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Patients would carry soda into Dr. Gerard Clancy’s office, with cigarettes tucked away for after therapy. Often victims of abuse or violent crime, they would seek soothing but risky behaviors to cope. Overweight. Chronic pain. Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Type II diabetes. His former patients will die younger than they should, he said. Clancy conducted therapy sessions until he became president of the University of Tulsa in 2016. At his psychiatry clinic, he saw firsthand how a...

I ran across this message on www.acesconnection.com and not only did it catch my attention, but it also made me want to dig deeper. Could it be true that nurses have a higher ACEs score than other healthcare professionals? It seemed true in this small survey, but was this a representation of a trend? If it was, the implications in nursing practice could be tremendous and concerning. What I found was that there is a grand canyon gap in research. The minimal studies that do exist confirm that...

The updated parent handouts are now available in Spanish as well as English and Dari. Here's the blog post with links to all three versions of each flyer. All versions of the Understanding ACEs and Parenting to Prevent & Heal ACEs parent handouts can be downloaded, distributed, and used freely. Both flyers were made with generous support from Family Hui, a Program of Lead for Tomorrow, who is responsible for making the Spanish and Dari translations available. These are updates of the...

The racist photo in the medical school yearbook page of Gov. Ralph Northam of Virginia has probably caused many physicians to re-examine their past. We hope we are better today, but the research is not as encouraging as you might think: There is still a long way to go in how the medical field treats minority patients, especially African-Americans. A systematic review published in Academic Emergency Medicine gathered all the research on physicians that measured implicit bias with the Implicit...

In looking at the impact of childhood trauma, you can’t get much clearer than this: In 2017, ACEs among Tennessee adults led to an estimated $5.2 billion in direct medical costs and lost productivity from employees missing work. That’s just one year, according to the new report, “ The Economic Cost of ACEs in Tennessee ," released on Feb. 1, 2019 by The Sycamore Institute in Nashville, Tenn. And to provide some perspective, $5.2 billion is one-seventh of the state’s annual budget . This $5.2...