The body is not a machine

How ecological thinking fills the gaps in biomedicine. Modern biomedicine sees the body as a closed mechanistic system. But illness shows us to be permeable, ecological beings. Nitin Ajuka reflects on complex illness, false compartments, what medicine makes of environmental decline and what it might make of medicine.

 “Lately, though, the world outside the clinic has begun viewing the health of the body through a dystopian lens. The accelerating climate crisis, in particular, has reasserted nature in our shared consciousness as not only powerful, but also directly relevant to human health. Its imminent consequences include not just a rising incidence of heat strokes and tropical infections, but also food insecurity, water scarcity and mass migration. Amid the coming cascade of droughts, wildfires, heat domes and hurricanes, I imagine that the clinic will have a harder time sheltering its orderly internal narratives from volatile external circumstances.”