Culture as Medicine
5 min readMar 24, 2020
The Biology of Cultural Beliefs
There’s extensive psychoneuroimmunology (PNI) research on how cognition and emotions affect nervous, immune, and endocrine systems’ regulation. Concomitantly, medical anthropology (MA) studies the cultural factors that influence health and wellbeing. I argue that the convergence of findings from PNI and MA can provide valuable information on how cultural factors can have…