Dr. Gabor Maté

Physician & Bestselling Author

Dr. Gabor Maté is a physician and bestselling author whose work on the relationship between trauma, stress, and physical illness has reached millions of people. His book When the Body Says No remains one of the most important works in integrative medicine, documenting the ways that unresolved emotional pain expresses itself as physical disease.

Dr. Maté spent decades working in palliative care and addiction medicine before turning his attention to the broader question of why people get sick — and why some people, despite every apparent advantage, cannot seem to get well. His answer, developed across multiple books and thousands of hours of clinical work, is that the body and the mind are not separate systems, and that treating one without attending to the other is medicine that is only half done.

His work has been particularly influential in conversations about women's health, where the pressure to suppress emotion, prioritize others, and perform wellness has been linked to elevated rates of autoimmune disease, chronic illness, and burnout.

Why They Were on Pair-A-Docs

Dr. Maté joined Dr. Sherry Ross and Dr. Tammy Nelson to discuss how unresolved stress, trauma, and suppressed emotion manifest as physical illness — and what true healing requires. The conversation covers the mind-body connection, the science of psychoneuroimmunology, and the implications for women's health.

For a show hosted by an OB-GYN and a sex and relationship therapist, Dr. Maté's framework is directly relevant. The patients Dr. Ross and Dr. Nelson see every day are living in bodies shaped by their emotional histories — and the conversation with Dr. Maté gives language and science to something both doctors have observed clinically for years.

The episode is one of the most intellectually substantive conversations in the Pair-A-Docs catalog, and one of the most practically useful for anyone trying to understand why their body is telling them something their mind has been trying to ignore.

Topics Covered

In this episode, Dr. Maté and the doctors covered:

How trauma and stress manifest as physical illness
The science of the mind-body connection
Why suppressing emotion has health consequences
What true healing requires beyond symptom management
The particular health costs of emotional self-suppression in women

Their Episode

Episode 6

Gabor Maté: When the Body Says No

World-renowned physician and bestselling author Dr. Gabor Maté joins us for a profound conversation on how trauma, stress, and unmet emotional needs manifest in the body — and what true healing actually looks like.

Listen to this episode →