Meet Dr. Clark Trask, MD
Dr. Clark Trask was raised on St. Helena Island when Beaufort County was still very much a farming community. He remembers tomato fights with his siblings before plastic, string and stakes were part of the field. He laughs that his older brother would break the rules by throwing “greens.”
He attended Episcopal High School in Alexandria, Virginia in 1982 and graduated in 1985. He took a Post-Grad year in France before attending Vanderbilt University where he graduated in 1990. After college, he worked on Kodiak Island, Alaska for the summer, then moved to Japan to teach English for a year. Japan was followed by a beard growing sojourn through Southeast Asia, India and Nepal. It was in Nepal that he had his first inklings of becoming a doctor after a member of his climbing party died of altitude sickness and he felt a sense of helplessness.
He returned to Beaufort in 1992 and completed an EMT course that led to a year of pre-med courses at the College of Charleston. He entered the Medical University of South Carolina in 1995 and graduated in 1999. Interested in the breadth of knowledge required to be a family physician and the connection it affords with individual patients, he completed his residency in Asheville, North Carolina with MAHEC and Mission Hospital in 2002.
Married and starting a family, he and his wife, Evy, and their one year old daughter, moved to New Zealand in 2003 to live and work for the year. They returned to Beaufort in 2004 and Dr. Trask joined Dr. John Gray and Dr. Lucius Laffitte in their medical practice.
Professionally, he has developed a strong interest in nutrition and lifestyle medicine which led to continued medical education and board certification in Bariatric Medicine in 2007 in addition to his certification by the American Board of Family Medicine. He has worked in several different models of medicine, from traditional private practice to the employed physician model with Beaufort Memorial Hospital. He has had medical stents in Alaska, Nepal, New Zealand, Appalachia and the Lowcountry.
His interests outside of medicine are many and include spending time with his family on the river or hiking in the mountains of North Carolina. He enjoys woodworking and cutting the grass with his son while exercise pursuits include playing tennis, sea kayaking, and pull-ups. Gustatory interests span the globe and culinary skills include Sushi, Hibachi, a melange of pan-Asian dishes, with deep frying reserved for soft shell crabs and shrimp.