Dr. Kennedy’s personal and professional stories are interwoven. She is a Family Medicine Physician, a board member of the Association for the Treatment of Neuroplastic Symptoms, and a member of the Oslo Chronic Fatigue Consortium.

Ten years into her career she was really baffled by the many patient medical problems that she couldn’t help. In medical school she learned that the majority of diagnoses are based on the patient’s history, not on testing or examination. The normal practice was diagnosis by exclusion—do testing to rule causes out and make a diagnosis based on patterns. She frequently saw people with a history of trauma, mental health disorders, and pain, who had seen specialists but were still seeking help for their pain or other symptoms.

That situation is not unusual. Many studies show that 40% of primary care appointments are for symptoms with no medically discernable cause.

For several years she read and took courses, to try to figure out these missing pieces of the challenge to an effective remedy for which there was no apparent cause. A Google search led her to the Mind Body Institute at Harvard which had studied effects of meditation on the nervous system. She incorporated the recommended healthy practices (stress reduction, mindfulness, diet, cognitive behavioral therapy, etc.) into her patient care, but her patients still had undiagnosable symptoms.

Then a physician friend suggested she send patients with chronic pain to Howard Schubiner and “…they come back to me with no pain.” That led her to seek training for treatment of neuroplastic symptoms from Dr. Clarke in Portland. Her employer, Kaiser’s Integrative Clinic, gave her a half-day weekly to get started treating neuroplastic symptoms. She was learning how to talk to patients about the way pain is a danger signal meant to protect people from structural bodily injury. Patients reported that understanding those concepts was helpful for them and their positive responses led to a flood of other patients into her clinic, desperate for treatment of their pain.

Being a shy person who didn’t like to make waves, she tried to inform other doctors and clinic leaders about the brain’s protective mechanisms and pain treatment. Their response was not supportive, and she wondered if patients and colleagues thought she was crazy, but she couldn’t go backwards because she knew that treatment of pain diagnosed as neuroplastic was credible.

Subsequently, she developed knee pain similar to an earlier injury but realized it as an old neuroplastic pain pathway. That pain episode only lasted one day. But several months later when she was entertaining the family of an old friend, the emotional stress led to pain in that same knee, which worsened and spread to her ankles and hips. A steroid injection reduced the pain, but the pain came back after several weeks.

Eventually, following the neuroplastic symptom treatment she had learned, she began to do the deep emotional work, learning to stand up for myself and express her anger and emotions in productive ways rather than suppressing them. Although she was initially dubious about somatic tracking and expressive writing, she learned they were very helpful tools in resolving her pain symptoms.
She began to use these tools with her patients—teaching them to feel and express their emotions, to “re-write” childhood memories from the perspective of an adult rational brain. Eventually she started her own clinic, focused on patients with neuroplastic symptoms.