Lewis Mehl-Madrona is both a traditional Native American healer and a conventional doctor. What he says here in his book Coyote Wisdom has implications, I think, for our collective response to Covid, which seems to me to be binding everyone into one rigid, fear-based story, that is contradicted by the situations in eg Belarus and Japan, which have minimal or no lockdown, and miniscule deaths from Covid:
"Nature is plastic. Nature changes with us, as we change with nature. Everything is connected. Genetics changes with social interaction. Culture influences biology. Even enzyme kinetics drift with social movements. I mean to make the radical claim that there is no biology apart from culture. Our efforts to carve the world into separate academic disciplines have been futile and need to be reversed. I believe more sensitive future research will begin to reveal how cultural beliefs shape physiological responses and modulate the expression of genes, even turning some on and off. I believe we will come to see that genes are exquisitely responsive to what we do and how we live in community with others. I predict that this discovery of a new field of cultural genetics will be a hallmark of the 21st century into which we have now embarked."
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