DURING my master's degree, I lived high up in the mountains of rural Ecuador, studying the practices of traditional Andean medicine. I was fascinated by beliefs of culturally specific syndromes, like susto, thought to be caused by spiritual attack, resulting in insomnia, depression and anorexia, or mal de ojo, in which a stare from another person can cause severe fever, diarrhoea and even death in children. What always stood out when I asked about the basis of these ideas was that the explanations seemed far-fetched to me but common sense to them. That is the thing about culture: to the people enveloped in it, even beliefs that defy explanation can seem like unquestionable reality. Ours is, unsurprisingly, no exception. To illustrate this, let's look at the evidence supporting what is arguably one of the West's culturally specific syndromes: "Chinese restaurant syndrome".
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