Chronic inflammatory diseases are on the rise, especially in so-called industrialized countries that have been structured by the hands of colonialism. Could this collective inflammation we are experiencing be a sign from our bodies that we are indeed mired in systemically unhealthy living conditions? What we might have once understood as an individual ailment, must now be understood as a side effect of daily exposures of air pollution, economic precarity, contaminated water, police brutality, mounting debt, and an overall increasingly difficult social structure to stay afloat in. In this week’s episode, Dr. Rupa Marya and Raj Patel discuss the biological impacts of oppressive social structures.

Delving into their most recent book Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice, we explore why modern medicine and “cure” based initiatives are not enough, what deep medicine looks like, chronic stress, the colonial dependence upon debt, and the history of Western medicine. We are left with the resounding reminder that inflammation is an indicator that we must change our collective ways in order to heal, and in today’s world that requires us to dismantle oppressive systems and expand our understanding of health beyond inadequate colonial definitions.

Dr. Rupa Marya is a physician, an activist, a mother, and a composer. She is an associate professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, where she practices and teaches internal medicine. She is a cofounder of the Do No Harm Coalition, a collective of health workers committed to addressing disease through structural change. At the invitation of Lakhóta health leaders, she is helping to set up the Mni Wiconi Clinic and Farm at Standing Rock to decolonize medicine and food. She is a cofounder of the Deep Medicine Circle, an organization committed to healing the wounds of colonialism through food, medicine, story, and learning. Working with her husband, the agroecological farmer Benjamin Fahrer, and the Association of Ramaytush Ohlone, she is a part of the Farming Is Medicine project, where farmers are recast as ecological stewards of rematriated land and food is liberated from the market economy. She has toured twenty-nine countries with her band, Rupa and the April Fishes, whose music was described by the legend Gil Scott-Heron as “Liberation Music.”

Raj Patel is a research professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, a professor in the University’s Department of Nutrition, and a research associate at Rhodes University, South Africa. He is the author of Stuffed and Starved and the New York Times bestselling The Value of Nothing, and the coauthor of A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things. A James Beard Foundation Leadership Award winner, he is the co-director of a groundbreaking documentary on climate change and the global food system, The Ants and the Grasshopper. He serves on the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems and has advised governments worldwide on the causes of and solutions to crises of sustainability.

♫ Music featured in this episode is "Seams/I Saw You" by Lindsey Mills, "Danza De Ventre (Instrumental)" and ​​"Salsa Lindo" by Roma Ransom.

Episode References

Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice by Rupa Marya and Raj Patel

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