According to: Vice.Com/Anna Maria Barry-Jester, California Healthline
California Has an Innovative Plan to Deal With Childhood Trauma
California's first-ever surgeon general Nadine Burke Harris is spearheading a movement for the state to become a leader in tracing adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs, to the onset of physical and mental illness. By Anna Maria Barry-Jester, California Healthline
Imagine identifying a toxin so potent it could rewire a child’s brain and erode his immune system. A substance that, in high doses, tripled the risk of heart disease and lung cancer and reduced life expectancy by 20 years.
And then realizing that tens of millions of American children had been exposed.
Nadine Burke Harris, California’s newly appointed surgeon general, will tell you this is not a hypothetical scenario. She is a leading voice in a movement trying to transform our understanding of how the traumatic experiencesthat affect so many American children can trigger serious physical and mental illness.
The movement draws on decades of research that has found that children who endure sustained stresses in their day-to-day lives—think sexual abuse, emotional neglect, a mother’s mental illness, a father’s alcoholism—undergo biochemical changes to their brains and bodies that can dramatically increase their risk of developing serious health problems, including heart disease, lung cancer, asthma, and depression.
To read the rest of this article, click here:https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/7xndnx/california-surgeon-general-childhood-trauma
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