Don’t watch Goop Lab without reading this
I’ve been pondering a lot lately about the place of Gwyneth Paltrow’s new show Goop Lab in the wellness world. When I saw the preview on my Netflix app, I’ll admit that I was intrigued and quickly dove in. On the outside, it’s possible to see the show as perfect advertising for Goop. I won’t deny that it’s part of a machine that is making Paltrow and her company big bucks.
However, the content is curious and asks some questions I think are vital right now. Questions around health, healing, intention and new therapies. And it isn’t all totally on the margins. Wim Hof breathing (episode 2) was a slide at a recent continuing education course I did with two well known, reputable, researchers from UCSF and UCLA.
I’m also frustrated and upset that the women I work with have often been dismissed for asking legitimate questions of their healthcare practitioners like
“Do you think diet or nutrition could help with ______?”
Or
“I’d like a complete look at my thyroid because my fatigue and brain fog isn’t normal, Can you order those tests, please?”
The answers they receive are usually dismissive and stem from a hierarchical view of medicine. That the doctor knows best and they should just trust his/her authority and knowledge. Denying the innate agency we have over our bodies, inner world and health.
To be fair, there are good practitioners in the field who are doing medicine differently. I still remember my own primary care doctor when I was 18 encouraging me to put little notes under my pillow asking for insight into why I was feeling so bad. That happened right along MRIs and labs. He was completely supportive of pursuing nutrition and alternative therapies alongside his care.
There are many articles circulating on the internet criticizing the show. The New Yorker wrote:
“The Goop Lab, lowbrow TV with high production values, is the most unsettling kind of sponcon.”
However, the most thoughtful opinion I have read, and encourage you to read, is an article from Elisa Albert and Jennifer Block. They write:
“To be clear, we aren’t looking to Goop for scientific rigor (or political consciousness, for that matter). But it’s condescending to suggest that if we are interested in having agency over our bodies, if we are open to experiencing heightened states of awareness and emotion, if we are amazed by and eager to learn more about the possibilities of touch and intention and energy, and if we’d like to do everything within our power to stay out of doctors’ offices, we are somehow privileged morons who deserve an intellectual (read: patriarchal) beat-down. Openness to intuitive measures that might help us avoid or ameliorate chronic despair and disease does not make us flat-earthers.”
Their article is poignant and thoughtful. Their ultimate invocation is that:
“We’ll begin to demand that our complex and (still!) mysterious physiologies are treated with respect, dignity, and humility in the realms of medicine and science.”
To me, that’s something to stand up for. And if, the Goop Lab, even in its imperfection can call us to that. Then, I’ll take it.
In health,
Antonella
