8: Taking Dr. Christiane Northrup Seriously (w/ Professor Jacqueline Antonovich)
As Christiane Northrup’s social media feed descends even further into the delusional zone — this week she retweeted explicitly identified QAnon content — we ask Professor Jacqueline Antonovich of Nursing Clio about the history of charisma, magic, and entrepreneurship in women’s wellness. When asked if she was surprised by Northrup’s conspirituality spiral, Antonovich was clear: “Not at all.” She carefully unpacks why.
We also look at the role of media in conspiritual thinking and discuss Northup’s enthusiastic endorsement of the movement to “make Americans free again” by becoming single-issue voters—the issue being vaccines.
Show Notes
Marshall McLuhan | The medium is the message
How Can the Press Best Serve a Democratic Society?
In 1947, the press reported on the Hutchins Commission report
Trump, QAnon and an impending judgment day: Behind the Facebook-fueled rise of The Epoch Times
Trump’s New Favorite Channel Employs Kremlin-Paid Journalist
Hundreds of hyperpartisan sites are masquerading as local news. This map shows if there’s one near you.
Make Americans Free Again | The New Normal: Citizens In Charge
Jacqueline Antonovich | Nursing Clio
Northrup’s retweet of a QAnon account boosting the red shoe conspiracy
Gilman’s “Yellow Wallpaper“
Ricki Lake’s “Business of Being Born“
On Lydia Pinkham
On Mary Putnam Jacoby
Sarah Swedburg on Louise Hay
How New Age Guru Louise Hay Harmed a Generation of Gay Men
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As Christiane Northrup's social media feed descends even further into the delusional zone, this week she retweeted explicitly identified QAnon content, we asked Professor Jacqueline Antonovich of Nursing Clio about the history of charisma, magic, and entrepreneurship in women's wellness.
When we asked if she was surprised by Northrup's conspirituality spiral, Antonovich was clear, not at all.
She carefully unpacks why for us.
We're also going to look at the role of media in conspiritual thinking and discuss Northrop's enthusiastic endorsement of the movement to make Americans free again by becoming single-issue voters.
That single issue?
vaccines.
We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us, wrote Marshall McLuhan in his long celebrated and admittedly difficult 1964 book, Understanding Media.
In the book, he writes that two technological revolutions changed how we perceive the world.
The printing press, which forced the way that we think to be confined to evenly spaced text, read left to right on the page.
And in fact, for a while, there were no spaces between words to mimic how thoughts naturally flow.
The other was electricity, which brought with it all the forms of media we consume today, such as television, radio in its evolution, podcasts, and computers.
Unfortunately, he died before he could see the ramifications of the internet.
McLuhan felt that media presented electrically could potentially eliminate the bounds of space and time, And once again return us to thinking in circles instead of the linear progression of stories told on the page.
The medium is the message, indeed, but also what we become, what we behold.
This was true when Gutenberg invented the printing press.
There was no media as we understand it now.
Anyone could hire a printing press to produce leaflets and manuscripts.
There were no fact checkers to ensure that wherever it was printed, passed an ideological purity test.
Whoever could afford to produce and distribute their writing had an edge.
In a 2012 essay in his own Lapham's Quarterly, the writer Lewis Lapham regards the internet as "the best and brightest machine ever made by man." He also notes that the internet is still a toy.
Language itself, well, who knows how long that actually took to evolve.
But from the clay tablets that we started writing on, it took another 3,300 years to reach the codex.
More Movable type took another 1,150 years.
And 532 years later, we achieved the internet, which is now roughly a half century old.
But even the widespread usage of the internet, we're still in the early part of the third decade.
At each interval, the media has been a representation of what humans are experiencing at that moment.
Even McLuhan knew that media were make-happen agents, more than make-aware agents.
So I'm not sure where we got this notion of a purely objective, unbiased media.
That seems more a creation of the imagination to pit one side against the other than any fair and balanced fact.
In this week's New Yorker, Michael Lu writes about a 1943 commission of media experts and academics who were trying to assess the role of journalism in American democracy.
He writes, Commission members worried about the forces of division in American society, the power of tribalism to warp political debate, and the press's role in provoking discord.
Americans were inhabiting different worlds of fact and judgment.
At the time, media consisted of print, radio, and television, though as the channels were few, the funnel into American homes was rather narrow.
The Commission met 17 times over a number of years to produce a report in which they identified five essential mandates for the press that were integral to a functioning democracy.
And they were to provide a truthful, comprehensive, and intelligent account of the day's events.
To furnish a forum for discussion of all the important viewpoints and interests in the society.
To offer a representative picture of society and its various groups.
To educate the public on the ideals toward which the community should strive.
And to make information available to everybody.
The commission also found that the press failed on every single account, mostly because journalists were forced to focus on novel and sensational stories due to market pressures.
This report was published in 1947.
So media has never been perfect, and yet it has always been essential.
There are still many organizations that focus too much on the novel and sensational, but what I fear more than their clickbait is their absence.
In this conspirituality circuit we discuss on this podcast, I see influencers sharing stories by the Epoch Times, which is the media arm of the Falun Gong religious movement.
While the group protesting in New York's Union Square and elsewhere presents itself as a meditative spiritual outfit, take that as seriously as Scientologists reading your stress levels with a soup can.
Falun Gong's founder, Li Hongzhi, He claims that aliens infected human minds in the 20th century and invented computers, and that both feminism and homosexuality are sins.
He also claims he can walk through walls and levitate.
Now, this same group pumped $10 million into pro-Trump ads on Facebook, and it has produced the most pro-Trump advertising online anywhere, even more than the Trump campaign.
Wow.
Then there's One America News Network, Trump's current favorite media outlet.
Many of the talking points we discuss on this show, such as 5G and anti-vax campaigns, make their way into social media via OAN.
The company was founded by Robert Herring Sr., who has explicitly ordered pro-Trump and anti-abortion stories on his network.
He's also directed his reporters to minimize information about Russian interference in the U.S.
elections, which makes sense given that one of the network's major personalities, Christiane Ruiz, last worked for Sputnik, which is the Kremlin's official propaganda outlet.
Recent research for Columbia University identified 429 websites that currently advertise themselves to be local news outlets.
Of those 429, Eight are liberal.
We've endured five years of attacks on the mainstream media by the loudest voice on Twitter, and that started well before he was in office.
Trump's influence is abundantly apparent right now, especially in all of those YouTube journalists that are exposing the secrets about COVID-19.
I repeat this over and over when I'm talking to people on social media.
There is no such thing as the mainstream media.
That is an invention.
It's not real.
The acronym MSM is simply another buzzword that's shorthand for anything I don't believe in.
While journalists should never get a free pass for their transgressions, they are the only layer between authoritarian propaganda and the public.
Now, as with the founding of the printing press, Everyone has a media channel right now.
And as we cover week by week, plenty of influential people have no regard for where their information is sourced.
They take no responsibility for their words, and if they're shown to be wrong, they only double down by blocking descending voices.
At least the old guard, like the New York Times, prints retractions and apologizes.
We've entered what Michael Lu writes in the understatement of the year, a disorienting, destabilizing moment for members of the press.
But I'll say this, if you think that the work that ProPublica is doing is akin to what David Icke is doing, then you have problems in your understanding of what media is.
I'll add London Real and whatever else to that.
Now, at least we can be comforted by the fact that none of this is new.
The 15th century Illuminati believed that signs of the devil were encoded in books printed on Gutenberg's press.
Today, wearing red shoes on Twitter is your passport into the twisted world of QAnon.
We've made it through one secret society, and we're surely likely to make it through another.
But I do worry about what we're going to lose along the way.
Yeah, well done, Derek.
I'm so glad you started with McLuhan, speaking as somebody from his hometown.
He's an icon here in Toronto.
Where I went to school at U of T, I think there's statues of him all over.
And one of the things that I think he would have been incredibly interested in is the kind of, that his prediction around or his excavation of this concern that that his prediction around or his excavation of this concern that preceded the development of text that somehow if we started writing things down, we would be offloading our
He described really poignantly how coming out of oral histories and oral cultures, that there was a fear of writing, especially amongst those who protected that knowledge, that somehow we would start forgetting how to learn, we would forget how to remember.
And one of the things that is just incredible to me day by day is how the print that we see in social media and the Internet more generally, it never disappears.
Nothing ever disappears.
And in some way, we have access to incredible cultural memory.
But on the other hand, there's very, very little accountability, as you said, Derek, for what's said.
It's almost as if print in online forums Uh, is equally erasable, not because it can't be retrieved, but because there's always more print being added.
And that's really strange.
Uh, and, and I posted to Facebook this week that it's one of the weirdest things about covering conspiritualists is that of course there are no retractions.
You know, if, if something's proven to be wrong, if something's proven to be wrong, it just sort of the next thing piles on top.
Uh, and so, yeah, I'm sure, I'm sure Marshall would have a lot to say about that.
Well it's also I began my training as a news journalist when I graduated college and I didn't stick with that because honestly I just enjoyed entertainment writing more and I went into music journalism for a decade but having some training and having worked in news for a few years through college and out just
The lack of understanding about what people are doing and the way it's being presented is just super frustrating, especially when it is the only layer between complete authoritarian rule and us right now.
And I really, I just, I attribute it to living in a culture of privilege and not understanding the stakes.
Because that's everything that I see.
It's just that I mean, Julian, you could probably speak to that being in an apartheid living, growing up in an apartheid state, and not understanding that what we're actually losing right now is a lot more than our freedom to not wear a mask or any of these things we're talking about.
Yeah, I'll never forget my first few years living in this country, there was a local election.
And I didn't really understand about local elections, having grown up in a country where there were no free elections.
There were white people got to vote.
