Inflamed
'A work of exhilarating scope and relevance ... What a rare and powerful experience to feel a book in your very body' Naomi Klein
'Health is not something we can attain as individuals, for ourselves, hermetically sealed off from the world around us. An injury to one is an injury to all.'
Our bodies, societies and planet are inflamed. In this boldly original book, renowned political economist Raj Patel teams up with physician Rupa Marya to illuminate the hidden relationships between human health and the profound injustices of our political and economic systems. In doing so, they offer a radical new cure: the deep medicine of decolonization.
Journeying through the human body - our digestive, endocrine, circulatory, respiratory, reproductive, immune, and nervous systems - Marya and Patel show how inflammation is connected not just to the food that we eat, the air that we breathe and access to healthcare, but is also linked to the traumatic events we experience and the very model of health that doctors practice: one which takes things apart, rather than seeking to bring ideas and lived experiences together.
Combining the latest scholarship on globalization and biology with the stories of patients in marginalized communities and the wisdom of Indigenous groups, Inflamed points the way toward a medicine that heals what has been divided and has the potential to transform not only our bodies but the world.
Rupa Marya is Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and a co-founder of the Do No Harm Coalition, a collective of health workers committed to addressing disease through structural change. A physician and activist, she is also a composer and musician whose music was described by 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 Research Associate at Rhodes University, South Africa, and a member of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems. He is the author of Stuffed and Starved, the New York Times bestselling The Value of Nothing and co-director of the forthcoming documentary The Ants and the Grasshopper.