For years, pediatrician Dr. Nadine Burke Harris treated children’s chronic conditions the way she was taught in medical school: Prescribing medication to ease symptoms. But it was a conversation with a 10-year-old patient’s mother that got her thinking differently.

“The mother said to me, and I’ll never forget this, ‘I noticed my daughter’s asthma acts up every time her dad punches a hole in the wall,’” Dr. Burke Harris told a crowd of Erikson Institute supporters, alumni, faculty, and staff at a recent President’s Council event. “Hearing those histories, hearing that in patient after patient after patient, I started to connect the dots.”

“Connecting the dots” meant learning to address the underlying issue of many patients’ medical conditions: Adverse childhood experiences — traumatizing events early in life that research has shown can lead to life-altering and life-threatening diseases in adulthood. During her President’s Council talk, Erikson’s first such event of 2018, Dr. Burke Harris discussed the need to treat exposure to adverse childhood experiences and the “toxic stress” they cause as a public health emergency.

[For more on this story, go to https://www.erikson.edu/news/t...ls-erikson-audience/]