Thorsten Brückner

One of the greatest ironies of the COVID era, for me, was watching people whose self-concept revolved around championing multiculturalism, Indigenous wisdom, and respect for non-Western traditions suddenly demand absolute conformity to a single Western biomedical approach to health. Traditional Chinese medicine, Ayurveda, and countless Indigenous healing traditions around the world emphasize the health of the whole organism, its environment, and the cultivation of balance and resilience over fighting a particular pathogen. Yet during COVID, discussions of these perspectives—overall health, fitness, mental health, nutrition, and internal balance—were met with ridicule and even censorship, while people who refused the novel allopathic pharmaceutical intervention were excluded from most aspects of society. It was so dark that it was hard to appreciate the parody. People whose entire cultural narrative revolved around multiculturalism were insisting that everyone conform to the dominant Western biomedical establishment—a system consolidated through Rockefeller-era reforms, backed by oil wealth, that marginalized traditional approaches to medicine. Anyone who refused to conform to the system during the Covid era was treated as an ignorant savage, too stupid or dangerous to participate in society. And anyone who practiced holistic medicine and rejected the novel allopathic intervention was labeled "hesitant"—someone who needed to be "educated." The colonial irony was breathtaking. Here were the self-appointed champions of Indigenous wisdom, assuming the familiar role of the enlightened colonizer, arriving to educate the ignorant savages out of their supposedly primitive beliefs. The acceptable public narrative was framed as a war against a pathogen, with almost no tolerance for even discussing the holistic conditions of health. My point isn't about a warlike binary of germ versus terrain theory, or a belief that traditional medicine should replace modern allopathy. I'm pointing out the extraordinary irony of people who celebrated cultural diversity becoming completely intolerant of medical pluralism. For me, that contradiction was a profound wake-up call about a culture I'd lived in for decades without ever seriously questioning. Apparently, when diversity goes deeper than the appearance of a Benetton ad, tolerance for differences can go right out the window.