John Chuckman
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE ON CBC NEWS
“Goop has exploited the medical establishment's failures on women's health
“The wellness industry taps into — and profits from — women's frustration with conventional medical treatment”
It is not a new phenomenon.
Remember "snake oil" and old medicine wagons?
This has become really big today because of the reach of the Internet.
Millennialist attitudes also play a role with expectations that are often little more than fantasy, and a lot of those attitudes in part result from a generation raised with a press which has stopped doing its job, substituting costless gossip and attitudes for expensive-to-provide facts.
The Internet makes it possible for us to hear about nonsense we once maybe didn't hear about. And its slick advertising and marketing, reaching everywhere, offer promises which minds grounded in reality should only laugh at.
Contrary to the writer’s assertion, I am sure Goop and a hundred enterprises like it have nothing to do with failures of medicine to deal with women’s health concerns.
It may come as a surprise to some, but there is simply a lot we do not know yet. There are lots of health matters we do not understand and really cannot help. Science just patiently carries on trying to find the answers. That is the only way it can function. It is like the proverbial mill which grinds slowly but exceedingly finely.
Once scientists do learn something, what they find often changes lives. Why, it was only in recent decades, we've discovered that stomach ulcers are a bacterial infection that can be cured with certain anti-biotics. For all my life before that there was empty talk of avoiding stress and drinking milk. You can see the assumption in scenes from movies of the 1950s and 60s. And just so with hundreds of health matters.
What also is revealed with phenomena like the growth of Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop empire is how many weak and suggestible minds we actually have in society, many of them with more money than they know what to do with. Like “the poor” of which Jesus spoke in the New Testament, they are always there. We just didn’t know about them.
Folks like Gwyneth Paltrow have always been with us, too. Exploiters, whether conscious or unconscious, ready to make money on all the foolish notions people have.
They are everywhere. In the finance industry. Selling used cars. Bible-thumping tent preachers. And they feature quite large in our politics.
However, if people want to waste their money on this kind of stuff, I think they are entitled to do so, just so long as there are no poisons or direct harms involved. We can't have a nanny state making everything "just right."
It is truly unfair and wrong to say that science has failed women’s health concerns. I think that just as wrong as Gwyneth Paltrow’s pitch.
