About My Blog

My name is Veronique Mead (pronounced Vair-uh-neek’ Meed). I write as a doctor, a person living with chronic illness for 20 years and gradually improving, and as a trauma specialist.

This is a research and personal blog. It offers new tools and insights for people like me who are living with chronic illness – when you’ve experienced trauma and when (also like me) you have not. It’s also important information for other health care professionals, caregivers, friends and family.

In this video I describe some of the perspectives I write from on my blog.

What I Never Learned as a Doctor

This blog is about the research I’ve discovered from all around the world.

 Some of these studies have made it to the New York Times, the Huffington Post and other every-day news outlets. Some were in Nature and Science. Others exist on websites such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Most of it has yet to reach our medical schools, hospitals, clinics or health care professionals.

I’ve tested the research findings with my own debilitating chronic illness of 20 years. I share how these perspectives can help you make sense of symptoms , flares and triggers. And begin to heal.

It’s Not in Your Head

I write because those of us with chronic illness need the data that explains what we know from experience – which is that our chronic illnesses and symptoms are real. And not in our heads.

I write about trauma because it’s where the research took me. Not because chronic illness is psychological, but because the science shows that adverse life events – subtle, unrecognized as well as overt – affects your body, your cells, your brain. And your genes.

Understanding Symptoms & Patterns

The science offers you new tools.

Tools to better understand your symptoms. To recognize patterns in your symptoms.

To explore why symptoms started when they did, why flares seem to come out of the blue or with seemingly tiny triggers, why seemingly non stressful events can affect symptoms, why treatments sometimes help for a while and then stop being effective, and why they sometimes make things worse.

Stop the Blame: It’s Not Your Fault

Having a chronic illness is not something you choose. And it’s not your fault.

Understanding the intelligence that drives symptoms and the role of trauma – including subtle, unrecognized events that elicit perceptions of threat – takes the shame, blame and self-hatred off the table.

Addressing the Limitations of Medical Perspectives

Our understanding of trauma in medicine and in our culture is one-dimensional.

And incorrect.

We have over a 100 years of published research showing that the effects of trauma are real. That trauma can occur even with subtle, glossed-over, seemingly everyday types of events.

That the effects of trauma are not about being weak, crazy or lacking courage.

 Chronic illness is not psychological.

It’s because of the many types of life experiences we overlook, have been told to throw under the rug or bury so we can move on – affect our genes and our health.

You Can Heal the Effects of Trauma

 There are effective ways of beginning to heal the effects of trauma, even if it happened years or decades in the past. When you were in the womb.  Or in your parents’ or grandparents’ lives.

Healing trauma can make a big difference in your symptoms, how you work and live with symptoms, and more. Not because it’s all in your head. But because healing trauma is a way to shift your genes and heal unconscious perceptions of threat that drive many kinds of real physical and physiological symptoms.

A Good Place to Start is with this post