MEDICINE FOR ALL PEOPLE

Food, Wisdom, Dance

& the Journey to Healing

Dr. Geeta Maker-Clark on Creating a More Whole and Joyful Approach to Health

By Rachel Sokol

In her well-researched new book, Medicine for All People: Science and Ancient Wisdom for Revolutionary Healing, Dr. Geeta Maker-Clark offers practical wisdom for living well. She is insightful, thoughtful, and brings readers on a health and wellness journey enriched with personal experiences. She also celebrates the healing power of dance, joy and connection; reminding us all that life is short; don’t forget to enjoy it. I spoke with Dr. Maker-Clark to explore the ideas, experiences, and inspiration behind Medicine for All People in PHM’s Book Reviews & Interviews series.

Your book, Medicine for All People: Science and Ancient Wisdom for Revolutionary Healing, is an amazing read.

Tell readers what it’s about.

It’s really a love letter to humanity. That's how I intended it. That's how it came through me. The core message is really about remembering and reclaiming what medicine is really about, and changing the paradigm of thinking about medicine as something that happens in a clinic, in a hospital, when we're sick, something that we take from a bottle, something that is an intervention that comes from the outside in…and actually expanding our lens to think about the medicines of food, plants, dance, nature, community, trust, play, justice, love, belonging, and remembering that these are the medicines that help us restore life. So the core message for me is remembering that medicine is much larger than a pill.

You're really expanding the way we think about health.

Absolutely. I mean, I am a physician working in a clinic, seeing patients. You know, I believe deeply in the biomedical medical model of medical training and care, and I believe in a standard of care. I believe in the excellence that pharmaceuticals have provided us. So, none of the book is written as an attack on those things. I am deeply grateful for what we've been able to achieve in biomedical medicine. It is an expansion and reclamation of all the medicines our ancestors used before we had what we have now, and that we've lost our way from. We need to remember these things work sometimes better than the things we’ve come to be dependent upon.

You include recipes in the book. Why?

Most of my career I have spent in growing the movement called “food as medicine.” You know, most medical training does not have any nutritional knowledge passed in. There are not really [nutrition] courses included.

I was shocked to read that in your book—that in medical school you didn't really have much

nutritional training.

I know, and there's a lot to put in the four years of training that we have, and there's a lot of reasons why this happened.

But nutrition and food really got pushed out to the very sides and then somewhat eliminated from the discussion of what it means to take care of oneself and what the very first medicines are.

So I've spent a lot of my career building that movement, starting a culinary medicine program with my colleague Dr. Sonia Oyola at University of Chicago, so that we are training medical students to understand not just what nutrition and food as medicine means in the bigger picture of taking care of people…but we're also in a teaching kitchen cooking with a chef, and really making sure this next generation of physicians knows how deeply important this is to discuss with patients.

I've spent a lot of time reviewing the literature, thinking about food, thinking about my history of food, and I felt like I could have written a whole book just on that. But I wanted to make sure that there were also some tangible take-homes for whoever is building their medicine pouch from this book—a few recipes that are cultural, that are heritage diets that can be easily swapped out with accessible, affordable ingredients that are rich in flavor. To me, that was part of creating an environment for people to create a medicine pouch for themselves: to provide recipes and think deeply about how food matters to each of us.

Can you talk about growing up in an Indian family in suburban Chicago and how that experience shaped who you are today?

My parents are immigrants from India. They were born in India, and they were born around the time of the partition, which is when the British colonized India for many hundreds of years. When they departed, and India became independent, India—few people know this—was separated into two countries: India and Pakistan.

My family was very intimately affected by this because we were on the side that became Pakistan, so they became refugees in their own country, and then they moved from India to America.

I was born in Chicago, and I grew up in suburban Chicago. So much of my life and my writing is informed by the environment in which I grew up. I had a very different home life than anyone else I was growing up with. You know, we were the only Indian family around, and we ate different foods than everyone else was eating. We had different cultural traditions. We had different prayers.

And my home life was very grounding to me, and, as many immigrants, first-generation immigrant children can relate to, a source of distress because we all want to belong and assimilate to the environments that we're in. So, there was some tension there for me.

Over time, I was really able to go back to India on my own, explore my roots deeply, and figure out where my identity lay in all of this, and embrace that I'm from a very rich culture and ancestry and lineage…and that could help inform my medicine and my way of living in a way that would only help me and strengthen me. But you know, that's a process. It’s really hard when you're a kid, and you just want to fit in. So, I chronicle a little bit of these stories in the book because I think people will relate to them.

Your book is incredibly well researched, but it's also very personal and relatable. What was your favorite chapter or favorite part of the book to write?

I enjoyed writing this book so much. I have to tell you, it was a bit of a lifesaver.

I think one passage in particular, one chapter I really enjoyed writing, was about the time that I spent on Standing Rock when I went and worked as part of the Medic Healer Council during the largest civil rights action of our times to help resist the laying down of the Dakota Access Pipeline.That was a meaningful time for me on many levels. The community building, the learning from Indigenous healers and Indigenous elders, the intrinsic relationship between health, healing, and resistance movements, and having my, at the time, young son be my apprentice.

I had my 11-year-old son, who's now 21, with me at the time, and he and I got to work together in these clinics and see, together and experience together, what it means to stand up for what you believe in. And it brought me a lot of joy to remember how the challenges that we saw, witnessed, faced, we were able to experience together.

What do you want readers to take away from this book?

My hope is that you’ll create a medicine pouch; start putting in those medicines that resonate with you, that feel right to you and start building a life that is filled with health, healing, and medicinal power in your daily practices.

Most everything I talk about is accessible and free, and really a reclamation of something that our families all once had.

I really believe that every human being can do something with these medicines, and that is powerful for them. And that this book moves far beyond just the pages of paper but becomes a movement where we can shift the paradigm of how we think about being healthy in an unjust society to one that thinks about love and justice and medicine all at once.

Learn more about Dr. Geeta Maker-Clark via her website: https://drgeetamakerclark.com. You can purchase Medicine for All People: Science and Ancient Wisdom for Revolutionary Healing wherever books are sold including

Dr. Maker-Clark’s website.