NPR's Laura Starecheski, in "Can Family Secrets Make You Sick?," describes the medical science which explains how adverse childhood experiences lead to chronic adult illnesses, including heart disease and cancer. Her excellent report was the first of two accounts of adverse childhood experiences (ACE) and the way that the medical profession has failed to grapple with the long term effects of sexual, physical and emotional abuse; child neglect; the loss of a parent due to death, divorce or incarceration; mental illness in a parent; and drug or alcohol abuse by a parent.
Dr. Vincent Felliti argues that inventorying traumatic childhood experiences is one of "the biggest opportunities to prevent disease -- and save billions in health care costs." Sadly, "It's an opportunity ... that American medicine and the health care industry still seem to be missing."
On the other hand, the NPR series gives us hope. Fifteen years after Felitti and Dr. Rob Anda showed why childhood trauma contributes to "pretty much every one of the major public health problems," some scientists "are trying to connect the dots -- to get a clearer picture of what exactly adverse childhood experiences do to the body."
MacArthur Fellow Jeff Brenner, whose work is on treating the most complicated, expensive patients in Camden, N.J., predicts "I can't imagine, 10 or 15 years from now, a health care system that doesn't routinely use the ACE scores."
[For more of this story, written by John Thompson, go to http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...oring_b_6807746.html]
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