Registration now closed

Author Dr. Wendy Johnson

in conversation with Dr. Aparna Bole

Join us when Dr. Wendy Johnson and Dr. Aparna Bole visit to discuss Johnson's latest book, Kinship Medicine.

About the author:

Dr. Wendy Johnson is a family physician, public health professor, activist, and writer who has spent her life actively working for a world where everyone can live long lives in equitable communities. Her career includes stints scaling up HIV treatment in Mozambique, overseeing an urban public health department, and, most recently, directing a community clinic in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She has a Master’s in public health from Johns Hopkins and holds faculty appointments at the University of Washington and the University of New Mexico. Dr. Johnson has been a vocal activist on many progressive issues both locally and globally and is a two-time TEDx speaker.

Our modern way of living is incompatible with our survival. Most of us intuitively know this truth, but almost everything in our society encourages us to ignore it. In Kinship Medicine, Dr. Wendy Johnson confronts this undeniable fact and breaks down how we think and act every day in ways that undermine our individual and collective well-being.

The antidotes to many of the causal factors of poor health—loneliness, industrial diets, systemic inequality, fear of death, profit-based healthcare—are relational, with each other and with the living earth. Through evidence from public health, sociology, anthropology, human ecology, and her experience as a family physician, Dr. Wendy Johnson will show you how:

• We must incorporate an “ecosystem” perspective into modern medicine
• What you ingest and where you live can reinforce or upset your body’s delicate balance
• Eliminating one organism in an ecosystem can affect all the others
• Histories of trauma can be passed down for generations
• Rekindling our relationships to non-human life is essential to our well-being
• Being closer to death can release some of its power over us
• Actions of communities will be stronger and more lasting than any individual efforts

You will leave with a clear vision of what a new society might look like, methods to accomplish this transformation, and concrete examples of where it is being done successfully. 

Dr. Wendy Johnson will be in conversation with Dr. Aparna Bole, special expert, Office of the Director at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and as a senior consultant, Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Climate Change and Health Equity. She is an adjunct associate professor of pediatrics at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine and she practiced for many years as a primary care pediatrician in Cleveland prior to joining HHS. She is particularly interested in the intersection between environmental stewardship, environmental justice and pediatric public health.

Books will be available for purchase courtesy of Mac's Backs - Books on Coventry.