“People really just want to be seen and heard. They want people to know what challenges they’ve made it through and overcome and how they’ve gotten to where they are. When you start asking about those things, and have those deep, meaningful conversations, it can really enrich that patient provider relationship.” – Dr. Rachel Gilgoff

Rachel Gilgoff, MD, is a child abuse pediatrician and serves as a member of the Pathways to Resilience Advisory Committee. She has been a clinical advisor to the California ACEs Aware initiative since 2020. Dr. Gilgoff has worked at the UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital & Research Center and helped develop and implement the Pediatric ACEs and Related Life Events (PEARLS) study as a co-investigator with the Bay Area Research Consortium. Her work now focuses on prevention efforts and program development and aims to incorporate trauma interventions into routine pediatric clinical practice.

In this video, Dr. Gilgoff explains how knowledge of a patient’s ACEs can help physicians better understand underlying causes of health conditions, improve patient-provider relationships, and build upon patient strengths to promote healing. Dr. Gilgoff also highlights different strategies to mitigate stress and shares her vision for how Pathways to Resilience can foster cross-sector partnerships to “help people live long, healthy, and meaningful lives.”

Stay tuned for additional videos featuring Dr. Gilgoff to learn more about how toxic stress impacts the body and the mind and how health care providers and families can use evidence-based “stress busters” to treat toxic stress and improve health.