Episode #135- Treating Neuroplastic Symptoms with Dr David Clarke

Today I have a special guest, a leader in the field of Mindbody medicine and President of the ATNS (Association for Treatment of Neuroplastic Symptoms, formerly PPDA), Dr David Clarke.

Dr Clarke practiced Gastroenterology in Portland from 1984 to 2009, treating over 7000 patients whose symptoms were not explained by diagnostic testing. 

In this episode, Dr Clarke summarizes Pain relief Psychology.  With research based methods teaching patients to take their focus off the symptom, shift attention to brain, and feel the emotions or deal with life stressors.

Responding to chronic pain or symptoms this way rewires the brain, so that symptoms can be eliminated instead of just managed.

Listen to hear more!

Find Dr Clarke and the 12 question quiz on the ATNS website-  https://www.symptomatic.me/

Dr Clarke's challenging patients course https://ppdassociation.org/online-course

For fresh content on healing chronic pain or disease, follow Betsy

on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/bodyandmindlifecoach/

Youtube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvXZSYYGL2cfJl-oEOzqspA

Website https://bodyandmindlifecoach.com

Transcript- Automatically Generated:

This is Betsy Jensen, and you are listening to Unstoppable Body and Mind, Episode 135, Treating Neuroplastic Symptoms with Dr. David Clarke.
In this podcast, we learn to upgrade our brain and understand the power of our thoughts, to heal and to create the results we want in our life. Become the person in control of your healing and make peace with your life. Become Unstoppable Body and Mind.
All right. Hi, everyone.
Welcome.
We have a special, special guest today. This is Dr. David Clarke. Welcome.
Great to be with you, Betsy.
Well, we are so glad to have you here. So Dr. Clarke is one of the pioneers and leaders in this field. The head of the PPDA, which is now the ATNS, we can talk about what all of these initials mean and acronyms.
But why don't we start with a little bit about your story, coming from being a Western physician to what you do now?
Yeah, I didn't know anything about this. The first seven years of my formal training and education, you know, it's kind of embarrassing to admit as a physician that nobody ever mentioned the idea that your brain could cause serious pain or illness in your body, in the complete absence of anything wrong structurally or with your organs. But then I encountered a patient, I didn't know the first thing about diagnosing or treating.
In year eight of my formal training, she was referred to us at UCLA where I was in training by another university because they couldn't find anything wrong to explain her symptoms. She was actually averaging one bowel movement per month, despite taking four different laxatives at double the usual doses. We did some specialized testing on her that also was normal.
I was doing her exit interview and basically telling her she was just going to have to live with this because there wasn't anything more we could do. But just so the conversation wouldn't be over in two minutes, I started asking her about stress. She didn't really have any.
You know, her current day life was really going just fine. But when I asked her about stress earlier, she started talking about having been molested as a girl by her father. Unfortunately, not just once or twice, which would have been bad enough, but hundreds of times.
And I had never heard anybody say that before. I didn't know what to do with that information. I had no formal training in how to respond to that.
But I fell back on basic instincts as a doctor, which is to try to get the story. When did it start? How often did it happen?
When did it stop? Those kinds of things. And she was telling me the story in a perfectly calm tone of voice.
It didn't look like she was distressed by this at all. If you didn't know better, you would think that, and I didn't know better at the time, you would think that she had completely processed this information and had moved on. And yet she has this terrible physical symptom with no explanation for it.
So I didn't think the two things could possibly be connected, but they were both very striking. So I had vaguely heard of a psychiatrist at UCLA that was interested in conditions like this. And I thought maybe it'll help her to live with this a little better.
So I connected her up with Harriet Kaplan, who was a psychiatrist and forgot all about her. Until I ran into Harriet in an elevator three months later, and I've told this story many times before, but this was the elevator ride that changed my career. Because in making conversation with Harriet, it turned out she had cured this patient with less than three months of counseling.
And the idea that you could alleviate a serious, real physical symptom just by talking to somebody, that was nowhere in my medical education or training. And I thought, you know, if I'm going to be a complete doctor, I should know a little bit about this. So I got Harriet to teach me how she thought about these things.
And I thought, you know, maybe I'll see a couple of patients a year that have this concern or this issue, and I'll be able to use this information, and get the patient over to whoever the Harriet is in my medical community. And I was, you know, started practice in Portland, Oregon a few years later. And I was wrong on multiple counts.
First of all, there weren't any Harriots in Portland. I would send patients to mental health, they would get cognitive behavioral therapy, it wouldn't help them, and they would come back and they say, you know, now what do we do? And so I did, you know, I tried to help them by trial and error.
And I'm confident I wasn't very good at it in the beginning, but even as a bumbling beginner, I was helping people. They were having improvement that they weren't getting from the rest of the healthcare system. So, you know, that was back in the 1980s.
Today, it's been 7,000 patients I've treated like this. It was 250 or 300 every year, which was another shock for me, one out of three of my patients. And I just got better and better at it as time went on.
My first book, which is called They Can't Find Anything Wrong, came out in 2007. And then I started getting invitations to speak. And then I met other people who were doing this work, which I'd never met before.
And we founded a nonprofit in 2011, which is now the Association for Treatment of Neuroplastic Symptoms. And you came to our conference in Boulder just six weeks ago.
Yeah. That's where we met officially. And I realized how tall you are in real life.
I look a lot shorter on Zoom.
Yeah. You said it's your superpower to look short on Zoom. And yeah, that I have to say was such a cool conference.
It was really, really amazing just being around all of these people who we've read their books, we've followed podcasts and done research and read a lot of works and studies that people have put out. And a lot of those big name people were there. It was kind of the everyone who's anyone of this world, the mind body world.
It's really true. Yeah. The speakers we had were tremendous.
I mean, I've been doing this all these years and I learned a lot from them. And the research is something we haven't had before. Just in the last mainly three years, there has been gold standard randomized controlled trials of the treatment methods that we recommend at the ATNS.
And they've been getting stunningly good results at universities across North America, everywhere from Halifax to Los Angeles is showing the power of first of all, focusing on relieving people's symptoms like that first patient, not just helping them live with it, but actually relieving it and focusing on stress in people's lives, trauma, the long-term impact of adversity in childhood, other life challenges. When you do that, people actually get better.
Yeah, yeah. And it's not just digestive issues, as we know. Like that can be a main one.
That's what brought me to the work was ulcerative colitis and irritable bowel.
Yeah, absolutely. That's how I started. But when people found out that I was doing this kind of work, they started sending me mysterious cases with symptoms from head to toe.
You know, I didn't, I have to say, I didn't see that many with migraines, but all kinds of things, dizziness, itching of the skin was one, back pain was a big one, fibromyalgia, pelvic pain, pelvic pain was very common in my practice. I had a whole slew of gynecologists that would send me patients that they couldn't find anything wrong with the pelvis, and yet it was very painful for people. Some of them had genital or bladder pain as well.
So, you know, joints, skin issues.
Genital urinary problems, like incontinence could have a mind-body component, right?
It should be checked for, that's the thing. What we emphasize is, you know, we're not going to have this mind-to-body connection in every single case, obviously, but there are a lot of people it should be checked for to get a complete evaluation.
Yeah, I personally know that because I had incontinence issues during a super stressful time, and I also just had four kids. So I thought, well, this is just my life. I'm just going to have this now.
But turns out I don't have that anymore. So, but I read Dr. Sarno's book when I first, because I found out about this stuff kind of like 2019, I think, 2018-19, a little before, I think, Cureable