In this week’s episode of Routes of Healing, Dr. Siri Chand Khalsa sits down with Dr. Christine Gibson, a family physician, trauma therapist, and author of The Modern Trauma Toolkit. Known online as TikTokTraumaDoc, Dr. Gibson has built a wide-reaching educational platform grounded in nervous system science, practical somatic tools, and a strong commitment to health equity and systems change.

Together, they explore how trauma shows up far beyond the psychiatric labels most clinicians were trained to recognize. From hospital culture and medical apprenticeship models that reward dissociation, to the ways trauma lives in the body through chronic sympathetic activation, inflammation, and functional syndromes, this conversation reframes trauma as both deeply personal and profoundly systemic.

Dr. Gibson shares how the 2015 Nepal earthquakes catalyzed a decade-long immersion into trauma-informed care, somatic therapies, and polyvagal theory, alongside a global lens shaped through her nonprofit work in community-based family medicine training. Dr. Khalsa reflects on her own long COVID autonomic nervous system journey and the clinical implications of persistent nervous system dysregulation for metabolism, sleep, digestion, and behavior change.

This episode is for clinicians, educators, wellness professionals, and anyone who wants a clearer, kinder framework for understanding why symptoms persist, why “compliance” is the wrong frame, and how safety, self-compassion, and practical tools can create a pathway to healing and post-traumatic growth.

If you’re inspired by our exploration on Routes of Healing, a physician-led podcast uplifting the wisdom and lived experience of integrative & lifestyle medicine doctors, subscribe to receive new episodes weekly.

1. Trauma is ubiquitous: How healthcare settings can unintentionally create trauma through loss of dignity, privacy, and autonomy.
2. Trauma beyond PTSD: Why complex, relational, developmental, and ancestral trauma often go unnamed in conventional frameworks.
3. Trauma as physiology: Trauma as the body’s response, including epigenetic and transmitted trauma across lineages and communities.
4. Dissociation as training: How medical culture normalizes disconnection from basic human needs and emotional processing.
5. Somatic vs cognitive approaches: Why bottom-up tools can be more effective when the thinking brain is offline during threat states.
6. Polyvagal theory in practice: Understanding sympathetic “motion” and parasympathetic “stillness,” and what it means for digestion, immunity, and reproduction.
7. Refugee health and somatic symptoms: How trauma is often expressed culturally through pain, headaches, belly symptoms, and tension.
8. Trauma therapy and chronic disease: Clinical examples of improvements in diabetes and other conditions after trauma processing.
9. Self-compassion + clarity: A practical lens for reducing shame around coping strategies like scrolling, irritability, or stress