Rocio Cordova’s Reviews > Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice > Status Update

Medicine has come to understand the emergence of disease through the metaphors of war and tolerance, because these were the liberal and neoliberal political metaphors a hand.

What happens then when we’re ready to see medicine in general, immune system in particular, not as a theater of war but as a composition with the rest of the web of life? What does that song actually sound like?

Immunology developed in tandem with the politics of its time.

…the body, like liberalism, called for a tolerance without parity, contingent of the recognition of a “self” and an “other”. People deemed “other” would not be killed but merely tolerated - immunes in a perpetual state of non belonging.

Social forces, precondition, for example, how bodies react to [illnesses]. The same infection is expressed differently in different groups of people because of how the immune system has been toned overtime, through lifetimes and ancestries of social oppression.

For indigenous communities in North America, the act of connecting young people back to their ancestral lands is cutting suicide rates without the use of Western medicine or pharmaceuticals.

Having a sense of belonging improves health outcomes. Cultural continuity and dignity are in themselves determinants of health.

Decolonizing is not some thing that can be done alone. It is already happening and communities were land is being rematriated, where solidarity economies of mutual aid and support are being established, where communities are renewing their relationships with local ecologies and re-telling their stories, some of which have been silence for centuries.

The ideologies of modern colonialism are alive and well - and they are making you sick. To be clear, [it] isn't simply the occupation of land. It is a process, an operation of power in which one cosmology is extinguished and replaced with another. Patterns of identity, language, culture, work, relationship, territory, time, community and care are transformed. Colonialism has fundamentally altered our relationships...

To understand what’s driving inflammation, we must account for the things our bodies have been exposed to, in the places where our lives have been circumscribed. And to offer a treatment, we must show how we can escape.

The root of a diagnosis is knowledge of antecedent parts that make sense of the present in order to change the future.

A story that fails to incorporate this history is one that can have no part in healing.

In 2012 a quarter of all human deaths were traceable to environmental factors in the air, water and soil.

The inflammation in your arteries and the inflammation of the planet are linked, and the causal connections are becoming increasingly clear; your physiological state is a reaction to social and environmental factors. Racial violence, economic precarity, industrial pollution, poor diet, and even the water you drink can inflame you.