Rupa Marya & Raj Patel's Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice is an important book for beginning to think critically about the way in which modern medicine is practiced in places like the United States.
Colonial capitalism, which separates society from nature, subverts the holism required to understand illness, and its intrinsic relationship to our contexts, histories, cultures and environments. Colonial capitalism, which dominates the 'other' by delineating 'otherness', is the unquestioned worldview of modern medicine because the latter was forged at a time of colonization. It has replaced indigenous cosmologies that were cultivated over centuries, reciprocal relationships between human and the natural world, passed down through oral histories. They argue that it is only through a return to an enlightened partnership with our exposome, the natural world, that the healing of our inflamed bodies, and inflamed planet, can begin ("We can be healthy only when the entire community is also healthy"). In Inflamed, we learn that Indigenous cosmology celebrates multitudes and the complexity of relationships, whereas Colonial cosmology seeks to categorize and impose social order. Medicine has been crafted in this same worldview, perpetuated through the church of hospitals, the clergy of doctors and the texts of medical research and it has been used as a tool to disconnect the body from this wider context, in order to control it. But in doing so, we have unlearnt, we have forgotten, the intrinsic interconnectedness of all living things. This "holy war of society against nature" has led to the degradation of soil, air, water and food systems, which in turn have caused havoc on our bodies through disturbances in delicately balanced systems and accumulations of industrial by-products.
The authors lay bare the connection between industrial processes and autoimmune disorders; between the circulation of global debt and chronic disease; between the expansion of Orientalism and obesity; between air pollution and mortality from COVID-19; between the patriarchy and post-natal depression; and between theories of racial hierarchy and hospital outcomes. That, deep down, we probably already know and lament all this, detracts nothing from the authors' impressive achievement at laying out the issues in such excruciating detail.
This is an inspirational volume that, particularly for those concerned about the nature of the health care "system" in the United States, is a must-read. There is most likely still a place for modern medicine in our world -- something these authors struggle to admit -- but they document so much for which modern medicine needs to account and adapt. Maybe even relearn.
______________________
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for my honest review here.