We had national elections, but there wasn't as much involvement in the political process.
And I asked the guy who I hung out with at the coffee shop, what are some of the issues?
And he said, well, there's one issue I really want to make sure I vote on, which is that they're trying to force us to wear helmets when we ride motorcycles.
And that is an infringement of my freedom.
I remember sitting there, I was probably like 21, 22, just my mind was just blown and this is just an extension of that.
I think everyone would benefit.
One of the hardest parts about being a local news reporter is all of the zoning board and school board meetings I had to attend to try to drum up stories and watching people from the town Talk to the elected representatives about how mad they were that when the garbage men collected their garbage, sometimes the garbage cans would be put back sideways or on the ground and not stood up perfectly.
And just to understand what actually happens and how important local news is beyond that.
It's just our lack of civic understanding and the lack of civics that we have growing up.
We're watching the results of that right now.
Along with that very privileged sort of cluelessness about so much of what really goes on in the world and everything, the mainstream media, like how is news produced?
What is truth?
What are the stakes actually?
So along those lines, let's go to this week in conspirituality for me.
Back to Christiane Northrup.
In her Great Awakening videos over this past week, Northrup has reliably always repeated one new and enthusiastic refrain.
In fact, it was even part of the title of two out of the four of her videos I looked at from the last week or so.
She is exhorting her half a million Facebook followers to join Dr. Pam Popper's Make Americans Free Again campaign, where she says we can have power As one issue voters.
So first, let's talk about Pam Popper a little bit.
She has 87,000 followers on YouTube and makes news report style videos every few days.
She uses examples of COVID testing and reporting mistakes or confusions as evidence to assert a conspiracy around inflating numbers for the purpose of controlling and terrorizing the population.
Of course, so as to impose arbitrary rules upon us.
She really enjoys referring to Emperor Newsome and Cuomo as if they are dictatorial figures robbing us of our civil liberties.
At one point, Popper compares California state recommendations for masks during wildfires.
to COVID-19 recommendations, citing what she sees as obvious contradictions regarding people with heart or breathing conditions being told not to wear masks during wildfires because that would be dangerous for them.
Obviously, wildfires and the threat of a global pandemic are exactly the same thing.
She says, if you don't want to get lung disease, you don't want to wear a mask and breathe in all that carbon dioxide.
So Pam Harper's audience is mostly in the U.S.
But she says we're happy to share resources with anyone in foreign countries who wants to join in.
Remember, the idea is to form the biggest group of people surrounding a single issue.
So we can just overwhelm the system with lawsuits and protests and civil disobedience and voting blocks to get rid of politicians we want to get rid of and vote in the ones who support what we support.
Says Popper.
We're working very hard to change this despotic mess, this dystopian nightmare we're living under.
How are we going to do that?
Via the website that Northrop is also directing people towards.
So I thought I would check this out.
The very new MakeAmericansFreeAgain.com website really only has three visible functions.
The first is to deliver the message that by focusing only on one candidate's position, The question of vaccines, we can make our voting choices.
The second is to encourage people to begin the process of learning how to homeschool their kids, so as to avoid vaccines and limit the traumatizing and unnecessary social distancing and mask wearing measures that are going on right now under COVID-19.
Of course, you can join the email list to find out more about both or either of these topics.
The third function of the website is to drive traffic to Pam Popper's personal Wellness Forum Health website, which is where things get kind of interesting.
Wellness Forum Health generates income in a variety of ways.
Now here we have the overlap that we've been looking at the whole time, right?
She has a lot of gluten-free health food products, smoothie mixes, prepackaged You know, ingredients so that you can bake your own bread, you can make your own desserts, soup powders, as well as natural bathroom supplies, so soaps and shampoos and toothpaste and the like.
The Cadillac, in terms of the products she sells, is water filtration systems, ranging from between $80 to $800 for showers, faucets, or for the whole house.
So you start to get the picture here that wellness is really about specific dietary requirements and ways in which to filter your food.
Under a tab on the website called Athletics, wouldn't you know it, Hot Yoga, with a quote from Hippocrates, give me a fever and I can cure anything.
I love his online classes.
I turn up the heat in here and wow, yeah.
Is Popper a naturopath or a therapist or an osteopath or something?
It's not entirely clear.
She does offer some cognitive behavioral therapy.
I haven't dug into that yet to see what her credentials are with regard to that.
Nowhere is it prominently displayed.
A lot of it seems to be around diet, so I'm wondering if she's a dietician.
Again, it's not really clearly mapped out.
Are the products all her own?
Are they under her brand?
It's a PDF and really laid out like a menu where you're ordering the ingredients for specific dishes.
So it seems that it's her recipes.
I don't know if it's under her label or not.
None of that is clear.
Right.
Yeah.
But it's really the Wellness Forum Institute health programs that appear to bring in the big bucks.
She has multiple levels of monthly payment for services like health planning and coaching, weight loss, You guys heard about this?
No.
and live streaming events that you get access to depending on where you join.
And at the top of the pyramid, she has health professional training diplomas.
The costs for any of this stuff range between $100 and $1,000 a year.
Now, as an interesting aside, one of Dr. Parper's videos mentioned the Giant Eagle lawsuits.
You guys heard about this?
No.
So she directed her viewers to check out Peggy Hall.
It turns out there were 34 lawsuits against a grocery chain in Pennsylvania called Giant Eagle.
All for unlawfully requiring the wearing of a mask while shopping.
Oh.
Now, many of these cases look like they're from people with legitimate health reasons for not wearing a mask.
And the claims are that they were mistreated by Giant Eagle staff.
So let's give them the benefit of the doubt.
Maybe this is a set of lawsuits around discrimination against disability.
But when we look up Peggy Hall, we find that with 40,000 YouTube subscribers, she has almost 100,000 views on a video called, No Mask, No Problem.
Here, Ms.
Hall instructs viewers on how to use a legal loophole argument to resist the tyranny of masks and force stores to let you in without one.
The key way to do so, tell them you have a medical exemption, They can't ask you what it is or you can sue them.
Presumably, people with heart or lung illness in Peggy Hall's universe would want to be in public spaces at greater risk with no masks at all as the pandemic hits critical mass this week.
Really crazy.
In another video, How to Shop Without a Mask, which has 30,000 views, Hall says this.
It's not about the mask.
I don't do this work.
Because I care about shopping at Costco without a mask.
I do this work because I care about living in a free society in which I can make my own health choices.
I do this work because of the elderly who are being abused under a kind of imprisonment in nursing homes and are not able to see their loved ones.
This is where my heart breaks.
So we see how from the faulty and conspiracy-based assumptions that Hall and Popper and Northrop all share that COVID-19 is largely a fabricated psyop designed to provoke fear and justify draconian control.
All of these counterproductive and dangerous distortions of reality in the name of a kind of co-opted resistance and struggle for freedom leads to a funnel driving our one-issue voters into the arms of the now growing legion of Trump QAnon candidates itching to get into power.
Okay, I've got I've got a couple of questions.
So, so, so, I mean, one issue voting is nothing new.
People will use abortion as a litmus test or guns, but use the Second Amendment as a litmus test or, you know, freedom, freedom of religious expression, or even things like charter schools versus the, you know, the capacity to the right to homeschool or to be funded to homeschool.
But is Popper and therefore Northrop, are they saying that just for now or for November that their single issue is vaccines and that's going to be their threshold or their litmus test?
They're not being clear about any of that.
Essentially, they're just saying we want to create this powerful bloc who are organized around this one issue.
And the way they frame the question specifically is you should ask any politician, do you support my right To have control over what gets injected into my body or my children's body.
Just that.
Right.
They're not saying anything else beyond that.
But it does seem to be very much organized around the coming election.
Right.
And then about homeschooling, did you see anything in Popper's materials that identified any kind of political or religious agenda around the values of homeschooling?
No.
No, I mean, again, it's a very new website.
Right.
And the homeschooling part was the most limited in terms of what's already up there.
And mostly it was reasons to homeschool.
You know, kids learn better.
There's less competition.
And then you'll get away with not having the mandatory vaccine and not having to deal with masks.
Right.
I mean, there's so much.
Up in the air about that.
I mean, none of those things are, there's no consensus around any of those issues, obviously, but I'm, I'm really, I'm interested in homeschooling would limit the social isolation of the children that are homeschooled is a very strange argument.
It would apply to very few people.
Um, I mean, I mean, I were looking, we don't know yet in, in Toronto or in Ontario here, uh, what our school, Uh, for September is going to look like for our sons who are four and seven.
Um, but you know, there's no really good answer.
If, if, if we homeschool them, they're isolated, uh, from their own, from their own friends.
If we send them to school with distancing measures, uh, there's strangeness and, and alienation and, and you know, a kind of hyper vigilance involved with that.
So yeah, it's terrible.
It's terrible all the way around.
So, um, That's interesting.
I haven't heard that angle yet, that to be pro-homeschooling.
Well, also that would slide into, you know, we don't generally want our children to be indoctrinated by the state, right?
Exactly.
Right.
So not just mandatory vaccines, there's got to be other things that Popper would appreciate her children not learning or other people's children not learning.
Yeah, probably some perception that there's a liberal agenda that they're going to have imposed on them.
Yeah, yeah, maybe.
Wow.
Given her love for the elderly, can you talk a little bit about the page on her website where she discusses about the problems that happened in the first place systemically that allowed the coronavirus to ravage nursing homes around the country?
I'm sure she really cares about that.
Yeah, none of that.
None of that, of course.
I mean, I dug into quite a bunch of different stuff this week.
It's hard to even choose.
But this notion that what really breaks her heart, and this was actually Peggy Hall, is that not only the elderly, but she also even mentions people who are in group homes, people who, for various reasons, are unable to see their loved ones, really for their own protection.
