Stress In The Body: Trauma-Informed Medicine & Why Dysregulation Should Be Included In Assessments

Why should medicine consider trauma as a diagnosis of inclusion and not just when nothing else is found wrong?

The failure to recognize and treat the stored trauma that drives many patients’ health challenges has profound and far-reaching consequences. It perpetuates a cycle of ineffective care. It worsens patient outcomes and undermines the overall effectiveness of the healthcare system. As a medical physician and also one who has been this type of patient, this episode and the Trauma-Informed Medicine Project coming out of this was really important to me.

One of the key problems is that trauma manifests in diverse ways across multiple bodily systems, making it difficult to identify as the common thread. Patients may present with a range of symptoms such as migraines, chronic pain, digestive issues, sleep problems, and mood disorders.

Rather than recognizing these as interconnected signs of nervous system dysregulation stemming from trauma, the medical system often compartmentalizes the symptoms, referring patients to various specialists to treat each one in isolation. This leads to a “medical merry-go-round” where patients bounce from one provider to the next, undergoing test after test, without ever getting to the root of their issues.

There is one more impact that makes this episode important. The absence of trauma-informed medicine causes patients’ symptoms to be minimized or dismissed. Sometimes patients are subjected to invasive medical procedures, actually breaking their trust in the system and their providers.

Addressing this and how to change it is the motivation for this episode.

Which is why I bring in Dr. Jorina Elbers, a board certified physician in neurology with a masters in epidemiology and former assistant professor and pediatric neurologist at Stanford University. She has authored over 25 research articles and book chapters, and really focuses on what’s going on in the nervous system in regard to stress and trauma and how to recognize it. She is currently the director of the Trauma Recovery Project at the Heart Math Institute and runs her own trauma sensitive neurology clinic.

In this episode, you will hear Dr. Elbers’ journey of how she discovered the critical link between trauma, stress, and neurological disorders. You will hear how she started asking better questions of her patients, uncovering stories of family trauma from her patients and just what to do especially when labs and tests show nothing wrong.