Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice

The sum of lifetime exposures to nongenetic drivers of health and illness, from conception to death, is called the exposome.17 The exposome encompasses chemical, social, psychological, ecological, historical, political, and biological elements

Matzinger challenged the idea that the human body is as interested in “the self” as nineteenth-century

Typically in septic shock, a person’s body sets off intense inflammation in response to an infection or trauma. Body temperature spikes to a fever to fight the offender. It can then plunge into hypothermia as the body fails to correct the

Put a different way, an accurate diagnosis of the workers in Alicia’s community would implicate the systems of injustice created during the colonial era, beginning with the exploitation and enslavement of the Takelma people and ending with a system of racial capitalism that treats migrant workers as disposable.25 A story that fails to incorporate t

The fall of beaver populations also changed the way rivers ran across the North American continent. The biodiversity that thrived because of the beaver’s hydrological engineering plummeted. With their dams, beavers create successional habitats that provide slow-moving water sanctuaries for plants, insects, and other animals, such as salmon. As dema

While fluoridation may have emerged in the 1940s as a low-cost public health intervention to manage working-class dental problems, today it is a billion-dollar subsidy for the fertilizer industry, in which hydrofluorosilicic acid is a by-product. This industrial waste has found a lucrative afterlife in water supplies around the world.

Inflammation is triggered when tissues and cells are damaged or threatened with damage. A complex and intricately coordinated response of the immune system, inflammation mobilizes resources to ultimately heal what has been injured. In a healthy, balanced system, once the mending has occurred, inflammation subsides. When the damage keeps coming, the

Our anatomical systems are embedded in more systems—ones that humans have engineered and that make up our surrounding ecologies.

Decolonizing is training our gaze on the origins of suffering in order to uproot them. It is the ambition to build a community of respect for the “animacy of life itself.”70