I don't really have a news item for this week.
It's more thematic.
And what I'd like to do is speak about the notion of betrayal in the discourse and in the figures that we're looking at.
One of the amazing stories that you'll hear Professor Antonovich recount in our interview is the story of how Louise Hay interacted with the very diverse gay community during the height of the AIDS epidemic.
She explained, I didn't know this, that Hay had this split message.
She did, and she said two very different things.
And I was familiar with one part of this, and in fact, In an interview that I think we'll post next week that I did with my colleague Jeevana Heyman, the founder of Accessible Yoga, the subject will be ableism in conspirituality.
He was describing that He had come to San Francisco to come out as a young man and to have fun.
And that, of course, he arrived during the height of the epidemic.
And he told me that many of his fellow activists at the time were disgusted by the fact that Louise Hay brought this victim-blaming discourse to the disease.
Her whole thing is based upon the premise that belief becomes thought.
And thought becomes feeling and feeling becomes biology.
And that's that theme is is basically, you know, it tracks back as as you showed, Julian, in a couple of episodes back to Mary Baker Eddy.
And it tracks forward as well through Northrop to people like Kelly Brogan.
So Hay would characterize AIDS as a disease of self-hatred.
And then she would suggest that if if gay men would only stop hating themselves, they wouldn't be getting sick.
And it's just a disgusting argument.
It's delusional, but it also makes homophobia socially acceptable, in a way, and even spiritualized amongst a certain demographic.
I think it lets people who think of themselves as nice people hate gay people in some ultimately passive-aggressive way.
And one thing that Jivan has said was that Hayes' argument wasn't all that different from more progressive Christian arguments, Which didn't focus necessarily on sin and hellfire, but did suggest that if gay men stopped being gay, they wouldn't be punished by God.
Okay, so about the betrayal part.
Professor Antonovich explains that Hayes' thinly veiled hatred was complicated by the fact that she also preached a very compelling and powerful gospel of radical self-acceptance.
Here was this woman who in the 1980s was in her 50s or 60s or something like that, and she might have been the only woman of that age with a mass media platform, with a kind of maternal bearing, who would be able to say to a whole generation of gay men, you really deserve to love yourself.
You really deserve to accept yourself completely.
And so these two messages together make an incredibly complicated combination because If the young gay man is listening to her, he's supposed to accept himself, but then contained within that acceptance is the thorn of realizing that he is to blame either for his own illness or for his vulnerability or for the fact that people are dying around him.
So it's both a gift and a threat at the same time.
Radically love yourself, which can feel like a liberating message, but then also recognize that if you're ill or depressed or anxious, Or if people are dropping dead around you, it's because you haven't accepted yourself.
So everything is up to you.
And the gaslighting part of this contradiction really ties people up in emotional knots.
And it has nothing to do with the ravages of a virus that strikes unequally amongst the human population.
So I think that sounds familiar.
So that's one example of betrayal.
To go back to Northrup, I'd like to use some of her material as a second example, especially the incredible about face that she takes historically.
Here's somebody who emerges as a warrior against what she calls medical patriarchy, and she has real skin in the game.
She realizes after participating in countless harsh, intervention-heavy childbirths, After seeing hundreds of male babies strapped to the circumstrance so that she could circumcise them, she sees the light.
She comes to Jesus, or Goddess, and she understands that there is a barbarity to certain unquestioned medical practices, that they are unfair, that
the they objectify the body and and that also that there's this need for things to be clean and orderly in clinical settings that for the most part is targeted at the bodies of women so so for her to go on in the middle of a pandemic when people when women especially are working harder than ever before uh because our divisions of domestic labor are still unequal
And then to go on and boost one charismatic male figure after another for their pseudoscience, like when we see her fawning all over Andrew Wakefield or talking about what a dreamboat Zach Bush is, when she shares posts from Tony Robbins, who's a sex offender, or the anti-vax guy Del Bigtree.
And meanwhile, there's not a single practicing women's medicine figure whose work she is boosting.
Like, who does she boost instead amongst women?
She boosts channelers and spirit mediums who believe they're talking to the Galactic Federation about pedophile lizards.
So this brings up the betrayal, this is my theme, of abdicating a lifelong responsibility and mission to improve the discourse around women's health, especially women's reproductive health.
And it seems to me like a selfish abdication because only Dr. Northrup is allowed to be a woman doctor on her page, it seems.
So the last example I have is really a meta example.
It's a structural critique of the overall rhythm of conspirituality, which I've kind of like hinted at this a number of times in previous episodes, but I'm just going to underline it here.
The rhythm of the entire conspirituality movement is rooted in betrayal.
Because what all of these figures do is they offer love, and then they offer terror, and then they cycle back and forth between these two things in ways that I've used the work of Alexandra Stein, for example, and her notions of disorganized attachment in cults to examine.
But the basic substructure is betrayal.
Like, love in one hand, terror in the other.
And, you know, it really Makes me wonder, what is going on in the hearts of people who are caught up in it?
Like, how much do people have to be hurting to be locked into this rhythm of emotional junk food?
To be, I mean, almost thrilled by this empty offer of mystical hope, but then also terrified by the fantasy that authoritarian control is lurking in face masks.
In every single one of Northrop's Great Awakening sermons, she's referring both to the abject horror of a kind of fantasized authoritarian rule of public health, and then also to the sublime inevitability of speaking with the angels.
And the only reason that this is not recognized as betrayal is that all of these people, Northrop, Bush, Brogan, Gee, they keep smiling.
They're really good at maintaining the performance of care.
So I was really privileged to interview Jacqueline Antonovich.
She's an assistant professor of history at Muhlenberg College.
Her current research focuses on women physicians, race, gender, and medical imperialism in the American West.
And she's also the creator and co-founder of an amazing site called Nursing Clio.
She received her PhD from the University of Michigan in 2018.
So this is our interview.
Professor Antonovich, thank you so much for taking the time.
I'm happy to be here.
Yeah, well, I wanted to start with a positionality observation and a question.
So over a few episodes, we are three men who are studying strains of conspirituality in the social media feeds of a beloved woman emeritus doctor.
Many of her followers will identify as feminist.
And given her enormous popularity, I don't feel like we're punching down, but At the same time, looking closely at a women's health icon is politically fraught, I think, for anybody, but maybe especially for us.
Now, you're speaking from a different position.
You do this professionally.
And I'm wondering, what are some best practices to bear in mind when critiquing the actions of a figure like this with care and respect?
Well, first of all, I think that's a really great question and a great perspective to come from.
And, you know, I'm a historian, so I'm going to come at this from the perspective of a historian who studies women and women's health.
And one of the things that I often tell my students when we're talking about historical figures is that it's incredibly important to take our historical actors seriously.
Right, and I think that works for contemporary actors as well.
It doesn't mean that you agree with them.
It doesn't mean that you are taking their position.
But it does mean that you try to seriously understand the logic from which people are coming from.
Right.
Because there is a logic to where people are coming from.
We tend to dismiss people that have ideas that we don't agree with as just, you know, being Looney Tunes, you know, or something like that.
But I think that you can't get past, if that's the position that you're coming from, then you can't get past that.
Right?
So trying to understand the logic from which people are coming from is really important.
And in terms of women's health, And again, speaking as a historian, taking our historical actor seriously is vital because there is, so this sort of mistrust of the medical education, mistrust of authority, has deep roots in our history of women's health, right?
So if I can just back up for a little bit, and if we think about prior to The mid 19th century, when women gave birth, they gave birth surrounded by women community members and a midwife, right?
What we call a social birth.
And then beginning in the mid-19th century, that's when male physicians started, in a United States context anyway, stepped into the picture.
Now it's important to complicate this.
This was something that many women were asking for, right?
They perceived that it would be safer if a physician was in attendance.
But that being said, that moment that male physicians sort of entered The realm of women's health, that's a point in which women started to lose their voice in their decision-making process, right?
And so then you think about things like, if you've ever read the Charlotte Perkins Gilman story, The Yellow Wallpaper.
I haven't, no.
Okay, so that's basically a story about a woman who, her husband, who was also a physician, and her physician's, her husband's brother was a physician, Believe that the main character is suffering from hysteria and possibly postpartum depression But you know that doesn't you know, we don't have that diagnosis at the time and so the cure for that is to put her up in a room where she cannot
Um, you know, she's not allowed to leave her room.
She's, um, you know, completely devoid of any agency.
Um, and then she ends up, I mean, spoiler alert, um, she ends up sort of going crazy and seeing, you know, images in the, in the yellow wallpaper, right?
Wow.
Is she separated from her baby as well?
Um, the baby doesn't really figure into the story.
It's been a while since I've read it, but yes.
So, so she's all alone.
Right.
And she's in this room, you know, she can't go outside and all of her decisions are made for her.
And it's so sort of slowly drives, you know, her mad.
Um, but hysteria was a real diagnosis and that, you know, was often attached to women by male physicians, uh, for a variety of, um, issues stemming from postpartum depression, regular depression, maybe being a little bit too mouthy or being too strong and independent.
You could also be suffering from hysteria So you get this moment in time where medical diagnoses are beginning to sort of cover a lot of different behavioral, you know, issues from women.
But this even continues.
It wasn't that long ago, in the 1950s, 60s, and even going up into the 1970s, that if you were a woman and you were suffering from, let's say, breast cancer, You know, that the physician would be having conversations with your husband.
Right.
And not yourself, right?
And even when we factor in race, it gets more fraught, right?
So going back to the time of the slave system, enslaved women getting experimented on by physicians and the famous case of Henrietta Lacks and later on in history where, you know, her HeLa cells are extracted or her cells are extracted and become HeLa cells without her consent.
