Magic Strategies: the basic biology of multilevel, multiscale, health intervention

A survey of the cultural psychology and related literatures suggests that Western biomedicine's fascination with atomistic, individual-oriented, interventions is a cultural artifact that may have little consonance with complex, subtle, multiscale, multilevel, social, ecological, or biological realities. Other cultural traditions may, in fact, view atomistic strategies as inherently unreal. A contrary perspective suggests that the most effective medical or public health interventions must be analogously patterned across scale and level of organization: 'magic strategies' will almost always be synergistically - and often emergently - more effective than 'magic bullets'. The result can be formally derived in a relatively straightforward manner using an adaptation of the Black-Scholes economietric model, applied here to the metabolic cost of bioregulation under uncertainty. Multifactorial interventions focused at the human 'keystone' ecosystem level of mesoscale social and geographic groupings may be particularly effective.