Inventing reality

Episode number 8 of Series “Millennium: tribal wisdom and the modern world”.
Have our needs for certainty and objectivity in our lives closed off the magical influence of the natural world? Is there a balance to strike? Follow narrator David Maybury-Lewis to the Huichol Indian villages of central Mexico to witness a Mexican doctor and a tribal shaman battling an epidemic of a rare strain of deadly measles. Then visit a cancer treatment centre in Toronto. Through these two examples understand how the certainties of science can combine with natural conceptions of physical disease. Then travel to Australia to ask the question: is reality something we shape - as some Australian First Nations peoples believe - or vice-versa?