And even up until today, we have lots of studies about physicians not believing black women and their pain, right?
So long story short, I think that throughout history, women like Dr. Northrup have been responding to issues of trust that women have had in the medical community.
And so I think it's important to come at it from that perspective in order to sort of understand what's going on.
Right.
And to take it seriously, as you say, because there's a wealth of history behind what she's been able to accomplish.
And, you know, she's built up this solid, you know, decades worth of OBGYN credentials and all of this clinical service.
And I imagine like a very, very winning bedside manner with her clients.
And she's done this all within the context of rebelling against some of what you've described and that she calls the dominator patriarchy in medicine.
And she does so while advocating for what she calls feminine intelligence.
And all of this is really hard won.
And one thing that I found really poignant in her account was the moment where she realizes, she writes about this in a couple of different places, the moment that she realizes That after circumcising hundreds of little boys as an obstetrician, she realizes this practice is barbaric as well.
It's not just the, you know, too many interventions in childbirth, but also what happens to children.
And that's just one example.
But I wanted to just to ask very generally about what kind of environment would she have been entering into in the field of women's medicine as she graduates from Dartmouth Medical in 1975?
Yes.
So that's really interesting.
And I wanted to get just really quickly back to your point about, you know, her sort of making this argument that she's intervening in sort of this patriarchal medical system.
Right.
She's not entirely wrong.
Right.
Especially if she's a graduate, you know, in the 1970s.
Right.
Where it was incredibly hard to be a woman physician, even in med school.
And, you know, and I think that's where a lot of these conspiracy theorists sort of are able to get a foothold in, right?
Because they're kernels of truth in what they're talking about, right?
And she's really good at that.
Right.
And then sort of spinning it out.
But to get back to your question, you know, whenever you ask me these questions, I'm always going to say, let's back up a little bit, right?
Right, right.
You know, just to give you a little bit of context, you know, the very first woman physician in the United States with a medical degree was all the way back in 18.
And it was a woman named Elizabeth Blackwell, who she graduated from Genova Medical College in New York.
And basically, she was sort of admitted as a joke.
But she, you know, got in anyway.
And from that point on, following her footsteps, there was a whole generation or two of women physicians in the United States.
And and that's partly because mid 19th century and all the way through, you know, pushing up to the 1915 1915 and the medical world was really unstable.
Right.
This is when you get the development of Different what we call medical sex, right?
We get things like homeopathy, we get things like chiropractic, we get osteopathy, and we get all sorts of different alternative medicines emerging during this time as a pushback against regular medicine, which was largely like bloodletting and mercury treatments.
And so within that alternative medicine field, these various fields, women physicians were really able to step in and become physicians.
And did they gravitate towards those alternative modalities that were competing for space with the conventional modalities?
They did, because at the time, the mid 19th century, if you recall what we called a regular physician, right?
And, you know, your, your regimen of treatment consisted of things like, as I mentioned before, bloodletting, and giving people a menagogues to make them vomit, and purgatives, you know, it also things to make a very You know, bowel movements, and we relied on a lot of mercury treatments.
Very harsh chemicals.
And so you have something like homeopathy that comes along and promises not only, you know, we're going to give you medicines that are not going to make you vomit or make you sick, right?
But that we're going to focus on treating the whole patient.
Wow.
And this was very attractive to women who wanted to enter the medical field.
And that's not to say that women didn't become regular physicians.
Right.
But that's also because a lot of these new medical feel or, you know, medical sex opening up, You know, we're more open to letting women in too, right?
So it sort of went both ways.
But I do also want to point out that, so women physicians, sort of the zenith of women physicians in the 20th century was the 1920s.
And for various reasons, because we started reforming our medical education system starting in the 1920s, those numbers went all the way down and they didn't recover until the 1970s.
And so that's sort of the, you know, that's where we place Dr. Northrup, right?
And it's sort of just when women are starting to return to medical school in larger numbers.
We've always had women physicians in the 20th century, but in the 1970s is when they start The numbers start bouncing back.
So there was something about the interwar period that opened up the doors for women physicians?
Did that have something to do with World War I nursing or something like that?
Yes.
So World War I, definitely there were more opportunities for women physicians, but they had been being trained Um, for decades before that.
Right.
Um, and they were in a lot of public health work.
They were in a lot of private practice.
Um, but World War I really did open up opportunities for women physicians to serve, not necessarily in the military, but things in like the Red Cross auxiliary, things like that.
Right.
Um, but these, but, but following the war opportunities for women physicians, Really declined.
That has a lot to do with how we reformed medical education.
Before, you could go get a medical degree at night, you could go part-time, you could stop and start, you could work your way through.
But, you know, beginning in the 1910s-ish, when we started reforming things and started adding residencies on there, attaching medical education to the universities, it became a lot harder for a woman to become a physician, right, and raise a family and do all of these things.
And so that's, you know, these numbers recover in the 1970s and that's the world that Dr. Northrup is stepping into.
And I will say one thing that they, that Dr. Northrup has in common with her earlier, you know, sort of women physician ancestors is that they were both butting up against sort of midwifery, right?
Oh, right.
So 19, so late 19th, century, early 20th century women physicians were really trying to distance themselves from midwives, these women who normally deliver babies.
Women physicians would be, would say things like, we are better than midwives because we're medically trained, right?
And that we can provide better care than these midwives.
So they really did that in a way to sort of try and push for their own professionalization.
And I just find it interesting that Northrop at the same time is pushing, you know, is in that world where natural health comes back.
Right, and women are starting to return to midwifery.
Right, you know, it makes me realize that I have to look back through her book and see what she has to say about midwifery, if anything, because that's a really standout point.
Because I imagine in the 1970s, as you say, that same tension is going to be prevalent.
Yeah, and I think that maybe that's one way that she is able to position herself in medicine as being woman friendly, right?
In that, you know, she, by recognizing and naming what she sees as patriarchal medicine, she can still exist within that system as sort of a rebel within the system.
Right.
Is that, you know what I mean?
Totally.
Yeah.
And, and, and, and just as a side note, now women outnumber men in medical schools and that just happened in the last couple of years.
Wow.
Yeah.
I mean, that's maybe well, well, we'll come back to that because part of what I feel reading through some of her literature is a critique that comes out of an older era.
I'm I mean, in my own life, my primary care physician is a woman.
I've had three specialists for various issues that are all women.
My family members are being cared for by women.
I don't think there's a male doctor actually in my extended family.
The statements that are made consistently about men who are in control just seem to be targeted at some other era.
So I find that very interesting.
But nonetheless, they seem to be still very powerful and resonant arguments.
Yeah, absolutely.
Now, the other thing that's happening in the 70s is the human potential movement.
And, you know, so in that vein, I wanted to note that Northrop lists a lot of inspirations.
One of them that stands out is Louise Hay.
And Northrop thanks Hay profusely in her best-selling book.
And she quotes Hay repeatedly on the axiom that thoughts become beliefs and beliefs become biology.
And it seems that Hay's You Can Heal Your Life lays down a kind of, which is 1984, lays down a kind of ideological groundwork that Northrop is able to fill in with medical details 15 years later in Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom.
Now, do you have thoughts about Hay and a health and wellness landscape in which her influence and her media platform play a central role?
I mean, I do.
I think Hay is a fascinating figure, right?
And I do want to say, and just sort of give a shout out, everything I know about Elizabeth Hay, I know from a historian named Sarah Swetberg, who wrote this incredible piece about her life in Nursing Clio, which is a blog that I edit.
Is it on the blog?
It's on the blog.
It is on the blog.
We can link to it in the show notes.
Great, great, absolutely.
But Hay was a metaphysical healer, as you said, right?
She began practicing at the First Church of Religious Science in the 1960s.
In 1976, she publishes this pamphlet called Heal Your Body.
And what I find particularly interesting about her, and again, this is in Dr. Swedberg's essay, is her work in the midst of the AIDS crisis, right?
As you said, Hay blames disease on behavior and negativity.
She doesn't blame AIDS on the virus, right?
She doesn't blame illness on bacteria or genetic disposition.
And so you can see how her work on AIDS might be a little bit problematic, right?
It definitely is.
In fact, I've read a number of articles from ACT UP activists from the era about how detrimental her publications were to the movement.
Yes, but, you know, she's got this whole, you know, her whole philosophy is a very classic blame the victim, you know, perspective that you often run into in the history of medicine.
This is nothing new, right?
But it's also important to point out that she had a huge following in gay communities.
And that's because she preached radical self-acceptance And self-love.
Wow, what a double-edged sword.
So I didn't hear that part of it.
That's new, right?
For gay men, mostly gay men in the 1980s, learning how to accept yourself and to love yourself was a radical thing to do.
She was able to do two things at the same time.
radical self-acceptance, except that the part of you that is able to engage in this risky behavior or whatever is actually what's responsible for, or it's not.
Is it about self-perception is the actual virus?
Well, she calls diseases dis-ease, right?
D-I-S slash E-A-S-E.
And she's saying that disease can be healed if you're willing to change the way you think, change the way you act, change the way you believe.
And part of that healing process is loving yourself.
Right.
So you can see, you know, so in part of that sort of preaching that she did in the 1980s, she did these things called hay rides, right?
Where she would gather, you know, people suffering from AIDS and, you know, HIV and AIDS.
And, And, you know, for many of them, you know, many of them left with a lot of anger.
They didn't, you know, they, you know, they were very sort of Taken aback by her, you know, blame the victim mentality, but a lot of men, you know, found that just human contact and that, you know, preaching of self-love really useful for them at a point in which many of their families had abandoned them.
Right.
Right?
Haye was providing, and again, this gets back to Northrop, Haye was providing something for some of these men that they weren't getting.
