issues and what to do with them when they find them. But once people learn this and it's not that difficult I mean, we've got abundant training courses and books that are evidence-based on our website People can learn how to do this and once you see this, you can't unsee it.
Speaker 1:That's amazing, and that website is symptomaticme correct, that's right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we've got. We curate our list of books. We make sure that they are scientifically based. I dearly wish I had had just even one of these books available to me when I first started. In practice, you know it would have been. There are so many people that can read a book in this field and have it make such a difference to them. There's also an app called Curable I should mention. They've taken a lot of the best ideas in this field and turned it into a wonderful user interface. A lot of the best ideas in this field and turned it into a wonderful user interface, and they're coming out with a whole different version in the coming months as well.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Okay, We've talked a little bit about the patient side. Now I'm really interested in like this is a fundamental shift in medicine, in Western medicine, and you you're the president of this foundation and you're training people in this. Can you tell me more about that, Because that's really exciting for me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we had our first live conference last year in Boulder, colorado. We had 270 people from eight countries that came for two and a half days of training in this and you know they absolutely loved it. You know they gave us incredible reviews. People said it was the best conference of any kind they had ever attended, that it was life changing. So we're doing another conference September 28th to the 30th, also in Boulder, colorado, this year, 2025. And we hope to continue to do them annually because they've just been so popular.
Speaker 2:We've got recordings of virtual conferences we've done in the past. We have training courses that are video-based on the website as well. So lots and lots of resources for people to learn how to do this. Healthcare professionals they already know 90 to 95% of what they need to know to do this work. They just need to graft on this additional approach. The best outcomes actually happen when you have a medical clinician and a mental health professional collaborating with each other, ideally in the same practice environment, so that when the doctor is done evaluating for organ diseases and structural abnormalities, they can bring in the mental health or behavioral health person who does the stress evaluation that I just described and starts uncovering these causes and between the two of them. The outcomes are tremendous. I taught just three doctors in a medium-sized city on the East Coast and they loved it so much and it was so transformative to their practice that in the following year they taught 70 other doctors in their community how to do this.
Speaker 1:Man making ripples man. It was going viral in.
Speaker 2:Albany, New York.
Speaker 1:Oh, wow, that's so freaking cool. That is really really exciting. So I know that I have MDs as well as doctors of acupuncturists and like and physical therapists that all listen to the show is. Is that some of these conferences? I know some of my acupuncturist friends would be interested and and coming and attending. Is that something that they could do or do you need to be a medical doctor?
Speaker 2:or no it's, it's open to everybody. Who's a healthcare professional? So who's a healthcare professional. So we encourage everybody who works with human beings and their symptoms to join us, because you can take the professional training you already have and add these concepts onto it and it will greatly expand your ability to impact your patient's health for the better. We have physical therapists that come. We have hypnotherapists that come. We have people from the general public who just want, you know they've got their own physical symptoms and they want to learn from the best about how to cope with this. So you know we've got, you know international experts that come. We had presenters from as far away as Israel that attended and gave speeches. You know several countries in Europe, so we got the best of the best coming to this conference to teach people.
Speaker 1:Oh, wow, that's fantastic. I'm excited I will be seeing you in September. That's really cool. Oh, that's really marvelous. So people can find everything that we've been really talking about on symptomaticme.
Speaker 2:Yes, and I should add that there's a 12 question quiz on there for anybody that has symptoms and is wondering if this whole line of thinking could apply to them. The 12-question quiz takes less than three minutes, is going to give you a pretty good idea, because every single question has a line or two of explanation about what a yes answer to the question means. The more questions to which you answer yes, the more likely it is that your symptoms are neuroplastic in origin.
Speaker 1:Wow, okay, and that's super fast, super easy. And I know a lot of you listeners are taking 10 question little quizzes on Facebook about which archetype are you or what animal is your spirit animal. So next time you see one of those, hop off of there, run over to symptomaticme and plug that in. Take your little test. This is really thank you so much for coming on and talking about this with me and plug that in. Take your little test. This is really thank you so much for coming on and talking about this with me. This is something I'm really interested in.
Speaker 1:As my listeners know, I've talked a lot about chronic stress adaptation and it's a very similar concept on here talking about the neuroplastic changes in the brain to certain regions, but here they're getting to hear it's not just mental health stuff. This is truly, truly a full body experience. Stress is and we have full body consequences, and now there are people like you who are doing the work to make these changes in Western medicine where people are starting to give up. But look, not everyone is giving up. I know at least. The last statistic I saw was over half of doctors now when they were asked knowing what you know now, if you could go back, would you be a doctor? And over half say no, and it's because at least they're reporting. They feel like they don't get to be doctors and the work isn't rewarding. Yet here you are going around to these people, teaching workshops, giving them tools to help their patients. That is lighting them up again, allowing them to practice medicine the way that they wanted to, because nobody gets into medicine so they can hand pills to people. Nobody gets into medicine because they want to be told what to do by the insurance company or standards of practice. People get into medicine because they want to help people, and here you are doing exactly that. Thank you so much, dr Clark. This has been absolutely marvelous.
Speaker 2:It's been a pleasure to speak with you and I really appreciate your helping to spread the word.
Speaker 1:I am so honored to help spread your message. Thank you so much, and for all of you listeners. You have gotten all of the information that you need. Now, please check out Dr Clark. You can go buy his book right now on Amazon. Go take your little quizzes. Thank you so much for your time and for all you listeners. Remember, stay curious and stay uncomfortable. Thank you, dr Clark. Thank you, bye.