As Dr. Nadine Burke Harris treated child after child, something told her she wasn’t getting the full picture.
Most of her young patients at the Bayview Child Health Center were from the surrounding, predominantly African American neighborhood in southeastern San Francisco. Their home lives were largely plagued by poverty, domestic abuse and chaos, and later in life, many of them developed chronic illnesses. But were the two related?
About seven years ago, Burke Harris read a study that finally connected the dots. Childhood exposure to trauma was strongly and scientifically linked to all kinds of ailments and risky behaviors: heart disease, hepatitis, autoimmune disease, cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, depression and suicide.
[For more of this story, written by Stephanie Lee, go to http://www.sfgate.com/visionar...heart-of-6082828.php]
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