David Baxter PhD
Late Founder
Gwyneth Paltrow and GOOP say the joke is on you if you followed their advice
by Dr. Jen Gunter
June 16, 2018
Imagine if I told you something about health and a lot of experts who knew more than I did pointed out I was wrong. They even provided sources.
Imagine then instead of being embarrassed that I had passed false information on to women I doubled down and called my detractors desperate for attention and accused them of not wanting to empower women in their health choices.
Now imagine I went back and retroactively labelled those posts as entertainment or just an interesting idea? Ha ha, my bad!
What would you call me?
A hypocrite.
If I were selling product based on those posts and the attention they garnered in the press you would probably call me a grifter and maybe even a hypocrite.
You’d be right and that is exactly what GOOP is doing.
GOOP is retroactively labelling “wellness” posts so women can figure out what was pure bullshit, what was just the hypothesis of a naturopath, and what might actually be factual. I haven’t come up with one that is labelled as factual yet.
According to Racked, the categories are as follows (GOOP’s words, not mine):
For Your Enjoyment: There probably aren’t going to be peer-reviewed studies about this concept, but it’s fun, and there’s real merit in that.
Ancient Modality: This practice is nearly as old as time — many find value in it, even if modern-day research hasn’t caught up yet (it’s possible the practice will never attract its attention).
Speculative but Promising: There’s momentum behind this concept, though it needs more research to elucidate exactly what’s at work.
Supported by Science: There’s sound science for the value of this concept and the promise of more evidence to come soon that may prove its impact.
Rigorously Tested: The validity of this concept is pretty much undisputed within the world of M.D.’s, D.O.’s, N.D.’s, and Ph.D.’s.
So many of GOOP’s wellness posts were just for fun. Like a joke.
Did they not realize they were jokes when I and many others pointed out the factual errors, potential for harm, and utter bullshit or are they just figuring it out now?
Inquiring minds want to know?
Let’s look at some of the GOOP posts that I called out as ****ing bullshit and see how they now rate on the GOOP truth-o-meter.
The Medical Medium’s post on the origins of thyroid cancer. I said it was horrific advice, which it is. I quoted a board certified medical expert. If instead you followed the advice on GOOP and got unnecessary testing for Epstein Barr Virus (EBV) and insisted on therapy for that, well, the joke is on you! Did you believed the false theories that 95% of thyroid disease is due to EBV and the rest from radiation? So sad!
Telling people lies about the origins of a cancer is just for fun, I mean there is totally merit in that.
How about the GOOP post on iodine and the thyroid? Again second-hand advice from a ghost.
I said almost everything about the post is “wrong and potentially dangerous.” I interviewed a board certified endocrinologist.
Hope you didn’t argue with your doctor about needing additional iodine, waste money more on testing, and I hope you didn’t take iodine to kill off non-existent bacteria and viruses that were not harming your thyroid because the post was just for fun!
There is totally merit in that, right?
How about the jade egg? GOOP said I was “strangely confident” for pointing out A) the jade eggthusiast didn’t know what the **** she was talking about regarding the pelvic floor muscles and B) a porous rock could introduce oxygen into the vagina which has been proven to be a critical step in development of toxic shock syndrome.
What is science when you have an “ancient therapy?” I’d also like to point of that GOOP has never actually offered proof that is an ancient therapy, but facts are irrelevant. Maybe there will be a rating scale for ancient therapies next year?
Regardless, being “ancient” doesn’t mean it has value. In “ancient” times people believed in evil humors and that tuberculosis was caused by vampires. I like my therapies post-germ theory.
What about the GOOP post on goat’s milk for parasites?
I called it stupid and dangerous (which it is), but GOOP believes that goat’s milk for non-existent parasites that can only be found by a naturopath who also believes that syphilis is a parasite is speculative, but promising.
It’s only promising for stupidity, bloat, food borne illness and for wasting money on non indicated testing.
By GOOP’s metric any untested, bullshit hypothesis is promising.
That’s not how it works. That is not how any of this works,
To Gwyneth Paltrow and GOOP I say you should be ashamed of yourselves. You so proudly touted your site JUST LAST YEAR as being so empowering and intuitive that women could clearly take away the right information for their health and yet here you are having to go back and point out for these same women that most of these posts have no science and many were just a joke.
