Dr. Devon Christie is a family physician and therapeutic counsellor with a focused practice in chronic pain and mental health. She is Co-Founder and Medical Director of the Centre for Medicine Assisted Therapy in Vancouver, BC. Devon has more than eight years of experience working with people living with chronic pain using a biopsychosocial approach that combines interventional procedures and trauma-specific counselling.
A certified trauma therapist, Devon served as both Co-Investigator and Study Therapist at a Vancouver site for the MAPS Phase 3 clinical trial of MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD. In 2021, she published a landmark paper showing that participants with PTSD and comorbid moderate-to-severe chronic pain experienced significant pain reduction as a secondary outcome of MDMA-assisted therapy—findings that have catalyzed new research into psychedelic-assisted approaches for pain. More recently, she proposed a novel framework understanding chronic pain as a complex systems phenomenon, positioning psychedelic therapies as uniquely suited to address it.
From 2020–2023, Devon served as Senior Lead of Psychedelic Programs with Numinus, where she developed clinical protocols and therapist training programs. Between 2015–2018, she collaborated with Dr. Gabor Maté and others, co-facilitating nine multi-day retreats combining plant medicine with somatic trauma therapy.
Devon’s additional certifications in Functional Medicine, Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, Relational Somatic Therapy, and Internal Family Systems underscore her commitment to integrative care. She is the author of Integrative Somatic Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy, and she co-directs the Somatic Psychedelic Facilitator Certificate with the Embody Lab. She also teaches with several leading training programs (CIIS, ATMA, IPI), with emphasis on ethics, embodiment, and trauma-informed practice.
Her passion lies in reshaping healthcare by integrating trauma-informed, biopsychosocial approaches. She envisions Medicine Assisted Therapy as part of a holistic, systems-based model of care to address chronic disease—an approach that echoes principles long held in traditional healing systems.
