The Biases of Western Medicine | Gabor Maté, MD

This transcript of a talk by Dr. Gabor Maté has been published by Sustainable Human. It begins:

“In the realm of child development, I just wish we’d actually look at the evidence. But we don’t.

I worked in family practice for 32 years — 12 of them with hardcore drug addicts, the other 20 in a straightforward family practice. And in those years, I found that the people who got sick and didn’t get sick had certain patterns.

There’s one major source of illness, and I’m talking about any kind of illness, whether that’s so-called mental illness or physical illness. And that’s childhood trauma.

Trauma is what happens inside you as a result of what happens to you. And things can happen inside you for which you don’t need very dramatic events.

Growing scientific evidence demonstrates that social and physical environments that threaten human development, because of scarcity, stress, or instability, can lead to short-term physiologic and psychological adjustments that are necessary for immediate survival and adaptation, but which may come at a significant cost to long-term outcomes in learning, behavior, health and longevity …”

You can read more – and or watch the video from which the transcript comes – from here.