Dr. Gabor Maté on Why Medicine Misses the Roots of Chronic Illness

When Erik asked what the daily reality of this work looks like, and how the public has taken to the ideas, Dr. Maté started with the numbers. His books have sold at least half a million copies in North America, and they've appeared in 20 languages. The appetite for the material is clearly there. He spends much of his life traveling to speak. The next day he was flying to Nashville to talk about addiction, then heading back to Vancouver, where that Friday he'd give a full day of talks on childhood development, early stress, trauma, and related subjects.

Audiences respond warmly. People nod along, he said, because the ideas click with something they already carry. They like hearing the science, but more than that, the science matches their own lives. That's one half of the picture.

The reception inside medicine is a separate story. He lectures medical students, something he'd done the previous week at the University of British Columbia, and that single talk is the one time in four years those students will hear any of this. Most future doctors never study trauma. They aren't taught how the brain develops in response to its surroundings, or normal human psychology, or developmental psychology, or neuroscience. Nearly everything he was describing to Erik sits outside the standard medical curriculum.

So physicians finish their training knowing a great deal about diseases while remaining largely unaware of where those diseases come from. Treatment then narrows down to adjusting a patient's biology in one way or another. That can genuinely help, he allowed. But it leaves chronic illness without any real path to healing, because the field doesn't recognize that chronic illness is often a sign of stress stretching back through childhood and across a lifetime. The response targets the effects and skips the causes.

Take rheumatoid arthritis, which commonly grows out of years of accumulated stress. Consider how it gets treated: with cortisol. Cortisol happens to be a stress hormone. So the medicine for these conditions is itself a stress hormone, and still nobody connects the stress to the disease.