Medicine for All People

An integrative family physician, educator, mother, and activist provides a welcome guide to the medicines we really need to live healthy—including foods, breathwork practices, movement, and deeply rooted wisdom.

The word medicine has long been associated with pills, injections, sickness, and costly and scary interventions. It's a word full of emotions—mostly fear, dependence, and anxiety. But medicine can also be healing and enlivening.

An integrative family physician, educator, mother, and activist, Dr. Maker-Clark reveals how dominating, money-driven systems have taken over our food supply, our health-care system, and co-opted our awareness of our natural deep intelligence and connectedness. Chronic inflammatory diseases thrive today because these larger systems have created the environment for them and have conditioned us to rely on these external power structures to make us well.

Dr. Maker-Clark guides us to the medicines we really need, which are all around us. Most are free and vital parts of our ancestral cultures. The medicines in this book are all easily accessible and often immediately effective. Through these foods, breathwork practices, and movement, we create true wholeness, not by patching our pain with Band-Aids, convenient drugs, and drive-by doctor's visits. Awakening to these true medicines, going back to the sources, and integrating powerful healthful practices creates a path for individuals and communities to move toward radical social change.

Dr. Maker-Clark prescribes these medicines to her patients, and now, in this book, offers them to readers to start their own health revolution—and to fuel a new movement toward true health, one that acknowledges that no one of us can be truly healthy unless we are all healthy. Medicine for All People is a manifesto whose goal is to help us heal from the individual and collective trauma of injustice, and support a transition from a culture of stress and sickness to one of healing and belonging. The book asks us to reevaluate the ecosystems we live in, to look at ourselves with new eyes. Medicine for All People is a path to a blooming and vibrant future, through the accessible and deeply rooted wisdom of our collective past.