The Links Between Health & Structural Injustices

Submitted by the Event Organizer

The COVID-19 pandemic has further revealed the shocking racial disparities in our health and our healthcare globally. Our bodies, societies, and planet are inflamed. We have also witnessed mass uprisings around the world in response to this systemic racism and violence. Inflammation is connected to the food we eat, the air we breathe, and the diversity of the microbes living inside us, and to the number of traumatic events we have experienced. It’s connected not only to access to health care but to the very models of health that physicians practice.

Join Speak Out Now for a discussion with Raj Patel and Dr. Rupa Marya about the hidden relationships between our biological systems and the profound injustices of our political and economic systems, and how a different kind of medicine and healthcare could be imagined. They are co-authors of the new book Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice, which provides the basis for their discussion with us.

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. She is a cofounder of the Do No Harm Coalition, a collective of health workers committed to addressing disease through structural change. Rupa has been invited to help set up the Mni Wiconi Clinic and Farm at Standing Rock and she is a cofounder of the Deep Medicine Circle, and a part of the Farming Is Medicine project.

Raj Patel is a research professor and professor of nutrition at the University of Texas at Austin’s Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, and a research associate at Rhodes University, South Africa. He is the author of Stuffed and Starved and The Value of Nothing, and the coauthor of A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things. 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.

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