The woman who gave the world the yoni jade egg and the This Smells Like My Vagina Candle now wants to bring back cruises. As in, sticking a bunch of people on a floating petri dish.
Goop founder and renowned woo-woo peddler Gwyneth Paltrow has announced the first Goop cruise, where you can hang out with her.
Goop at Sea is promising an “incredible roster of cutting-edge doctors, practitioners and thought leaders”, and Goop’s “very best healers” to bring you the “ultimate wellness experience at sea”.
Paltrow needs some healing herself, she revealed last week, after she “went totally off the rails” during lockdown. She said she lost her shit so badly she even ate bread. And she drank not one but two cocktails every night.
“I mean, who drinks multiple drinks seven nights a week?” she wondered. Who, indeed.
Goopy Paltrow’s an easy target. She took hippy dippy wellness ideas steeped in pseudoscience and turned them into a business worth quarter of a billion dollars. The media love her because she’s famous, photogenic, and she talks about fannies.
She’s played a big part in shifting “wellness” into the mainstream. Shaping its image as harmless. Making it beautiful. And removing the distinction between science and bullshit. Which is particularly dangerous in the middle of a global pandemic.
She’s already been lightly smacked down by the head of NHS England, Professor Stephen Powis, for her coronavirus advice.
Paltrow had COVID-19 last year, with “some long-tail fatigue and brain fog”. She said kombucha, kimchi and keto were the answer, along with infrared saunas. (If you can’t afford thousands of dollars for a sauna, don’t fret. It’s more quackery.)
Much of the gunk on Goop is harmless, except to the credit card. But the website has a whole section on “immunity”.
Among the dross it lists homeopathic tablets called “Cold Crush”. Cold Crush’s ingredients include belladonna, also known as deadly nightshade, and nux vomica, a potentially fatal mixture including strychnine.
Which’d be a worry if there was enough of these toxins in there to do anything at all. Homeopathy is based on the notion that the more diluted a substance, the more powerful it is. There are many earnest treatises on why homoeopathy is hogwash, but perhaps the best explanation can be found in this Mitchell and Webb skit.
The homeopathy tablets are dangerous in a way the vagina candle is not.
There is a long history of homeopathists claiming they can produce alternatives to vaccines (they can’t). There’s also a long history of homeopathy trying to discredit medical science. And there’s also this disgraceful situation here in Australia where homeopathic treatments with vague promises couched in health-adjacent language can sit in chemists alongside proven medicines.
They get the imprimatur of the white coats.
As India suffers in the grip of COVID-19, homeopathy and other types of quackery are being promoted as treatments or cures. Here in Australia, a large online supplier of homeopathic junk claims India’s (previously) low infection rates were thanks to homeopathy.
The “wellness” industry is often well-intentioned, frequently ditzy, and sometimes useful. But promoting anything that is trying to take the place of proven medicine is downright dangerous bullshit.
It’s hard to see pseudoscience promotion has harmless when it seeks to undermine trust in medical science. The wellness industry relies on selling itself as an alternative to Big Pharma, along with notions that healthcare is only interested in us when we are sick – so there’s no incentive to make us better.
You can’t claim that science is wrong and that medicine is simply what profits the Big Corporations without undermining confidence when it matters. Any individual product might be harmless baloney in terms of its effects on our well-being, but every product is harmful when it’s marketed against a scientific understanding of reality. Prayer is harmless too, except when people think it’s actually going to cure something.
those nasty Big Pharma corporations (and they are nasty) are only interested in us when we’re sick – but the “wellness” industry makes billions selling snake oil to us, both when we’re sick AND when we’re well … but’s it not like they are in it for the money
“Imagine Big Pharma but if they didn’t have to go through scientific investigation or the peer review process, was none of the heavy regulation, and could advertise directly to the consumer.”
The wellness industry is what Big Pharma would be if they were able to act without restraint!
Q: “Why are complementary/alternative concoctions available in the supermarket and over the counter?”
A: “Because if they worked they’d be called medicine.”
The price of the stuff is sky high yet the ingredients, mainly aqua & flavouring, ARE extremely cheap.
Blackmores made big buck$ selling delusion, not unlike religions.
Big pharma is itself dangerous. It has an unhealthy degree of influence over doctors via its sponsored convention junkets, lucrative offers to present papers and its ability to guide the outcomes of seemingly independant research. I really think we need to investigate this influence as I think too many doctors are making diagnoses of expensive medicine which are designed to sustain cronic diseases, and hence profits, rather attempt to cure people. As a lifelong asthmatic I am becoming very cynical about big pharma and very open to the possibility that it is a corrupting influence, possibly even criminally so.
Yes, Michael.
Put simply, Big Pharma has succeeded in eliminating the distinction between science and bullshit.
Very sad for medical science (and medical practitioners) and human well-being.
The pandemic has been a great testing ground for enhancing and further monetising this phenomenon.
Its always seemed to me that homeopathists suffer from dilutions of grandeur.
So over ‘Paltrow/Zuckerberg/Bezos/‘ hyper-, capitalism’ self-absorbed,destructive’ zillionaires!!!!!what a criminal waste of superior neutrons.
If the ‘neutrons‘ were really superior the vessels in which they are stuck are not much cop.