In this live episode from the Institute for Functional Medicine's Annual International Conference, host James Maskell sits down with Dr. Geeta Maker-Clark, who opened the conference that morning with its keynote address.
The conversation begins with something unusual: conference attendees — mostly, as Maskell puts it, "type A, cerebral" doctors — got up and danced during her talk, a rare sight at a medical conference. Dr. Maker-Clark, who is part of a West African dance company, explains why: drumming and dance tap into something deeply primal in all of us, tied to ancestral rhythm, grief, celebration, and rites of passage — connections she says were severed largely through colonization. Maskell shares a parallel experience with communal singing, discovered through his men's group, and the two agree it produces a similarly embodied, collective effect.
From there, the discussion turns to rebuilding what's been lost. Maskell describes creating a small home-school and community pod for his daughter, built around Dunbar's number, as a deliberate act of "rebuilding the tapestry" of connection. Dr. Maker-Clark reframes this broader work not as innovation but as remembrance and reclamation — recovering what our cells already know how to do.
The conversation closes on health equity and food. Dr. Maker-Clark discusses her decade running a culinary medicine program at the University of Chicago Medical School, training physicians to talk with patients about food and cultural humility — a model that has now expanded to over 80 academic medical centers nationally. She and Maskell discuss group-based, cohort models of care as a scalable way to deliver this kind of medicine beyond wealthy populations, pushing back on the idea that holistic care is "just for rich people." The episode ends on a note about hope as a muscle — something we have to keep using.
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About the Guest:
Dr. Geeta Maker-Clark delivered the opening keynote at the Institute for Functional Medicine's Annual International Conference. She is a member of a West African dance company and runs the culinary medicine program at the University of Chicago Medical School, training physicians and medical students in nutritional science and cultural humility in patient care — a model now adopted across 80+ academic medical centers nationally. She has a book coming out later this summer.
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