What the Eyes Don't See: A Story of Crisis, Resistance, and Hope in an American City (One World Essentials)

by Mona Hanna-Attisha

The other new concept is our realization that a child’s neuro-endocrine-genetic physiology can be altered. Prolonged, extreme, and repetitive stress or trauma—due to exposure to an ACE, including poverty, racism, violence—chronically activates stress hormones and reduces neural connections in the brain, just at the time in a child’s development when she should be growing new ones.

This new understanding of the health consequences of adverse experiences has changed how we practice medicine by broadening our field of vision—forcing us to see a child’s total environment as medical.

We studied activism by becoming activists—going beyond changes in individual behavior to explore how policy and politics helped or hurt our causes.

“But you know, what the priest said was true. Haji did believe in people more than anything else. And they believed in him. He was a humanist, someone who believes that people can make the world better. Haji respected everyone’s beliefs and never spoke against any religion. But he didn’t believe that God wanted calamity for anyone—or that anyone deserved to be abandoned to fate or bad luck. He taught me to treat everybody well, because we are all equal, no matter what we look like, what we believe in, or how much money we have. To always do the right thing, even if it’s hard. Even if people tell you it’s impossible. And maybe that’s even better than going to church.”

Being a pediatrician—perhaps more than any other kind of doctor—means being an advocate for your patient. It means using your voice to speak up for kids. We are charged with the duty of keeping these kids healthy.