“People Who Cannot Find Time For Recreation Are Obliged Sooner Or Later To Find Time For Illness. – John Wanamaker.”
admin - Sat, 12/18/2021 - 09:32
Dr. David Clark, gastroenterologist and body mind therapy expert
I first learned about the ability of the mind to create physical symptoms in the body in 1983 with a patient who was severely ill, had been for two years, had completely baffled two different universities, and I stumbled on the fact that she was dealing with a severe stress in her life. it dated back to when she was a child, and I didn't know what to do with that information.
cure the patient with less than three months
My medical training didn't really address that issue, but I knew of a psychiatrist at UCLA where I was in training at that time who had a practice in this area, and I got the patient to see her. her name was Harriet Kaplan. she was able to cure the patient with less than three months of weekly counseling sessions. And I just thought that was remarkable.
about pain:
we all know pain. For example, when we hit our thumb with a hammer, the pain is generated by the damage to your thumb. But there's another kind of pain which can be generated in the brain. And the most classic example of that is Phantom limb pain, where a person feels pain at the site of a limb that has been amputated, and that pain clearly is not coming from the limb because it's no longer there.
pain is being generated inside the brain
And it turns out the brain can do that quite commonly and can create symptoms, pain or otherwise anywhere in the body. So the reason that it does that is that there are changes in the neuroanatomy. There are real physiologic underpinnings to this. The circuits in the brain that process these signals are different, and the reason they're different is because of one or more types of stress that the person is suffering from. It can be childhood stress. It can be stress in your life. At the moment. It can be a mental health condition like depression, anxiety, or post trauma. And if we can identify what that source of stress is, and there may be more than one that a person is suffering from, then we can treat it.
adverse childhood leads to chronic pain
If the person, for example, has been abused as a child, we can address the long term impact of that in a way that benefits the person not only in their daily functioning and in their view of themselves, but it also alleviates the stress that's creating the symptoms
about diseases:
there are many people who have ulcerative colitis or Crohn's disease who also have irritable bowel syndrome at the same time. And in some of those patients, when they have a flare up of their symptoms, it's because of irritable bowel syndrome and not because of the ulcerative colitis or Crohn's disease.
lowering the impact of the irritable bowel syndrome
we can help those patients with these mind body methods by lowering the impact of the irritable bowel syndrome. I always remember one patient who had a well documented flare up of his ulcerative colitis. The colonoscopy showed it very clearly. He was treated as an outpatient and did not improve. He was put in the hospital. He was treated very aggressively in the hospital with medication still did not improve, and he was scheduled for surgery to have his large intestine surgically removed, which is the final stage of treatment for ulcerative colitis. That does not get better. But the diarrhea he was having was unusual. It wasn't following the pattern that we commonly or typically see with all sorts of colitis, and he was being cared for by another doctor, and the other doctor was suspicious about this. He thought, this is a little odd. Before we send him off to surgery, we should do another colonoscopy and just find out what's going on at the moment.
The colon looked perfectly fine
he did, and the colonoscopy was normal. The colon looked perfectly fine at that point because he had in fact, responded to all of the treatment he'd been receiving over the previous several months in terms of the inflammation of his colon, which is what ulcerative colitis is. But his symptoms hadn't changed much. He was still having all the symptoms and that was because he had irritable bowel syndrome at the same time. And the irritable bowel syndrome was from stress. And by diagnosing, the source of stress, which in his case was sexual abuse as a boy was able to get them connected with a psychotherapist who was skilled in that area, and that's when he finally got better.
