25 | Deep Medicine | Rupa Marya & Raj Patel

Social Medicine On Air

SMOA Survey: bit.ly/SMOAsurvey

Raj Patel and Rupa Marya join on this episode to draw the links between physical inflammation, injustice, decolonizing medicine, and the relationship between human and non-human flourishing. They discuss environmental racism, political economy and capitalism, the way that inflammation modulates social and biological health, reductive Enlightenment science, the need for decolonized care, and what deep healing looks like. Their new book is Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice (2021).

Raj Patel is an author, film-maker, activist, and academic. He is a Research Professor in the Lyndon B Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, Austin. He has degrees from the University of Oxford, the London School of Economics and Cornell University, has worked for the World Bank and WTO, and protested against them around the world. He is the author of Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System and The Value of Nothing, as well as co-author of A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things. He co-directed the documentary The Ants & The Grasshopper.

Rupa Marya is a physician, activist, artist and writer who is an Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, the founder of the Do No Harm Coalition, and the founder and executive director of the Deep Medicine Circle, a worker-directed nonprofit committed to healing the wounds of colonialism through food, medicine, story, learning and restoration. In addition to her work in medicine and writing, Rupa is also the composer and front-woman for Rupa and the April Fishes.

Animation Video (3:18) for Inflamed: bit.ly/3B4Zp6y

Video (28:28): Health and Justice: The Path of Liberation through Medicine (Rupa Marya): bit.ly/3a0xXLe

Synopses of Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2021):

• Prasad A, "Inflamed by Rupa Marya and Raj Patel review – Modern Medicine's Racial Divide," The Guardian (2021), bit.ly/3nQWUkp
• Jones S, "The Public Body: How Capitalism Made The World Sick," The Nation (2021), bit.ly/3lLHlYu

(Disclaimer: at the request of the podcast, two free pre-print copies of the book were supplied by FSG in preparation for this episode)