It's amazing because it's almost like the medicine there becomes poisonous at the point at which it doesn't offer medicine, right?
So there's radical self-acceptance, which must be incredibly edifying and poignant for so many people.
But if that's where it ends, then that's supposedly the curative for the actual virus.
What an interesting story.
It's complicated, right?
And as often as I tell my students, because, you know, now they're, you know, we're not alive when, you know, at the height of the AIDS epidemic.
And I think that, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's hard to, it's, it's easy to forget if you're, if you weren't within that community, just how isolated and, you know, marginalized and discriminated against You know, people who were dying of AIDS were.
So, yeah.
Now, what about the money stuff, though?
Because, you know, I found this 2007 conversation between Northrop and Hay.
And Northrop recalls, I think they were at a convention in Las Vegas, and Northrop is one of the lead guests, and Chopra is one of the lead guests.
Northrop and Hay are on stage and she's remembering that Hay hosted her on her book tour in 1999, and they rode around in Hay's Rolls-Royce.
And Northrop says, quote, I was just astounded by it, you know, to go out and the unabashed appreciation of having a Rolls-Royce.
I'm from Maine, you know, the East Coast where everybody, especially the old money people, they drive beaters and they like to pretend that they don't have any money.
And it wasn't that you were ostentatious.
It's that you were enjoying every moment.
And Hayes then replies that it took her six years to manifest that car and that she loved it and that she just wanted to show it off and share it.
And so there's this prosperity gospel thing that comes in as well.
And I'm wondering about the intersection between women's wellness movements and the notion of manifesting abundance in one's life.
I just think that this question is incredibly interesting, right?
Because I, you know, from my perspective, this sort of, for lack of a better term, leaning in, into sort of this, you know, not being, you know, not being ashamed of your wealth and actually actively pursuing it.
Seems to be a new thing in terms of women's wellness efforts and women's health movement, right?
I mean, typically, historically, women's work, whether that's in the medical field or even education, these are all seen as, from a woman's perspective, it's care work.
And you do this care work because, not because you're looking to make money, but because you care about your communities, right?
You care about, so think about, you know, these traditional fields of healing, teaching, even housework, sort of call of this reproductive labor, right?
And it's usually historically uncompensated or undercompensated.
Wow.
And, and, It's framed in a very altruistic manner, right?
That you're doing this for the good of humanity.
You're doing it for the good of womanhood.
You're doing it for the good of children, right?
You're not in it for the money.
So for me, this whole conversation about, you know, Hay and her fancy car, sort of reminds me of even, I mean, her name was going to come up sooner or later, but like Gwyneth Paltrow, right?
And, you know, this sort of corporate feminism, lean in feminism and not being afraid to make money off the things that you were doing.
I don't necessarily have a value judgment about it.
I just think it's really interesting that it seems to be a new phenomenon.
Well, speaking of value judgments, something's just clicking or turning around in my brain a little bit around this piece of caregiving work is unpaid labor, and it's always been that way, and it's supposed to be given altruistically.
Now I think I'm going to listen to Hay and Northrup, if she brings it up, speak about wealth or abundance in a way that has behind it this feeling of, well, we've been doing all of this wonderful work for generations, haven't we?
Right?
And we've been taking care of people, and of course this is the most important work in the world, and why shouldn't it be the source of wealth?
I haven't actually I haven't considered that.
That part of the law of attraction and secret stuff, I haven't heard that in there.
So thank you for that.
That's really helpful.
Now, one of the most interesting things as I go through Northrup's writing, her popular medical work, is that it whiplashes, sometimes paragraph by paragraph, between a kind of evidence-based discourse In which she's citing research and studies and then, you know, a language of self-help or new thought or new age stuff in which the intuitive and subjective instincts are centered.
So there she'll have like a bunch of pages on the dangers of the HPV vaccine and why nobody should take it.
And then that will be followed up, maybe not followed up, but there she'll also have pages on cleansing the second chakra.
Now the transitions are never marked.
It's like there's no, there's no, you know, from this pre-modern point of view, we would, we might say that blah, blah, blah.
So there's no sort of flagging of, well, this is where I'm going, or this is the epistemology that I've got right now.
Is this blurring of paradigms?
Does it have a history behind it in, in women's health and wellness?
And, and, and if so, like who would Northrop's precursors be?
Well, that's a great question.
I think, I think that I'm going to return to sort of our conversation that we had earlier about the sort of explosion of, um, um, um, different kinds of medical systems in the, in the mid 19th century.
Right.
Um, I mean, if you think about it, it's actually quite incredible that from the time of, so this idea of humoral medicine and bloodletting and all of that, you know, with the dominating medical system, For since the time of, you know, Hippocrates, all the way up into the mid 19th century, there was really in the United States, and when we get to, you know, you know, when we get to the United States, and that's the main sort of system of, of, of, of mainstream medicine.
And yet, even before we get this explosion of different medical systems, people are pairing You know, regular medicine with folk remedies, right?
And backyard medicines.
That sort of blending of a paradigm has always existed, right?
And especially, this gets very heightened when we get to this explosion of different medical systems.
You know, people and even physicians would sort of blend regular medicine with homeopathy or blend.
I mean, there's an argument that there's a lot of infighting between all of these different medical systems.
But for the most part, a lot of patients would, you know, sort of pick and choose from these different medical theories.
And so, you know, whether they're choosing folk remedies or Chinese medicine, you know, we've been doing this for a long time.
And this is especially true with women's health.
And again, it gets back to that conversation we had about, you know, not really having a lot of trust in mainstream medicine.
If something is not working for you or someone's not listening to you, you may listen to what your mother said or what your neighbors are saying about different kinds of sort of folk remedies.
And we do this today, right?
I know people who have a regular physician, they have a regular OBGYN, but they may go to Whole Foods and buy a homeopathic remedy for their menstrual cramps.
For sure.
Even women and parents who maybe aren't anti-vaccination, right, but they do space out their vaccine schedule for their children.
Right?
Right.
Even though they get those vaccines.
I see that as a blending of this paradigm as well.
Especially, I suppose, if they supplement with immune support for their children in the interim while they're spacing out or something like that.
There's a kind of a mix and match of techniques.
You know, I'm realizing that the bias of my question is really very contemporary in the sense that, like, my assumption, I guess, is that people generally have an understanding of what Scientific research is or what, you know, or, or what, what, I don't know what clinical trials will show or how people do, how people do meta-analyses and stuff like that.
And that they should be able to, or that they're having an internal conversation about, well, this is how this is known versus this is how this is known.
But I actually, I can imagine that, that before the internet and certainly You know, before university education becomes relatively accessible to a certain amount of the percentage of the population, that that's just not true.
There's no way for the regular person to really be able to assess different types of knowledge.
Yeah, I mean, and this is sort of getting off track, but also I find really interesting.
I mean, exactly what you said.
There's a historian named Nancy Thames who wrote this great book called The Gospel of Germs.
And her whole argument is, you know, uh, scientists and, uh, you know, largely start discovering, uh, bacteria that cause specific diseases, right?
Sort of our germ theory starts coming around in the 1870s, 1880s, you know, by the turn of the century, uh, for the most part, not completely, um, but for the most part, you know, scientists and, you know, believe that germ theory, um, is real.
But how do you convince regular people, regular housewives, regular children, regular Joes going off to the factory, that these little tiny microscopic things cause diseases?
That's a hard sell.
And it's still something I think we have issues with today in sort of explaining science to You know, to regular people, and it's confusing because sometimes science is a process.
It's not usually a definitive statement, right?
Right.
I had a question about, I think I should probably move on to make sure that I get to all my questions about Norfolk.
I was thinking about how the smallpox, or the cowpox rather, Arm-to-arm vaccination that I was reading about it in you Ula Biss's book and how that was actually like a populist discovery that didn't have to sort of like come to the population from a top-down public health perspective.
People understood that milkmaids didn't get cowpox.
And so why was that?
And so maybe there are some instances too in which people do develop a kind of very advanced understanding And they don't really have to be convinced about something that seems scientific and abstract.
Yeah, I mean, Smallpox is really fascinating, right?
I could probably go off on a tangent for an hour on that, but I will say that, you know, once Jenner came up with the idea or, you know, sort of discovered that milkmaids didn't get cowpox and then sort of comes up with this idea to vaccinate, well, vaccination actually vaca for cow, right?
Vaca is Latin for cow.
And, you know, there was a lot of conspiracy theories around smallpox vaccinations back then.
You can see there are a lot of really great images of women getting vaccinations and then having a cow head pop up from their arm, right?
That vaccinating someone would turn you into, would give you bovine features.
Oh my gosh, that would just fit right into the meme economy of the present day, wouldn't it?
Absolutely, absolutely.
My students love all of those images, but it sort of tells you that vaccine conspiracies have been around for a very long time.
Right.
Slightly different direction.
I do a lot of research on charismatic authority as a cult researcher, and I find that it's often the case that charisma finds a cultural gap in knowledge or service, and then it kind of expands in that space.
Now, I mainly study male charismatic leaders, And they typically carve out an unregulated space between religion, politics, self-help.
Now, with a figure who does something similar from a feminist direction and in women's health, this feels more complex.
Now, so are there ways in which you'd say that charismatic and intuitive leadership have been really useful in women's health and practice as practiced by women doctors?
I think that, you know, typically, you know, when women physicians entered the field, and again, I'm talking historically, they made an argument for themselves that they belonged they made an argument for themselves that they belonged in the medical field because of their identities as women, right?
that only women could properly take care of other women.
Now, there was a lot of different, there was some disagreement among women physicians who saw sort of the downside of making that argument.
But typically, I mean, you know, a lot of women do go to women physicians because they want to see another, you know, they want to be seen by a woman.