Do you think women are lemmings? Because it is totally looking more and more like you have been herding them to a ledge for money, like Disney executives. You do know that lemmings didn’t end up jumping over the cliff on purpose, they were pushed.
You used your massive international platform to push fake therapies and make-believe on women under the guise of “conversations,” not to empower but to sell products and books. When I pointed out that these ideas and therapies were at best useless and fringe but potentially very harmful you leveraged that same international platform to accuse me of medical myopia and not trusting women. You accused me of ridiculing women.
No I haven’t forgotten and yes I’m pissed.
Ethical people don’t write fairy tales and pass them off as medical advice, which is what the Medical ****ing Medium does. And you, Gwyneth Paltrow, HELPED HIM SELL BOOKS. Now it was just all in fun? You mean apricots can’t tell time?
Color me shocked.
Me pointing out that many of the health ideas and products on GOOP are bespoke bullshit doesn’t make me a critic it makes me correct. The fact that GOOP is retroactively trying to cover their asses in an effort to seem more respectable is the ultimate in gas lighting. It is clear that it has been GOOP and Paltrow who have been ridiculing women while they have been laughing all the way to the bank.
Perhaps ultra fringe isn’t selling quite as well? Maybe the investors are worried about lawsuits from women who overdose on iodine or get a food born illness from raw milk? Maybe the new money realizes the truth, that the Venn diagram of entertainment and health care looks like this:
As far as I can tell with the GOOP rating system “enjoyment” means second-hand information from a ghost; “ancient” is code for biologically implausible, but sells well; and “speculative, but promising” is the fringe hypothesis of a naturopath or “Integrative” doctor. I am pretty sure we won’t see too many “backed by science” posts because there aren’t many complementary products to sell alongside in the GOOP shoppe.
I wished I’d asked “the experts” at In GOOP Health if bringing yourself back from being dead by love from your dead brain was a “backed by science” thing or just “speculative, but promising?” Medicine is kind of fun when words don’t mean anything!
I wonder what rating the GOOP post on the link between bras and breast cancer will get? Will it be “promising” despite the lack of science and the studies that clearly show otherwise or just for fun?
Because scaring women about breast cancer? Well, there is real merit in that.
by Dr. Jen Gunter
June 16, 2018
Imagine if I told you something about health and a lot of experts who knew more than I did pointed out I was wrong. They even provided sources.
Imagine then instead of being embarrassed that I had passed false information on to women I doubled down and called my detractors desperate for attention and accused them of not wanting to empower women in their health choices.
Now imagine I went back and retroactively labelled those posts as entertainment or just an interesting idea? Ha ha, my bad!
What would you call me?
A hypocrite.
If I were selling product based on those posts and the attention they garnered in the press you would probably call me a grifter and maybe even a hypocrite.
You’d be right and that is exactly what GOOP is doing.
GOOP is retroactively labelling “wellness” posts so women can figure out what was pure bullshit, what was just the hypothesis of a naturopath, and what might actually be factual. I haven’t come up with one that is labelled as factual yet.
According to Racked, the categories are as follows (GOOP’s words, not mine):
For Your Enjoyment: There probably aren’t going to be peer-reviewed studies about this concept, but it’s fun, and there’s real merit in that.
Ancient Modality: This practice is nearly as old as time — many find value in it, even if modern-day research hasn’t caught up yet (it’s possible the practice will never attract its attention).
Speculative but Promising: There’s momentum behind this concept, though it needs more research to elucidate exactly what’s at work.
Supported by Science: There’s sound science for the value of this concept and the promise of more evidence to come soon that may prove its impact.
Rigorously Tested: The validity of this concept is pretty much undisputed within the world of M.D.’s, D.O.’s, N.D.’s, and Ph.D.’s.
So many of GOOP’s wellness posts were just for fun. Like a joke.
Did they not realize they were jokes when I and many others pointed out the factual errors, potential for harm, and utter bullshit or are they just figuring it out now?
Inquiring minds want to know?
Let’s look at some of the GOOP posts that I called out as ****ing bullshit and see how they now rate on the GOOP truth-o-meter.
