DISCLAIMER: I do not speak for David Wise or represent him, and I am not connected in any way to him or his clinic, and likewise David Wise does not speak for me. This is a preliminary message to the pelvic pain community. I suppose in every large group of people you will always get a few really bad eggs. Well, we have one. We know his real identity, but we'll simply refer to him here as "Kramer". He's going from site to site on the internet, using multiple accounts and identities, and proxy servers, attacking this site, me personally, and David Wise. A few years ago his target was the PNE sites, and he was banned repeatedly by their forums, after harassing their members by email. Now it's our turn. He's posted numerous anonymous messages on the internet, and multiple reviews at Amazon under different names, attacking and libelling this site, me, and everything to do with David Wise, his clinics, and his books ... and he even takes a few shots at trigger point therapy!
My opinion of this troubled man is that he is really quite disturbed. I urge him to seek professional help. He's been emailing me with threats since 2005, and he is still obsessed and angry about everyone and everything, but since he was banned from this site a few years ago (under another account, for trangressing the forum rules repeatedly), he's really had a huge grudge against me in particular.
I'll provide more details about him if he starts contacting members by email, as he did with the PNE crowd. Both I and Dr Wise have sought legal advice on this issue, and we are in contact with the owners of the other forums that were used to post the libel.
Kramer is easy to spot because he always uses the same arguments. His arguments are a mixture of half-truth, distortions and lies. I'll summarise them here so you can recognize them when you see them:
CLAIM: David Wise is not a MD, only a PhD in Sociology, and therefore should not be treating peopleDavid Wise is a Clinical Psychologist, so of course he has no medical degree. He has a PhD in Sociology as well as board certification in Clinical Psychology. A person with a medical degree would probably not have been able to think outside the box enough to formulate the W-A protocol. So his lack of a medical degree is a plus. It enabled him to find new answers instead of the same old failed answers of the past. The purely medical approach has
failed utterly for the last 50 years! This is not a medical problem (ie treatable by drugs and surgery), it's a pyschoneuromuscular problem.
Wise's California psychology license number is PSY4050. He's been licensed as a psychologist in California since 1973, approximately 37 years. He gives courses to other psychologists for their continuing education so that they can fulfil their continuing education requirements and renew their licenses. He could never have worked at Stanford and seen patients without being a licensed psychologist. He received a Ph.D. in sociology at the University of California, Berkeley and, like others at the time, he was in graduate school with a Ph.D. in a social science and so fulfilled the very rigorous requirements of the State of California for psychologists, and was eligible to take the boards and become a psychologist, and did so. He has done approximately 20,000 hours of psychotherapy. He is part of an interdisciplinary team (psychologist, physical therapist, urologist) that treats the condition.
CLAIM: chronicprostatitis.com removes posts critical of the Wise-Anderson (W-A) protocolAs for me removing negative comments about the W-A protocol: it's a lie. I have
never deleted a post made by an ex-patient, meant specifically to criticize the W-A protocol. In fact, I don't think I've ever deleted a report by an ex-patient of any doctor, and wouldn't, unless they were frankly libellous. I regard such reports as very valuable. Wise cannot help everyone, and we should expect some disappointed patients. Not many so far!
CLAIM: Kramer describes the W-A protocol as a "simple cure-all solution"The supposedly "simple" solution is actually underpinned by extremely complex medicine, namely the HPA axis and its connection to stress and stress hormones. CPPS patients are known to have low cortisol levels, and this can be caused by stress. Cortisol is involved in muscle tension, muscle contraction and relaxation, predisposing to the formation of trigger points. Some of the substances produced by the adrenal gland also determine an individual's pain perception threshold and can sensitize nerve endings, causing the perception of pain induced by stimuli which are normally non-painful (a phenomenon known as allodynia). So stress, a psychological phenomenon most aptly treated by a psychologist, is a big part of CPPS.
CLAIM: David Wise is supportive if you report steady progress, but "dismissive" if you do not.I have seen absolutely no evidence of this, ever. Nobody has reported this on the forum. In fact, people have said how warm and approachable he is, if anything.
CLAIM: "No research to support" anxiety/MTrP treatmentThere are tons of research supporting the various aspects of the W-A protocol. Just look at our research forum, see all the studies linking stress to disease, linking nerves and nerve cross-talk to pelvic pain syndromes, linking anxiety to CPPS and BPS/IC. What about the recent paper "
Pathophysiology of pelvic floor hypertonic disorders", by gynecologist Charles Butrick - founding member and board director of the
International Pelvic Pain Society, that makes the link between muscular tension and pelvic pain? What about Dimitrakov's and Anderson's work linking low cortisol to pelvic pain? The claim that there is no research to support the W-A protocol merely shows an ignorance of recent science.
Uodate: see the latest research supporting the Wise-Anderson Protocol presented at the 2010
American Urological Association meeting:
Intensive Physiotherapy And Cognitive Behavior Clinic Treatment For Chronic Prostatitis/Chronic Pelvic Pain SyndromeCLAIM: Rodney Anderson has retired from Stanford.Anderson has
Professor Emeritus status at Stanford and is still active in urology, publishing his most recent paper in 2009. Anderson still has an office at Stanford as well.
