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.

About The Author

Dr. Geeta Maker-Clark is director of Integrative Nutrition and Advocacy at Endeavor Health in Chicago, clinical assistant professor at Pritzker School of Medicine at the University of Chicago, and co-director of the Culinary Medicine project, one of the first of its kind in the country. A nationally known and sought-after speaker, she is founder of multiple food justice programs and projects, including the Food is Power program in Chicago Public Schools teaching decolonized nutrition education and food justice to middle schoolers. She has also become a pioneering voice in using dance as a medicine to prevent neurodegenerative disease and to inspire instant energy and joy. 

Dr. Maker-Clark has worked as a family physician for over twenty-five years providing full-spectrum family medicine, high-risk obstetrics, and integrative medicine as part of her practice. Her integrated and holistic view of health stems from many years of medical and spiritual training from thought leaders and healers around the globe. She’s worked in communities as a social activist and organizer with migrant farm workers in Ventura, CA; Indigenous people in Northeastern Brazil; fishing villagers on the East coast of India; citizen activists at Standing Rock; and thousands of patients in the inner city of Chicago. 

She received her MD from Rush Medical College in Chicago, completing a family medicine residency, an obstetrics fellowship, and an integrative medicine fellowship with Dr. Andrew Weil in the years following. She holds certifications in yoga instruction, functional nutrition, and culinary medicine. She is also a professional dancer with a prolific African diasporic dance and drum company in Chicago.