The Medical Medium’s post on the origins of thyroid cancer. I said it was horrific advice, which it is. I quoted a board certified medical expert. If instead you followed the advice on GOOP and got unnecessary testing for Epstein Barr Virus (EBV) and insisted on therapy for that, well, the joke is on you! Did you believed the false theories that 95% of thyroid disease is due to EBV and the rest from radiation? So sad!
Telling people lies about the origins of a cancer is just for fun, I mean there is totally merit in that.
How about the GOOP post on iodine and the thyroid? Again second-hand advice from a ghost.
I said almost everything about the post is “wrong and potentially dangerous.” I interviewed a board certified endocrinologist.
Hope you didn’t argue with your doctor about needing additional iodine, waste money more on testing, and I hope you didn’t take iodine to kill off non-existent bacteria and viruses that were not harming your thyroid because the post was just for fun!
There is totally merit in that, right?
How about the jade egg? GOOP said I was “strangely confident” for pointing out A) the jade eggthusiast didn’t know what the **** she was talking about regarding the pelvic floor muscles and B) a porous rock could introduce oxygen into the vagina which has been proven to be a critical step in development of toxic shock syndrome.
What is science when you have an “ancient therapy?” I’d also like to point of that GOOP has never actually offered proof that is an ancient therapy, but facts are irrelevant. Maybe there will be a rating scale for ancient therapies next year?
Regardless, being “ancient” doesn’t mean it has value. In “ancient” times people believed in evil humors and that tuberculosis was caused by vampires. I like my therapies post-germ theory.
What about the GOOP post on goat’s milk for parasites?
I called it stupid and dangerous (which it is), but GOOP believes that goat’s milk for non-existent parasites that can only be found by a naturopath who also believes that syphilis is a parasite is speculative, but promising.
It’s only promising for stupidity, bloat, food borne illness and for wasting money on non indicated testing.
By GOOP’s metric any untested, bullshit hypothesis is promising.
That’s not how it works. That is not how any of this works,
To Gwyneth Paltrow and GOOP I say you should be ashamed of yourselves. You so proudly touted your site JUST LAST YEAR as being so empowering and intuitive that women could clearly take away the right information for their health and yet here you are having to go back and point out for these same women that most of these posts have no science and many were just a joke.
Do you think women are lemmings? Because it is totally looking more and more like you have been herding them to a ledge for money, like Disney executives. You do know that lemmings didn’t end up jumping over the cliff on purpose, they were pushed.
You used your massive international platform to push fake therapies and make-believe on women under the guise of “conversations,” not to empower but to sell products and books. When I pointed out that these ideas and therapies were at best useless and fringe but potentially very harmful you leveraged that same international platform to accuse me of medical myopia and not trusting women. You accused me of ridiculing women.
No I haven’t forgotten and yes I’m pissed.
Ethical people don’t write fairy tales and pass them off as medical advice, which is what the Medical ****ing Medium does. And you, Gwyneth Paltrow, HELPED HIM SELL BOOKS. Now it was just all in fun? You mean apricots can’t tell time?
Color me shocked.
Me pointing out that many of the health ideas and products on GOOP are bespoke bullshit doesn’t make me a critic it makes me correct. The fact that GOOP is retroactively trying to cover their asses in an effort to seem more respectable is the ultimate in gas lighting. It is clear that it has been GOOP and Paltrow who have been ridiculing women while they have been laughing all the way to the bank.
Perhaps ultra fringe isn’t selling quite as well? Maybe the investors are worried about lawsuits from women who overdose on iodine or get a food born illness from raw milk? Maybe the new money realizes the truth, that the Venn diagram of entertainment and health care looks like this:
As far as I can tell with the GOOP rating system “enjoyment” means second-hand information from a ghost; “ancient” is code for biologically implausible, but sells well; and “speculative, but promising” is the fringe hypothesis of a naturopath or “Integrative” doctor. I am pretty sure we won’t see too many “backed by science” posts because there aren’t many complementary products to sell alongside in the GOOP shoppe.
I wished I’d asked “the experts” at In GOOP Health if bringing yourself back from being dead by love from your dead brain was a “backed by science” thing or just “speculative, but promising?” Medicine is kind of fun when words don’t mean anything!
I wonder what rating the GOOP post on the link between bras and breast cancer will get? Will it be “promising” despite the lack of science and the studies that clearly show otherwise or just for fun?
Because scaring women about breast cancer? Well, there is real merit in that.