CLAIM: The protocol is not part of Stanford's Urology departmentIt was never claimed to be part of Stanford's Urology department. This is a straw man argument. When the WAP started, Anderson was part of this Urology department and and Wise worked at Stanford seeing patients referred from the Urology department. That's where the Protocol was developed and that's how got its "Stanford" name. Now that Wise not longer works there, they prefer the name Wise-Anderson Protocol.
CLAIM: No doctor from Stanford has ever offered a testimonial to the bookThe co-author of the HEADACHE IN THE PELVIS is a Professor Emeritus of Urology from Stanford, which makes further endorsement from that University unnecessary and superfluous. Another straw man argument.
CLAIM: The name and location of David Wise's clinic is somehow suspiciousThe implication is because clinic seminars are held in a section of a hotel resort, and not in a hospital setting, it cannot be worthwhile, which is clearly complete nonsense. Doctors and hospitals have been
miserably ineffective at treating pelvic pain syndromes, and still are. Kramer seems to be unhappy because there are no operating rooms and machines with blinking lights (or "machines that go PING!" per Monty Python).
CLAIM: The W-A studies are not "controlled" studies meaning they did not have placebo arms. They are therefore not reliable.It is impossible to have a placebo/sham for intrarectal massage, so a placebo-controlled study is not readily achievable. Does it mean they are therefore not reliable? No. It simply means they were not placebo controlled, which means they are less reliable than a placebo-controlled study. In an ideal world, we'd have a placebo-controlled study, but since that is well-nigh impossible, there is no point in carping about the results we do have. And BTW the results were published in the best peer-reviewed journals in urology, so we can rest assured they are dependable studies.
CLAIM: The book's Amazon reviews are all written by me or David WiseAbsolute rubbish, and what's more we know that many (all?) of the negative reviews are in fact written by Kramer under different guises. Kramer has numerous accounts on other website forums, and the admins there inform me that he uses proxies as well (different ISPs and IPs). This is his
modus operandi. One of the negative reviews, making all the same trumpted-up charges, was written under his real name, "ckramer". The other negative reviews mostly come from people who all have the same profile: joined up within days of each other, made one or two short complimentary reviews of various books, then straight across to Wise's books to make long, viciously critical reviews. Unfortunately, Amazon is open to this sort of abuse.
CLAIM: W-A protocol success stories are fabricationsWe've had plenty of success stories at our forum, posted by people who have verifiable identities via PayPal, so there is no question about their veracity.
CLAIM: Kramer claims he is an ex-patient of Dr WiseHe isn't, take my word for it.
He makes the dumb mistake of posting that he'd just called the Wise clinic to ask for prices, then posted the next day claiming that he is an ex-patient himself, then posted the following day to say he'd spoken to an ex-patient who'd told him this and that, all of which he'd have known if he'd attended himself. He's not very bright.
CLAIM: What are trigger points anyway? They don't even exist. And if they do exist, pressure is not the way to treat them. And why don't many doctors know about or believe they exist? Why don't they get trained in TrP treatment? It's not convincing and must be a scam.It's not part of a doctor's standard training because it is seen as physiotherapy (physical therapy), another field. Today, much treatment of trigger points and their pain complexes are handled by myofascial trigger point therapists, massage therapists, physical therapists, osteopaths, occupational therapists, myotherapists, Certified Athletic Trainers, some naturopaths, chiropractors, dentists and acupuncturists, and other hands-on somatic practitioners who have had experience or training in the field of neuromuscular therapy (NMT). Among physicians, typically only physiatrists (physicians specializing in physical medicine and rehabilitation) are well versed in trigger point diagnosis and therapy.
Trigger points are relatively new in medicine. Doctors are extremely conservative. I have medical textbooks, published recently, that lack all sorts of modern discoveries and research. An example is CFS, which was, until recently, viewed as nonsense by the majority of doctors. Now it's mainstream medicine. Go figure. It took many years for the medical profession to accept that most gastric ulcers are caused by bacteria. If you set as your benchmark a wide acceptance by the conservative medical profession, you'll wait another 50 years. Most people have found that physical therapists know things, and can do things, that doctors do not know, and cannot do. Why is that? Even though these things can make enormous differences to our comfort and ease great pain, doctors are not able to do them and do not know about them. It's like that with myofascial trigger points (MTrPs) at this stage.
As for whether they exist or not and how best to treat them, I refer you to the recent research in this regard.
CLAIM: Webslave is in cahoots with Dr Wise, in fact, he's probably Dr Wise in disguise!I have no connection to the Wise-Anderson clinic. I have never been there, and never met David Wise. We have spoken on the phone a handful of times, and exchanged emails. I get a small payment for hosting his
schedule of clinics on the site. Period. Oh, and I think he's a great bloke.
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That's most of the arguments he presents, but there are many more, including complaints about the cost of Wise's clinic, etc. As someone else commented, his list of complaints reads like the
Unabomber's Manifesto.
I've finally posted this message because it's clear, after 5 years, that this angry, embittered individual is not going to go away, and we have to deal with the problem he presents. If he contacts you, or you see one of his messages, you are now prepared.
