A blood pressure of 150 has a story. So does an LDL of 72. But most of our training taught us to treat the number and move on.

In the second episode of the Roots of Care series, Raj Sundar sits down with Sophia Malik, Rachel Weiner, and Lonnie A. Nelson to ask what gets lost when we treat the body as a machine and what becomes possible when we stop.

The conversation moves from hypertension guidelines to colonialism, from diagnosis-as-identity to co-regulation with a frightened child, from the design of our exam rooms to what it costs a clinician to look calm while not being calm. Along the way: what happens when a diagnosis becomes the only proof a patient has that their pain is real, why the "fixer" role is an unwinnable position, and what it actually means to create a space where healing can happen.

Some of what we cover
-Whether the problem is in the person or in the conditions the person lives in.
-Disease labels as identity.
-Land and connection as a gap in how we think about social determinants of health.
-Context, connection, and choice.
- Co-regulation, and why regulating yourself comes first.
-Practical tools you can use tomorrow — finding gravity, feeling your feet on the ground, trusting your body to hold itself together, and the pause in the car before you walk into clinic.

Guests
-Sophia Malik, MD, MPH — Family physician and Somatic Experiencing® Practitioner
https://www.drsophiamalik.com
https://drsophiamalik.substack.com

-Rachel Weiner, MD, MPH — Family physician

-Lonnie A. Nelson, PhD — Clinical psychologist; researcher in Native health

Resources mentioned

-Somatic Experiencing® (SE™)
https://traumahealing.org/
https://www.somaticexperiencing.com/

-Compassionate Inquiry® (CI)
https://compassionateinquiry.com/en/
https://drgabormate.com/

-adrienne maree brown
https://adriennemareebrown.net/

Books
-Vine Deloria Jr., The World We Used to Live In: Remembering the Power of the Medicine Man
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1555915647

-Efu Nyaki, Healing Trauma through Family Constellations and Somatic Experiencing: Ancestral Wisdom from the Snail Clan of Tanzania
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1644118521

-Alondra Nelson, Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0816676496

-Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0807010294

-Dean Spade, Love in a Fcked-Up World*
https://www.deanspade.net/books/

-Peter Ralston, The Principles of Effortless Power
https://chenghsin.com/books-new-page/#pep

About Roots of Care
A series on whole-person, trauma-informed, and community-centered primary care, produced as part of the Healthcare for Humans podcast.