Rachel Gilgoff, MD

More from Rachel Gilgoff, MD

Engaging Experts: Seven Strategies for Healing

“There are a lot of ways to really help people heal and help people think about getting to the root causes of the toxic stress response. The stress busters are seven ways that have been shown by science to improve neurologic, endocrine, and immune function.”

Engaging Experts: The Stress Response

“The stress response system can be life saving for children who experience adversity and can really protect them in the moment. What happens though, to their developing brain, if that stress response system is activated over and over and over again? People then are at risk for all of these health conditions in the long-term.”

Engaging Experts: All About ACEs

“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.”

Pediatrician & Integrative Medicine Specialist

As a board-certified general pediatrician, child abuse pediatrician, and integrative medicine specialist, Dr. Gilgoff brings a multidisciplinary approach to ACEs, toxic stress, healing, and well-being. Over the course of her career, she has been the Medical Director of the Clinical Innovations and Research Team within Center for Youth Wellness, and co-founder of the National Committee on Asthma and Toxic Stress. She co-developed the Resiliency Clinic, a group clinic intervention model to treat toxic stress, and co-created “VITAL: Relational Health,” a free, on-line learning series on the science and practice of relational health. More recently, she co-created “Stress Busters: Clinical Strategies for Preventing and Mitigating Toxic Stress,” a free, on-line course to help health care professionals develop their clinical response to childhood adversity and toxic stress through a comprehensive exploration of seven evidence-based, stress management strategies, called stress busters.

She is currently an advisor with the California ACEs Aware Initiative, clinician at the StressWell, GetzWell Pediatric clinic in San Francisco, and an Adjunct Clinical Associate Professor at Stanford University School of Medicine. She is also the co-PI on “Systems-based, Multidisciplinary Assessment of Adversity and Toxic Stress for Individualized Care (The SYSTEMAATIC Project),” an ACEs and Precision Medicine research project through the California Initiative to Advance Precision Medicine (CIAPM). Dr. Gilgoff is dedicated to addressing health issues resulting from child abuse and toxic stress, creating systems of care that incorporate the science of stress biology and wellness, and collaborating across sectors to develop multidisciplinary, integrative, human-centered, and holistic approaches to healing.