William Drucker, M.D.
I graduated from Cornell University in 1964 and then Albert Einstein College of Medicine in 1968 with an MD degree. Ever since my psychiatric residency in the mid 1970's, with board certification in 1977 or '78, I believe I have had a particular 'feel' for psychiatry which I think has helped me discover new aspects of akathisia -- its high frequency, extensiveness, and profoundly negative impact it has on our treatment results which we can enormously improve upon -- as I found with my patients -- if the treating physicians were aware of the difficulties it can cause and how to deal with them. I believe akathisia's commonality and major effects have been very poorly recognized despite our being aware of it for some 60+ years ever since the psychopharmacologic era began in the 1950's with chlorpromazine and lithium.
After my retirement in 2015, I wrote up my discoveries, thinking it would not be difficult to attract interested clinical investigators who would want to explore my findings to determine whether they were 'true' or not. If they were, it would likely greatly improve the mediocre treatment results we presently can now expect from our psychotropic medicines. But gaining that interest has proven to be more difficult than I had expected, so I have now turned to the internet in the hope this would help bring my discoveries to light.
For 31 years, until my retirement, I worked as a line psychiatrist in a clinic run by L.A. County located in the skid row area of Los Angeles and aimed primarily at treating the homeless mentally ill there. In 1988, I read two articles on the favorable use of clonidine for akathisia which began my journey of discovery of, and passion for, the amazing and profoundly negative impact it has on treatment success and medication results which I have detailed in my attached 'monograph' and then much shorter 'speech'. On my way to this much greater understanding, I believe I also discovered many physical symptoms of what I came to call 'expanded' akathisia which have not been recognized as being part of its syndrome, yet which cause many difficult problems for the patients and their doctors who would try to help them but without a correct idea of just what to do.
I am looking for a clinical psychiatric investigator or investigators who are interested in what I have to say and would like to pursue with me, as colleagues, a much more scientific study or studies than I could pursue for determining and treating akathisia and the positive results we can then achieve using these discoveries to establish the correctness or incorrectness of what I have learned. My former patients surely experienced the benefits of my findings, giving me a much better treatment success rate than we can now usually expect, so I feel a great need to set forth what I found before it is too late as I am now 80 years old.
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William Drucker, MD