Gabor Mate

A Hungarian-born physician who spent years as a family doctor in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, treating people whose addictions were severe enough that most services had already given up on them. In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts came out of that work, and its argument is that the useful question is never why the addiction but why the pain.

He extends the same reasoning to illness in When the Body Says No and to almost everything in The Myth of Normal, written with his son Daniel: chronic stress, suppressed emotion and childhood adversity leave physical marks, and a culture can be sick in ways it has agreed to call ordinary. Maté was an infant in Budapest under the German occupation and says so plainly when explaining where the interest comes from. His claims do not all carry equal evidence, and he is more convincing on trauma than on cancer.