But that was absolutely an entry point for women physicians who, you know, made a very specific argument that they would be better suited to answer the needs of other women.
I'm trying to think of someone who has, with a medical degree, you know, who sort of has that charismatic nature that you're talking about throughout history.
I'm not quite thinking of one, although I will tell you, can I tell you about my favorite?
Yes.
Yes, please.
figure in history who I think sort of embodies a lot of these things that you're talking about and whether it was helpful or not is debatable.
But my favorite character is a woman named Lydia Pinkham.
She is amazing.
So she was a woman in the 19th century.
She invented sort of this woman's compound called Pinkham's Vegetable Compound.
And she did so because her husband or her family was sort of suffering in the depression of the 1870s.
And so she decided to start this family business and make this tonic.
She made it, you know, on her stovetop at first before they sort of scaled up.
And she So she invented this compound and this was at the height of sort of the patent medicine era, right?
Or what we might call quack medicine.
And it was to relieve women's menstrual problems, maybe their menopausal issues.
Or, you know, she would advertise it as, are you suffering from sort of like a weak womanhood?
Do you need a, you know, do you need a restoration of your, your, you know, your energy?
And it was a mixture of things like, you know, fenugreek and unicorn root and black cohosh and alcohol, basically.
I mean, as a preservative, like it was a tincture or something like that?
Yeah, it's really interesting because her whole family were huge temperance activists.
Right.
But there was quite a bit of alcohol.
But this is what you could take, right.
Yeah.
But the important thing to know about Pinkham is that she developed a cult following.
She was very, very popular and she did aggressive marketing.
She's one of the first people that actually put her face on packages.
Wow.
So you'd go and you'd get this in the mail and it would have her face on it.
And so she becomes this moment where you're linking a medicine to a particular woman.
Right.
She asked women to write to her about their problems, and that she would answer every single one of them personally.
Private letters?
Yes.
Although, I mean, I don't think she was answering all of them.
I think it was, you know, her family members.
It was like a whole family business.
But she did reply to people.
And so you can see that sort of, you know, there's a whole history of letter writing between women.
So that, you know, that's a way that, you know, I think women really trusted Lydia Pinkham.
But again, she was filling a need that the medical establishment at the time was not even paying attention to.
And so, you know, Lydia Pinkham's vegetable compound is still around.
Seriously?
You can buy it on, oh, actually, I mean, I've got a package right here.
It doesn't have the same, they market it as an herbal supplement now.
Right.
Which I think is interesting because herbal supplements are very, I feel like in some ways, are the patent medicine of today.
But it's still around.
You can buy it on Amazon.
There are people on YouTube who've made testimonials about how effective Lydia Pinkham's vegetable compound is.
It's not unlike the testimonials that Lydia Pinkham used to publish.
Wow.
There's a whole drinking song called Lily the Pink about Lydia Pinkham.
You could go on YouTube and find it.
Now, when you say a cult following, because when we talked about, when I asked you the question, you were like, well, I'm wondering if there's somebody who ticks all of those boxes.
I'm imagining that the argument that the woman doctor would have to make to their colleagues would involve a certain amount of very confident presentation.
I can do this and women are the best people to take care of women.
So I can imagine that pitch also being made to their client base, to their patient base, but there would have to be some sort of public entrepreneurial thing to it as well.
And it sounds like Pinkham is really covering that, but does she, is she out giving lectures and stuff, uh, and going to conferences or?
No, well, she's not a physician.
She's not a physician.
She's just, she's just a woman who, you know, at the time anybody could make patent medicines and sell them because we don't have the FDA yet.
Um, and you know, she was just a woman who, uh, family was an economic crisis and decided to sell her, um, her home remedy that she, you know, claims she had been making for forever.
And, um, you know, really, you know, and again, that whole home remedy folk remedy thing had a long history.
Um, and you know, she didn't go to conferences or anything like that, but, um, her marketing, she was an aggressive marketer, um, Well, you know, brochures and ads and newspapers.
And you can go to Google and, you know, Google her name and you'll see a ton of different ads come up.
So she's really one of the very first women who really aggressively marketed her, you know, herself as a healer and her medicine as a healer.
And it was really a catch-all.
If anything that had to do with any sort of woman problem, It's so interesting that she's coming up in relation to Dr. Northrup, because Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom is like, I think it's like 1,100 pages long.
So it is literally anything that has to do with women's medical issues.
And also, I believe on both editions of the book, it is Dr. Northrup's face.
And so I'm thinking about Pinkham's face being on the bottle.
Was that unique for the time period or were male patent medicine guys putting their faces on bottles too?
I mean, so, um, you know, people did put faces on their, um, their, their medicines.
Um, and sometimes it was, um, you know, a made up figure like a mascot or, or something like that.
And sometimes it was the person who was selling it.
Absolutely.
This is really, you know, Pinkham took it to a whole new level because of how much she marketed.
And it is really, um, The first time where it's a woman's picture and it's actually the likeness of Lydia Pinkham, right?
So it's not a representation of what she looks like, it's an actual sort of drawing of her.
Right.
So yeah, I mean, you know, she never, getting back to this whole prosperity gospel thing, you know, she never, she dies before her family, you know, her family does, you know, end up making quite a bit of money, but she's never really Very wealthy.
But I do think it's interesting, you know, in terms of sort of being very aggressive and not, you know, not shy about putting her face on a, you know, a box and really selling her product.
You know, and as for wealth, I mean, I suppose if she'd been able to monetize the letter writing back and forth between her and her clients, as people do on social media today, it might have been a little bit different.
Absolutely.
Okay, so interesting to think of Northrup with this Pinkham history behind her, because, as I said, this Bible is all about women's issues, and it also has what feels like a conservative and old-timey gender politics to it.
The opening line of the book is, quote, the female body was designed by our creator to be a source of pleasure, fertility, movement, strength, and well-being.
Our bodies connect us with the moon, the tides, and the seasons.
They are the temples within which our souls dwell and experience life on earth, and they are profoundly impacted first and foremost by our beliefs about what is possible, by the culture in which we live, and then by the behaviors that stem from these beliefs.
Does this sound like an opening that could be, like, I don't know, 50 years old or 100 years old?
It feels like it comes out of another time.
Yeah, but I mean, it's, it's, it's comfort.
Like, there's something really comforting about that.
Absolutely.
Right.
That, that, you know, you know, talking about, you know, sort of essentializing gender and sex roles is it's very like, you know, it gives you a sense of order.
To a chaotic universe.
It gives us a sense of control.
It gives us almost a sense of power, right?
And this is, you know, it does sound very, you know, sort of 1970s to me, you know?
But it's also, you know, getting back to that, you know, argument that I was talking about earlier where, you know, physicians like Elizabeth Blackwell, you know, the arguments that they were making about being a woman's right to be a doctor, is cut from the same cloth, right?
That women, there's something essential about women and their knowledge and their essential being as women that are best suited to take care of other women, right?
And so I find that really interesting, right?
Their feminine sensibilities makes you a better physician.
But the con with that then, and some physicians at the time like Mary Putnam-Jacobi recognized this, right?
That if you, from a physician's perspective, if you argue that women are best suited to treat other women, that boxes you into only treating women, right?
And that that is an issue in itself.
And from the patient's perspective, Those, uh, essentialized gender roles, um, you know, can be, you know, what if your body doesn't conform to that?
What if it doesn't reproduce?
What if you miscarry?
What if you're infertile, right?
What if you don't, you know, fit into those sort of boxes of these sort of, you know, gender is the sort of universe in the universe, sort of moon tide kind of thing.
Right.
Um, you know, then there's something wrong with you.
And so, you know, I find in some ways, it's interesting because I find those words sometimes comforting, but I also find them really disquieting as well.
Right, right.
You know, but these arguments were also made not just in the history of women's health.
These same essentializing arguments were made by suffrage activists.
Right, you know, would argue that the essential characteristics of women, their feminine nature, would make them better and more moral voters.
Right.
And, you know, people like Phyllis Schlafly, who was against the ERA, you know, was also making these very essentializing arguments about women's nature.
Right.
So, yeah.
Well, within that, within all of that, she does, she does, And we've been talking about this.
She does extend a kind of feminist analysis through her work.
There's strong gender binarism in it.
And she is resisting, as she says, medical patriarchy, and people find that very compelling.
She says almost nothing about class or the social determinants of health.
Her book is very long, but I word-searched it for things like universal healthcare.
I'm speaking to you from Canada, by the way.
Or I word searched socialized medicine.
There's just no hits.
So she's writing from an American context.
I understand that.
But what else comes to mind for you when you think about exclusions like that within the context of women's health where social determinants have to be a huge consideration?
Oh, I'm so glad that you asked me this.
I find this aspect of Northrop's writing and her philosophy the most problematic, right?
In some ways, as you mentioned, coming from Canada, it's the most Americanized, right?
It's sort of this idea that, you know, again, as we were talking before, there's the idea that you have Control over your body and its destiny and its health destiny in some ways is very comforting.
Right.
But it completely and totally ignores systemic issues in our country that lead to disparities in health care.
And I find that quite disturbing, right?
And, you know, we don't have universal health care, we don't have socialized medicine, and her rhetoric completely lies in the power of the individual.
It reminds me a little bit of a documentary that I often show my students and ask them to problematize, and that is the documentary that Ricky Lake made back in the 90s called The Business of Being Born.
Oh, I recall that, yeah.
Right, where it's all about the movement, the home birth movement, right?
Yes, yes, yes.
Nothing necessarily wrong with the home birth movement, but the way in which she makes this argument that in Europe, all women give birth with midwives.
Most women give birth with midwives, right?
They have a whole midwifery system, right?
