Shownotes Links:

 Dr. Lorre Laws’ Website:

Dr Lorre Laws’  Book – Nursing Our Healer’s Heart: A Recovery Guide for Nurse Trauma & Burnout:

• Dr Sarah Woodhouse on “You’re not Broken” and Dealing with Trauma in Our Modern World Introduction


• Dr. Denise Quinlan: Leadership & Preventing Burnout in the Workplace
  
  


• Dr. Tabitha Healey: Mental Health & Burnout in Medicine


• Burnout Recovery for Healthcare Providers with Tammy Guest

YouTube Timestamps (Concise & Highlighting Key Topics):

0:00 – Intro: Why Healthcare Burnout Needs a New Approach

2:43 – Meet Dr. Lorre Laws: Nurse Scientist & Trauma Expert

3:34 – Burnout vs. Trauma: The Science Behind It

7:49 – How Polyvagal Theory Explains Freeze & Fawn Responses

18:26 – Cell Danger Response: What Burnout Does to Mitochondria

32:07 – Why Traditional Self-Care Fails for Healthcare Providers

50:03 – Dr. Laws’ “3 A’s + B” Framework for Healing

1:02:28 – The Future of Healthcare: Nursing 2.0 & System Reform

1:07:08 – Final Thoughts: Practitioner Health = Public Health

Burnout, Trauma & Healing: Dr. Lorre Laws on Healthcare’s Future

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:00:01 ] Hi, Dr Ron here and I want to invite you to join our Unstress Health Community. Now like this podcast, it’s independent of industry and focuses on taking a holistic approach. To human health and to the health of the planet, the two are inseparable. There are so many resources available with membership, including regular live Q &A’s on specific topics with special guests, including many with our amazing Unstressed Health Advisory Panel. Now we’ve done hundreds of podcasts all worth listening to with some amazing experts on a wide range of topics. Many are world leaders, but with membership we have our UnstressLab podcast series where we take the best of several guests and carefully curate specific topics for episodes which are jam -packed full of valuable insights. So join the UnstressHealth Community. If you’re watching this on our YouTube channel, click on the link below or just visit unstresshealth .com to see what’s on offer and join now. I look forward to connecting with you. Hello and welcome to Unstress Health. My name is Dr Ron Ehrlich, well today we continue a theme which I think is relevant to absolutely every one of us, whoever comes into contact with a health professional, let alone if you are a health professional, because it is my belief that the epidemic of preventable chronic degenerative diseases, both physical and mental, that we have in our Western world is a reflexion of the health of the practitioners which delivers that. And that says something about the system rather than the individuals themselves. So this is a great conversation today about so many issues which are relevant to us all. My guest is Dr Lorre Laws. Now, Lorre, L -O -R-R-E, Lorre Laws, is a nurse scientist and she’s also a trauma and burnout expert. And we talk about all of those things today, what they mean on a level that I think you will find very interesting. She’s also the author of Nursing Our Healer’s Heart, a recovery guide for trauma and burnout. But as I say, you could substitute the word nurse for you or yourself very easily here. I hope you enjoy this conversation I have with Dr. Lorre Laws. Welcome to the show, Lorre 

Dr Lorre Laws [00:02:43 ] Thank you so very much for having me. What an honour to to come together in such a beautiful virtual way from different parts of the planet. 

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:02:52 ] Exactly, exactly. Now, listen, you know, burnout is a big topic and we’ve been exploring that theme on the podcast in the last few years. And I have a sort of a hypothesis that the health of the health practitioner is reflected in our global preventable health pandemic that we find ourselves in. So starting with health care professionals is probably a good place to start. And that’s what we’re going to be talking about today. But I’m just interested to know what drove you to explore this, to research, to write about it affecting nursing worldwide. 

Dr Lorre Laws [00:03:34 ] Well, you know, it’s always, you know, when you get to be a woman of my age, there’s there’s a lot of stories, some of them shorter and some of them longer. But the cliff notes to my long story is I started as a very young woman, a teanager cleaning restrooms in a  nursing facility, and then got my nurse’s aid credentials at the age of 15 and started facilitating end of life transitions for the residents who were at the end of their lifespan before I was old enough to drive or vote. And so, yeah, so that, you know, my healer’s heart, you know, what I call, you know, the reason that each of us hold deep within for, you know, what matters to us most, including our profession, because really, we’re all healers, parents, health care professionals. You know, it just means that we’re helping another along the path to to their health and well -being. And so that that led me to a career in nursing and went on to start doing it. I did a master’s degree and then and then a doctorate degree. And I became very curious about integrative health, which is which is what my clinical specialty is. And I’m also an integrative nurse coach. And so I started this was prior to the events of 2020, 2021. And I was working with coach coaching nurses, excuse me, who are experiencing burnout. And what I was learning was that they were refractory. A good number of these nurses were refractory to our normal approaches, to self -caring and, you know, mindfulness practises and so forth. And I got very curious around the the the literature and the narrative around burnout. So burnout syndrome was was brought out in in the 1970s, you know, a half of a century ago. And the evidence base has not been materially updated, nor is it trauma informed. So that as a nurse scientist, that gave me some good fodder for some research questions. And so I started really investigating like, what if it’s not just burnout? Like that was that was sort of my overarching research question. It seems to me that in 50 years that I’ve been around, right, from a very young woman to now, shall we say, a very mature woman? That we this hasn’t been materially addressed. And I see it in my colleagues and the physicians and in our home health care professionals and and dentistry and really any helping professional. Right. And so I really started looking and it was my good fortune. I have a background in social behavioural sciences. And I was teaching in in that college when I was doing the research for this book. So it’s a multidisciplinary research project. And so I started looking outside of health care for solutions. And I started looking places like, you know, neurophysiology and, you know, polyvagal theory by Dr. Steven Porges, of course. And then I started looking at relational neuroscience and the work of Ian McGilchrist and Dr. Bonnie Badenoch and among others. And so what I started seeing that and then I did a symptom cluster analysis. Like, let’s let’s do a symptom cluster analysis on the traditional burnout symptoms and then let’s let’s look at the symptoms, the immediate and delayed responses to trauma as framed by SAMHSA. So let’s let’s analyse all of that. And what I found was really shocking, surprising and also gave a little beacon of hope is that in the good number of cases, it’s not just burnout. It’s occupational related traumatization, much of which is avoidable. 

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:07:49 ] Interesting. Yeah. Gosh, you have said so much there that we could unpack. I mean, what a way to start a nursing career and end of life at such a young age. Your interest in integrative health is one that I’ve shared for over 40 years, and we’ve explored many times on this podcast. The story of burnout, you know, I mean, I think I didn’t. Well, I know Christina Maslach was a pioneer, I thought, in the 80s in burnout. But it was kind of a definition that has come to fruition in our modern age. And you’ve mentioned Stephen Porges and Ian McGilchrist, both of which I’m very, very familiar with. I mean, Stephen Porges, Polly Vagel Theory. And this is where the trauma comes in. And we’re going to talk about that in McGilchrist, of course, wrote that wonderful book that I read. I think the Master and His Emissary, the left left and right brain. So we could spend quite a good deal of time talking here, Laurie. Anyway, let’s just start with you mentioned nurse specific traumatizatio