How Should Clinicians Help Homeless Trauma Survivors Make Irreversible Surgical Care Decisions?

Important but frequently overlooked childhood trauma outcomes can manifest later in patients' lives and include neurophysiological influences on language perception and expression, memory, attention, abstract reasoning, emotional regulation, and executive functioning. Therefore, when interacting with patients experiencing homelessness, mental illnesses, and substance use disorders, clinicians should adopt a trauma-informed approach to generating deeper understandings of patients' neurobiological makeup and psychosocial histories, especially when discussing interventions and during informed consent.