And that women in Europe have lower maternal mortality rates.
And so she draws a Straight connection between midwives.
And lower maternal mortality rates, right?
And not socialized medicine.
Exactly.
And not the fact that women, yeah, women have, depending on where, depending on your class and your race, your employment status, may not have access to prenatal health care.
They may not have had access to regular care as a woman throughout their entire lives.
You know, they may have health disparities because of poverty.
She doesn't talk about any of those things, right?
And so, you know, this whole rhetoric reminds me a lot of that.
And I think if you view this argument through the lens of race, the problem becomes even clearer, right?
African American women, Latina women, I mean, they're dying of COVID rates at much higher rates than white folks.
There's racism in health care, access to quality care and hospitals.
And police violence, which is also tied up in the wellness of, you know, marginalized communities.
These things are baked into the system.
Right.
And blaming it on the individual takes away from the collective action that we should be taking.
And I find that is, that is the most disturbing aspect of Northrup's whole individual aspect of her philosophy.
You know, thinking about Rikki Lake's documentary and this correlation that she makes between lower mortality rates and countries that have midwifery systems, but excluding the socialized medicine part, is really testimony to how effective the American propaganda around universal health care actually is, that it kind of
Erases it as a factor or something that people would consider in their actual outcomes.
And speaking as a Canadian, I can just say that universalized health care is not equally accessible to everybody.
There are many problems with the system, but it is so baked into the national identity that One really doesn't have to think about it.
The paradigm of approaching a health problem is the notion of collective care and that that's going to be stable, that that's going to be secure.
And so I always sort of look at the American wellness influencer as somebody who's really both being created by, but also necessitated by an environment in which really everybody's left to their own devices.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I think that You know, it's, it's a lot more, it's easier to take control of a problem if it's within your own means, right?
All I have to do is A, B and C and I can, you know, be well.
It's a lot scarier to think that everyone has to work on something together as a collective and to change something that's a lot bigger than just an individual.
And it also, I mean, sort of flies against the grain of sort of American exceptionalism and individualism.
Right.
Right.
I think I've got you've given you've been very generous with your time.
I think I've got one last question, which, you know, this is this is coming coming right to the heart of our podcast project.
You know, we're we're doing this research.
We're doing this coverage because of Northrop's Turn into what we're calling, or what people have called, conspirituality.
And we've already done some reporting on that.
And, you know, just on the face of it, one sort of major factor in this story is that Northrop's Facebook page was actually the mainstream gateway for the viral spread of the documentary, Plandemic.
And that really boosted the shares of that documentary from these weird QAnon groups into the mainstream.
And so I'm just wondering, did you find that surprising?
Is there any precedent for that?
You know, what do you make of it?
Is there a logic there?
If we're going to take this seriously, as you said in the beginning, as a historical arc, where's the through line?
Oh, well, I'm actually not surprised at all, right?
I think that health and conspiracy theories go hand in hand.
You know, the through line perhaps is that, one of the through lines I would argue, is that we have a tendency to capitalize on fear and perpetuate blame.
And we We can go all the way back to the Athenian plague in 430 BCE.
You know, where we blame, where the Athenians blamed the Spartans for poisoning the well, and that was the cause of the plague.
The 14th century Black Death, people blamed Jewish folks, again, saying that they were poisoning the wells, and that's what was causing the illness, and Jewish folks were persecuted and burned at the stake.
Syphilis, which is always a fun topic.
And syphilis, before it had the name syphilis, over time, depending on where you were, you know, it was either called the French disease, the Polish disease, the German disease.
Oh, I did not know that.
Right, so it was always like... I think I heard French disease, but I didn't know that it floated from country to country.
It's always like the people that you don't like.
Right, right.
It would be called, you know, it would be called that disease, right?
And, you know, I could go on and on and on.
Cholera, we had a cholera outbreak in Britain in the 1830s.
People started attacking, like mobs would attack doctors on the street, you know, accusing them of taking cholera victims to the hospital in order to kill them and use them for dissections in anatomy schools.
Wow.
Getting back to the cowpox thing, right?
You know, there's also a very long history of vaccine conspiracy.
Um, so I, I, I think there's something very, um, I think there's just something very scary about, you know, I think it's, it's possibly tied to, you know, not only wellness, but, you know, death.
Right.
And we're all afraid of dying.
And I think that, you know, when it comes to the human body, in some ways it can feel so, um, out of control that it almost makes sense to map on these other people, these other things that are happening.
And so these, you know, when pandemic, you know, when this whole COVID outbreak started happening, and talking with a lot of my colleagues, we knew that people were going to start blaming other people, right, and that they were going to be tying it up into all sorts of conspiracies.
That there was going to be a race aspect to it, you know, with the Chinese flu.
Right.
Which is also nothing new if we think about the bubonic plague in San Francisco in the early 1900s.
And we knew that there was going to be a whole sort of regimen of rejecting medical science, especially when the science isn't clear right now and we're in the unknown territory.
And that there would be a outcropping of sort of new quack medicine.
And all of those things have happened.
And so in some ways, none of this behavior is surprising.
You know, it's, I guess, maybe the thing that's surprising is its connection to women's health and wellness.
Although, you know, through the anti-vax movement, the sentiments that are mobilized, especially by people like Wakefield, are really about You know, are we protecting mother's intuition?
But it puts, it creates this weird environment in which Dr. Northrup has done all this wonderful work in terms of, you know, upping the conversation around autonomy and agency and whether or not women are making their own health decisions or not.
What I find in her social media feeds is that she's deferring basically to male conspiracy theorists for her data.
And it's just, it's weird.
It's almost as if she grows up rejecting medical patriarchy and now she's kind of adopted almost like a conspiratorial patriarchy of players who are feeding this strange information.
So I find that very disquieting.
I love that term conspiratorial patriarchy.
I mean, that's, that's fascinating, right?
To think about.
I actually haven't.
I, I, I mean, this would be a great research subject in itself, but I don't know of, of, um, I don't know of a leading, uh, conspirituality evangelist or a, somebody who has put forward a new theory about somebody, something, uh, who's not a man.
Uh, And I also don't think, I also don't know if there are anybody, if any of the media platforms like Dell BigTree, GreenMedInfo, Natural News, I don't know if any of those media platforms are controlled by women either.
And in the academic context of conspirituality, as outlined by Ward and Voas, they say quite plainly, and it's just in the abstract, that
Conspiratorial thinking is generally male identified and that the spirituality part of conspirituality is the feminine identified new age or utopian sentiments that come together in this strange combination.
But one's following the other.
It's not like I'm not seeing women playing a leadership role in terms of generating these ideas.
I find that really fascinating, and I mean, that is, you're right, that is ripe for a wonderful research project.
I might be wrong, but I just haven't seen it.
It doesn't, it doesn't, any, I mean, that tracks to me, and it gets back to that earlier conversation we were having about gender essentialism, right?
That, you know, Northrop is in this really interesting position where she's making these feminist arguments, but then also relying on sort of gender essentialism.
Andrew Wakefield is a great example of that.
I mean, he's almost sort of like the father figure.
Literally, literally.
She goes on his podcast on Mother's Day and says, and she says to him, you've been such, this is a paraphrase, but it's basically, you've been so wonderful in your protection of women and mothers through the years.
And it's, it's the male's role to protect and to nurture.
And you've done that so well.
And it's like, I, Yeah, I mean, I almost had a stroke, but like, it's so difficult to watch her bend the knee at somebody like that.
And yeah, on that note, who are your favorite, I wanted to end in a really happy place, who are your favorite women medical thinkers and practitioners and advocates right now?
Oh, especially in relation to COVID, like, like anybody who's, who's doing the best, most interesting work that you know of?
Um, well, I mean, this is, that's a really hard question.
Um, I'm going to sort of sidetrack this a little bit.
Um, one of the things that I am most interested in is the inner, especially in the, um, the COVID debates.
And sort of, you know, this moment that we're in is the intersection of race, gender, and disability.
Wow.
I think that there is a wonderful disability community on Twitter.
And so I'm thinking of women like Alice Wong, who herself is a disabled woman.
She just came out with a new book.
And they're really sort of tackling
Health from a disability perspective that I think is important, not just for people in the disability community, but it's important for all of us to, um, you know, be thinking about these things and some of the arguments that they're making, for example, um, you know, that looking at mortality rates as an indication of how dead, you know, how dangerous a pandemic is, is maybe a little bit misleading because we need to be thinking about how disabling
It's such a great point.
It's such a great point, especially as we see all of this data rolling out around possible long-term brain damage or neurological impacts or people who got COVID in their 30s.
I'm just realizing, just hearing you say that, that there's kind of an erasure of disability in the focus on case fatality rate.
That's an amazing thought.
Yeah.
And we should really be taking our lead from people who are disabled themselves and sort of who have been thinking about and theorizing about health and wellness and, you know, for a long time and in sort of, sort of making us, you know, making people who are able-bodied or identified able-bodied, you know, rethink our paradigms about what it is to be well.
Right.
I think that's really important.
Yeah, and that's going to necessitate thinking about wellness in public terms and collective terms and social terms because that's the thing about it.
my limited understanding of disability studies is that, is that, you know, this is a world that is made for some people, but not others.
And, and we have to change the world and we have to do that.
Absolutely.
I really love history geeks.
That was such a great interview, and I love her.
I love people who are enthusiastic about history, because it's something I come across as I'm going through the process of writing this book on psychedelics.
It's like, do you want to understand Why psychedelics are illegal in America today.
Well, you have to look at the history of race in America if you want to do that.
And when you put these together, these connections, it's just, there's something fascinating about it, but you can also connect the dots.
