Pushing Limits – October 2, 2026

there's a great deal of emphasis and a lot of money to be made as well by a focus on health and wellness and well-being and even trauma.

How would you suggest we move beyond that sort of framing to look at the social, not just in terms of an understanding, but a way to then act on it.

I mean, when you're talking about agency, how do we keep that agency from just being simply the actions of individuals?

Well, going back to Virchow, the 19th century German physician whom I quoted earlier, Medicine is not just an individual thing.

It's a social phenomenon.

And health is a social phenomenon.

And again, I could list off beams of statistics showing, for example, how race or racialism, not race, by the way, racism affects health in the United States or in Canada.

so that the fact that black men have a much higher rate of high blood pressure, whereas the genetic qualities in Africa do not.

Or black women of any class, regardless of economic status, have higher risk of breast cancer.

These are not genetically given.

They're created by the culture of racism and the stress that that imposes.

The fact that the more experiences of racism a black woman has to endure the higher risk for asthma so that the inflammation of the lung so then you have to ask the question as i do in this book so is the inflammation of her lungs and the narrowing of her airways a matter of individual pathology or is it a social malaise but clearly it's both but the source of it is outside of herself so And one could go on about the health of children in different communities, the maternal illness rate, the diagnosis of ADHD.

No matter what you want to look at, it's affected by social and cultural factors.

So clearly, just dealing with it on an individual level is necessary, but it's also inadequate.

And now we're looking at broad questions of policy social structure, who makes decisions, who decides and who gets to submit.

And these are social and political questions.

there's a great deal of emphasis and a lot of money to be made as well by a focus on health and wellness and well-being and even trauma.

How would you suggest we move beyond that sort of framing to look at the social, not just in terms of an understanding, but a way to then act on it.

I mean, when you're talking about agency, how do we keep that agency from just being simply the actions of individuals?

Well, going back to Virchow, the 19th century German physician whom I quoted earlier, Medicine is not just an individual thing.

It's a social phenomenon.

And health is a social phenomenon.

And again, I could list off beams of statistics showing, for example, how race or racialism, not race, by the way, racism affects health in the United States or in Canada.

so that the fact that black men have a much higher rate of high blood pressure, whereas the genetic qualities in Africa do not.

Or black women of any class, regardless of economic status, have higher risk of breast cancer.

These are not genetically given.

They're created by the culture of racism and the stress that that imposes.

The fact that the more experiences of racism a black woman has to endure the higher risk for asthma so that the inflammation of the lung so then you have to ask the question as i do in this book so is the inflammation of her lungs and the narrowing of her airways a matter of individual pathology or is it a social malaise but clearly it's both but the source of it is outside of herself so And one could go on about the health of children in different communities, the maternal illness rate, the diagnosis of ADHD.

No matter what you want to look at, it's affected by social and cultural factors.

So clearly, just dealing with it on an individual level is necessary, but it's also inadequate.

And now we're looking at broad questions of policy social structure, who makes decisions, who decides and who gets to submit.

And these are social and political questions.