Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice

"A work of exhilarating scope and relevance . . . Inflamed mixes medicine, argument, and metaphor into a post-pandemic poultice."
—Naomi Klein, author of On Fire
Boldly original and deeply researched, Inflamed takes us on a medical tour through our digestive, endocrine, circulatory, respiratory, reproductive, immune, and nervous systems. Unlike a traditional anatomy book, however, this groundbreaking work illuminates what ails us as a whole, mapping the hidden connections between our biological systems and the profound injustices of our political, economic, social, and ecological systems. Inflammation is connected to the ground beneath our feet, the food that we eat, the air that we breathe, and the diversity of microbes living inside us, which regulate everything from our brain development to our immune system. It’s connected to the number of traumatic events we experienced as children and to the trauma endured by our ancestors. It's connected not only to access to health care but to the very models of health that physicians bring to their medical practice.

Inflamed offers a radical new cure: the deep medicine of decolonization. If colonization is about dividing and conquering in order to centralize control of resources, decolonization is to heal what has been divided, reestablishing our relationship to the earth, our relationship to each other, and our relationship to our own bodies. Drawing on physician and professor of medicine Rupa Marya's work with patients in marginalized communities and the scholarship on globalization that has made political scientist Raj Patel a rock star on the Left, Inflamed shows how a program for decolonizing food and medicine might work—and how it has the potential to transform not only our individual well-being but the world.