24 NEWSWEEK.COM MARCH 06, 2020
In the mid-2000s,
Dr. Nadine Burke Harris opened a children’s medical clinic in the
Bayview section of San Francisco, one of the city’s poorest neigh-
borhoods. She quickly began to suspect something was making
many of her young patients sick.
She noticed the first clues in the unusually large population of
kids referred to her clinic for symptoms associated with attention
deficit hyperactivity disorder—an inability to focus, impulsivity,
extreme restlessness. Burke Harris was struck not just by the sheer
number of ADHD referrals, but also by how many of the patients
had additional health problems. One child arrived in her clinic
with eczema and asthma and was in the 50th percentile of height
for a 4-year-old. He was 7. There were kindergarteners with hair
falling out, two children with extremely rare cases of autoimmune
hepatitis, middle-school kids stricken with depression and an epi-
demic number of kids with behavioral problems and asthma.
Burke Harris noticed something else unusual about these chil-
dren. Whenever she asked their parents or caregivers to tell her
about conditions at home, she almost invariably uncovered a ma-
jor life disruption or trauma. One child had been sexually abused
by a tenant, she recalls. Another had witnessed an attempted
murder. Many children came from homes struggling with the
incarceration or death of a parent, or reported acrimonious di-
vorces. Some caregivers denied there were any problems at all,
but had arrived at the appointment high on drugs.
Although none of her mentors at medical school back in the
early 2000s had suggested that stress could cause seemingly un-
related physical illnesses, what she was seeing in the clinic was
so consistent—and would eventually so alarm her—it sent her
scrambling for answers.
“If I were a doctor, and I was seeing incredibly high rates of
autism, I’d be doing research on autism,” she says. “Or if I saw
incredibly high rates of certain types of cancer, I’d be doing that
research. What I was seeing was incredibly, incredibly high rates
of kids who were experiencing adversity and then having really
significant health outcomes, whether it was difficulty learning,
or asthma, or weird autoimmune diseases. I was seeing that the
rates were highest in my kids who were experiencing adversity.
And that drove me to the latest scientific literature.”
What Burke Harris found there would eventually thrust her to FROM TOP: ANDREI PUNGOVSCHIʔAFPʔGETTY; PARAS GRIFFINʔGETTY