Chapter 5: What happened next to Dr Clarke?
Excerpt from an insightful interview with Dr. Clarke as he tackles skepticism surrounding PPD treatments.
The Doctor of the Year Award in 1990 led to many other physicians becoming aware of the work I was doing. Soon I was doing 90% of the 2nd opinion consultations for the Gastroenterology Department and also seeing patients with a full range of other symptoms. These included back pain, itching of the skin, gynecologic problems and many more. The results for the patients were excellent.
Then a very supportive administrator retired and was replaced with one who pointed out that I had no formal credentials in psychology and that I was below the department average for the number of endoscopy procedures each month. (This was because all those 2nd opinion patients had already had a normal endoscopy (or two) and didn’t need another one.) The administrator also wondered why a GI physician was seeing so many patients who had no GI problems.
The result of that battle was something of a stalemate, but it was clear I needed to document how I was practicing. In 2003 I began taking Friday afternoons off to write my first book, They Can’t Find Anything Wrong! (published in 2007). The book was warmly endorsed by leading U.S. experts in Gastroenterology (including the founder of the GI department at Yale) and Psychiatry (including a president of the American Psychosomatic Society) and by the Yale surgeon and well-known author Bernie Siegel MD. Later, a website named it one of the five best mind-body books ever written.
The book led to numerous invitations to lecture and over 100 TV and Radio broadcast interviews. I began to think I might help many more patients by teaching, speaking, and writing than I could by treating individuals.
Then in April, 2009 I was invited to speak at a conference in Ann Arbor, Michigan that was organized by PPD experts Howard Schubiner MD and John Stracks MD. All fifty of the attendees, from a wide range of healthcare professional backgrounds, had been invited because they had found their way to the principles of diagnosis and treatment of PPD. Nearly all of us had practiced in isolation, not knowing there were others. This conference was our Woodstock or Coachella Festival. We spent two days finishing each other’s sentences.
After the conference a group of us concluded we should create a non-profit corporation to educate the public and our fellow clinicians about PPD. I closed my practice a few months later and began to help with fund-raising. In March, 2011 the Psychophysiologic Disorders Association (PPDA) was incorporated as a 501(c)(3) non-profit with me as the President.
A shot from Pain Brain, a documentary about a massive neuroscience study that challenges the medical industry’s approach to chronic pain.
The PPDA held conferences in 2012, 2013 and 2021 with a fourth planned for October, 2023. We have also supported a highly successful randomized controlled trial of Pain Relief Psychotherapy (the Boulder Back Pain study; Ashar Y et al, JAMA Psychiatry, Sep 2021), and three documentary films (All The Rage, This Might Hurt and Pain Brain). We have also produced an online course and two jargon-free textbooks (Psychophysiologic Disorders: Trauma Informed, Interprofessional Diagnosis and Treatment and A Diagnostic Guide for Psychophysiologic Disorders). After more fund-raising we hired Executive Director Jessica Shahinian (2018 – 2022) followed by Operations Manager Rena Le and Marketing Director Luke Jones in 2023. As part of our new membership program, you will help us reach many more PPD patients and educate many more clinicians.
I have continued as President through the time of this chapter (2023). As with my colleagues on the Board of Directors I take no financial compensation for this work. I also donate to the PPDA all earnings connected in any way to PPD including book royalties, speaking fees, faculty salaries, consulting fees etc. I continue to lecture throughout North America and Europe, do broadcast and podcast interviews, and have been teaching 1-3 credit courses in two graduate schools and individual classes at Pacific University’s Physician Assistant program and the medical school and Internal Medicine residency program at Oregon Health & Science University.
With a rapidly expanding number of expert PPD clinicians, I am looking forward to much more widespread adoption of the principles of diagnosis of PPD and treatment with Pain Relief Psychology in the years to come.
Chapter 5 Videos
PPDA President and Co-Founder David Clarke MD discusses:
1. His expertise in Mindbody Medicine
2. What are Psychophysiologic Disorders (PPD)?
3. Addresses the Skepticism about PPD
4. About the PPDA
5. Why you should support the PPDA.
