Synopsis

Specializing in naturopathic medicine, Dr. Clark has a special interest in helping adults with chronic conditions maximize their healthly potential including those suffering from:

• autoimmune disease
• mercury toxicity and immune sensitivity
• type II diabetes
• irritable bowel syndrome
• other digestive problems
• chronic fatigue syndrome
• fibromyalgia
• other chronic illnesses
• aging gracefully with good health

Dr. Clark's naturopathic treatment offerings include:

• diet and lifestyle counseling
• clinical nutrition
• IV therapy
• safety first mercury detoxification
• other detoxification protocols
• botanical medicines
• medically supervised weight loss `

Dear Prospective Patient,

My name is Jeff Clark, ND. I'm a physician licensed to practice medicine in the State of Oregon. Before becoming a physician I have been a son, brother, husband and father. I come from what today is considered a large family, and like most of my siblings am demographically a baby boomer. I've always been connected to the people around me, my extended family, friends and neighbors. Over my 50 years of life I have been a paperboy, a dishwasher, a waiter, a cook, an auto mechanic, a computer design engineer and high tech manager in a fortune 500 company, a small business owner, a small scale cattle rancher, and a physician.

Being a physician is the zenith of my professional life. It is in this role that I am best able to use my ability to understand and solve complex problems for the most direct benefit of others. In addition to involvement in my profession I enjoy being around the happy people and pets I love, the outdoors, hiking, fishing, vegetable gardening, raising beef cattle and riding my bicycle to work as often as possible. Below is an essay about how this former engineer with 5 patents puts traditional natural medicine into context with what is today conventional pharmaceutical based medicine.

Jeff Clark, ND

There are some misconceptions about my specialty of medicine and I've had more than one friendly person look at me funny and wonder out loud how a successful engineer with products and patents to his credit could go into natural medicine. The underlying assumption being that somehow using botanicals/herbs and nutrients to treat disease is less scientific than using pharmaceutical drugs with all of their FDA clinical testing data. There is no denying that better quality information is always better for making decisions. But as I've learned in my high tech career, perfect information is almost never available when you need it most, and often not unaffordable when you can wait. With human health, uncertainties are always present even when the best possible information is available. Even more important than demanding a maximum quality of information is taking pause to understand the information that you do have.

Pharmaceuticals in emergency medicines are often the best we have come up with for stabilizing a person in an immediate life and death situation. Pharmaceuticals for chronic conditions definitely have their place, but they seldom produce cures, usually form dependency, and often create serious side effects. Herbal medicines are not without their cautions, but I typically find they are much safer, subtler, and more harmonious with the body's own attempts to recover health. In my view, correctly prescribed herbs and supplements more often assist the body's own processes while pharmaceuticals tend to completely take them over and supplant them. There is a time and place for every treatment and as a physician I am ever diligent to differentiate. As a licensed naturopathic physician I have pharmaceutical prescription rights in the state of Oregon, so in effect I do it all. I like to think of my profession as "alternatives" medicine, offering the fullest set of choices including what is currently available conventionally through me or through a referral to an MD specialist.

Medicine is practiced one patient at a time and this is probably the most important piece of information that needs to be widely understood by patients and demanded from physicians. Each one of us at any moment is the result of our unique combination of 30,000+ genes, our birth mother's health during her pregnancy with us, our environment and habits throughout our lives including what we had for breakfast this morning. Until you try a treatment, no one knows for certain how it will work for you. You might be average and on target or you might be in the tail of the population distribution that shouldn't take the drug. Until you try it, no amount of FDA testing will answer that question. After all the huffing and puffing about scientifically gathered data is done, medicine is and always should be practiced one carefully monitored patient anecdote at a time.

Most of the disparaging attitudes toward herbal and nutritional medicine are regarding the basis upon which we choose to give it a try. There is very little that is FDA approved as a drug that is purely natural, even though at least 60% of prescription drugs are derived from or inspired by naturally occurring medicines. FDA approval is very expensive, 100's of millions of dollars per drug, herb or supplement. You can't patent most natural herbs and nutrients, so they can't be sold exclusively for the extremely high prices required to pay for that FDA approval. After meeting the FDA requirmenrs, the investors also demand a profit. This is defintely a catch-22. We as a people are left with the choice of only allowing as medicines man-made drugs that can be patented, afford FDA approval, and sold for extremely high prices...Or accept other information sources as valid for choosing to try one person at a time from the many unpatentable natural medicines that have grown up in the world alongside the human species, are affordable, and frequently growing in our own gardens.

Traditional herbal medicines have a very long history of use. The Ayurvedic and Chinese traditions from the far east go back thousands of years. The western herbal tradition stretches to before Hippocrates and after him Galen of the 2nd century AD, both considered fathers of western medicine. European Christian monks kept knowledge of western herbal medicine alive through the chaos of medieval times a thousand years ago. Herbal medicine in Europe was developed further during the Renaissance and can still be found in European apothecaries sitting next to modern pharmaceutical drugs. These information sources along with ethnobotany -- contemporary studies of what indigenous peoples from the Americas and around the world have traditionally used for medicine, all give us a strong basis for trying non-patent, traditional herbal medicines in the treatment of diseases and ailments. Better quality contemporary information is always a boon, and comes now from basic scientific research and from using the medicines in practice. FDA drug approval under the way things are currently ruled and administered is never going to find a source of financing for these natural substances unless there is also a possibility for a patent. To be patentable, natuure's handiwork must always first acquire a non-natural, man made quality.

Yet there is already enough information for a person trained in the botanical traditions to have proper indications and to work comfortably and safely with plant medicines. Its an oddity of America that we have thrown out our oldest, most traditional, least expensive medicine sources in favor of the most expensive, most dangerous forms of man-made medicine that truly need FDA scrutiny and approval. Herbal medicine has always worked, been extremely safe used under trained supervision, and remains so today. While FDA drug status is financially out of reach for most herbal medicines, the modern scientific basis for their use continues to grow through the efforts of organizations such as the American Society of Pharmacognosy.

Nutritional supplements are the direct product of science. They are the practical application of what has been learned in contemporary times from the efforts of basic biological science that has described the structure and function of most nutrients and human enzymes and hormones at the biochemical level. These are the nutrients and other compounds that our bodies normally utilize to function properly and maintain good health. These too generally cannot be patented and therefore afford FDA drug testing and status. Yet food supplements can be applied to health conditions with powerful logic stemming from what we do know scientifically about the ingredient roles in normal body structure and function. With founders including Nobel laureate Linus Pauling, the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine continues to document advances in the science of nutritional medicine. Adjacent to the orthomolecular people there is another group of holistic physicians that practice treatment of many diseases with nutrients, calling their very scientific school of thought "functional medicine". The Institute of Functional Medicine being a leading organization. There is a further move by forward leaning medical educational institutions to include non-drug status herbs and nutrients in conventional practice under the heading of "integrative medicine" Consortium of Academic Health Centers for Integrative Medicine.

The good physician is always going to listen to and observe their patient to decide if a medicine is helping, hindering or hurting. The excellent physician is going to always be seeking a way to help the patient recover true health and not just manage or mask the symptoms of their ailment. There is much more capacity to recover, cure and heal than conventional medicine sometimes wants to allow. It is always the person themselves that does the healing, never the drug, herb nor nutrient, and certainly not the physician. Though I believe all can be helpful, and very important to the process!