So when Professor Antonovich was talking about Samuel Hahnemann, I have a particular fascination and slight disdain with homeopathy because Hanuman was a trained medical doctor who thought that the medical industry was barbaric.
Bloodletting.
He didn't agree with it.
And the basis of his system is sound, right?
Homeopathy, at its base, a little bit cures more of it.
That's vaccination.
And so when Edward Jenner was able to show the efficacy of vaccinations, Hanuman was very happy.
But today you have homeopathists and traditional Chinese medical practitioners who think that vaccines are bullshit, but their founders all knew that the science was sound, or at least they thought it was, and that's how they treated people.
And when she makes that connection with Northrop in the 70s, talking about What female health, what female health was at that time?
Well, she had good reason to be skeptical.
And I think that that's the sort of nuance that I hope we can bring out sometimes in this podcast.
But it's also missing in all of the discussions that we have online, where people say these things, and there's just this automatic The impossibility of having nuanced dialogue online and the channels that we're using is really unfortunate.
And that's what really came out in the interview for me is how well she was able to discuss nuance.
Yeah.
Can I ask you a question about Hanuman, actually?
Because I'm wondering, I mean, just the principle of withdrawing interventions to the point of disappearance, that some sort of You know, ultimate jacking of the placebo effect or something like that is really compelling.
Did you come across anything that indicated that his former participation in conventional medicine had burdened him with a sense of guilt?
Because I detect that part of the story underlying a number of the stories that we cover.
Like, I think it's really poignant that Northrop talks about how many boys she circumcised, right?
And how many birth interventions she participated in that she feels now were unnecessary.
I've got a bunch of other examples too, but was there a sense of guilt or shame or atonement that homeopathy begins with?
It is definitely possible because he does talk about his role in that industry, but I don't know how much, it's hard to cycle, you know, look back and do armchair psychiatry on him now, because it's not clear because I did read the foundational book of homeopathy when I was doing research for another book.
And it also, and to answer another part of that question, I don't know exactly when The placebo idea really took hold because even today, there are homeopathic products.
There are homeopathic products on the shelves that do contain active ingredients, and those active ingredients are actually illegal in pharmaceuticals, but because they're presented as supplements, they can get around that, which makes them dangerous, and there has been evidence of homeopathic products in the past that specifically have harmed children because of that, specifically because of that loophole.
But I don't know when the idea that a little bit of a substance became no substance whatsoever with the provings.
And because that's really the fascinating aspect of all this to me.
But to get back to the guilt aspect, I would imagine that that played a role, but I have no specific evidence that I can cite.
Yeah.
I mean, I was going through, go ahead, Julian.
Well, it's my understanding with homeopathy is that there's two sort of key principles, right?
One is that like cures like, but the other, Is that the more you dilute a substance, the more powerful it becomes.
Yes.
And going, going, the further they've gone down that road, the further they've gone away from like cures, like being still being a meaningful statement, right?
Yes.
Yes.
And there's, there's even, I always use this one because it's the most popular, I always forget how to pronounce it, even though it's the most popular flu medication in France.
Thank you.
And that's like $40 million a year.
And I always wonder, do vegans or vegetarians take it?
Goose liver.
The proving starts with a duck liver.
By the time you take it, there's no duck liver in it.
It's just sugar water.
That's all you take in.
But A duck had to be killed in order for it to be made regardless.
Because I have known vegetarians who take it, and I ask them that, and it's like one of those questions where, again, if you don't research, but what's your stance on that?
It's technically vegan.
Technically, yes.
But in the process of it, it's not vegan.
Yes, yeah.
Yeah, just back to the guilt thing for the moment, I'm sort of fixated on it because I came across this podcast recording of Kelly Brogan talking to a friend, Charles Eisenstein, and she spoke, I mean, she speaks at length in many different places about how she was a prescribing psychiatrist for many years, and she focused primarily on pre and postnatal women and figuring out how to prescribe
Psychiatric medications to women who are breastfeeding and so on and she is obviously disgusted by this This part of her training, but also this part of her profession that it really turned her away There was a point at which she's writing that she described writing a prescription for Zoloft for a lactating woman and telling herself Or hearing herself say inside.
Well, I wouldn't take this myself and that sort of began her turn away but then with Eisenstein She describes how she describes with disgust that her colleagues are able to medicate people into a kind of submission to the to the world destroying machine.
But also but also and this is a sort of like a key link to the to to her current fascinations.
Also very sort of disgusted or horrified at the fact that practicing psychiatrists can forcibly inject, uh, you know, people undergoing psychiatric crises and they can, then they can deprive them of civil liberties and have them, you know, forcibly hospitalized.
And so there's a real sort of like rejection of a kind of violence done against the psychiatric patient that it's, that's at the root of, uh, you know, the, the, the, the will to protect people's civil liberties, but it carries with it this, I was participating in something that was wrong, and I'm not making that mistake anymore.
And there's a hint too of I'm atoning for something.
Yeah, what's so difficult about that is that in any of these sorts of arenas where something like that is true, the rejection of the thing that is demonstrably brutal, or was morally wrong, or was scientifically barbaric that we've hopefully or was scientifically barbaric that we've hopefully come a fair distance from at this point.
The conflation of that with whatever the new set of alternative ideas or beliefs or protocols or, you know, diagnostic and treatment methodologies are, those things get conflated so that in any kind of debate about this, To justify the second thing, they'll go to the first thing.
And the first thing, if you're really open and listening to them and being an empathic human being who's giving them the benefit of the doubt in that moment that they're arguing in good faith, it's legitimate.
To me, it comes down to something I find myself saying to people again and again, say with regard to science, that the only remedy for corrupted science is better science.
It's not going to be some alternate way of coming at what the truth is.
Go ahead.
Right.
Yeah.
No, I was just, I was just going to say that, that we've remarked many times that, that the figures that we speak about come to the end of a kind of scientific conundrum and they flip into a different discourse.
So that's where the sermon comes in, or that's where we're going to rely on yoga, or, you know, we're suddenly going to start to talk about 5D consciousness or something like that, because we're actually at the end of our research capacity.
Uh, and right.
That's right.
And so this thing, so for example, with Kelly Brogan, this way that psychiatric patients have been horribly mistreated, the answer to that is to now go down this entirely other road.
And part of what I hear in her as well is this idea that through some sort of spiritual process, you become an autonomous spiritual adult.
And that that spiritual adulthood is then also linked to a kind of freedom from anyone else telling you what to do or how to think.
And there was that meme that you referenced last week or the week before that was something like where we would come to in a medical model where there was an understanding that whatever each of us believes is actually what's real, right?
Do you remember?
Right.
Well, medicine is a personal belief system, I think, was at the heart of that.
Yeah.
One thing that I didn't ask Professor Antonovich about, well, I don't know if I could really have asked her.
I mean, I started to ask about whether or not Lydia Pinkham's face being on her formula was sort of a unique moment.
And she said, well, there were male figures who had their images on their medications and so on, on their patents.
On their tonics.
Right, on their tonics.
But she did say Pinkham's was the first image that was actually a likeness.
And I think that's really... I wanted to push that a little bit or rest on it because there's something about that that we can connect to contemporary influencers because it's the point at which the personableness and therefore the charisma of the healer becomes something that's really remarkable.
It's part of the commodity.
It's part of the placebo effect.
It's, you know, her face is right there on the bottle.
And, you know, as we know with most of these, with a lot of these writers and thinkers in conspirituality, it's their headshot that's on the front of their books, right?
So it's not that the books are going to be about their subjects.
The books are really about them.
And even more than that, it's them as an archetype.
Right.
It's believe this or take this product, drink this tonic, and you will be like me.
I am whatever.
A happy, empowered, incredible person.
When you were talking with her about Louise Hay, who I'm familiar with as well, it made me think too of Carolyn Mace.
And Carolyn Mace was really, really popular when I was first sort of coming up in the The Los Angeles spiritual yoga community, everyone was really into Carolyn Mason.
She's brilliant.
She had a lot of really interesting things to say, but I'll never forget listening to one of her lectures that everyone had glowingly recommended to me.
And she said, it doesn't surprise me that it is the two groups of people with the most victim consciousness in our society that are afflicted, that have been afflicted most with HIV.
And she said, blacks and gays.
And that thing has incensed me so much with regard to trauma as well.
That so much in the New Age community around spiritual bypass, there's this idea that the way, and it goes back to what you were saying about that kind of double bind situation or Kafka trap, right?
Where the way to be free and to be healed from your horrific trauma that you suffered in childhood is to stop playing the victim.
Right.
Stop being recognized that you chose it.
Recognize that you're not actually someone who was victimized and it was perfect.
And then you'll be free.
And the horrific kind of psychological dissonance of that to me is so damaging.
Yeah, it's the the it really uproots a fundamental reality principle.
And I didn't hear its implication, I think, until I was doing my book on Joyce.
And I was speaking with Karen Rain by phone, who's, you know, the one of the main interview subjects.
Yes.
And she said, you know, we need to reclaim the word victim as a legal term, not as a psychologized term.
The victim describes something to whom something has been done and not somebody who's taken an attitude towards the fact that they were sexually assaulted, for instance.
And so yeah, I would love to see if somebody's done their PhD in the rhetoric of the word victim, because that would be amazing to see where that started.
But it's got to be back there sometime in the early 80s, in that whole Hay House field.
Yeah, I would think so.
I would think so.
One other thing I just wanted to say, Matthew, about this interview, which I thought was fantastic, is that there's a
I think it really, really fleshes out what we've been doing so far on this topic around really recognizing, and we've tried to touch on it at different moments with curiosity, but I feel like this interview really goes there, recognizing the legitimate concerns, the legitimate sense of betrayal and abuse that has gone on through the history of medical science as an imperfect cultural and scientific endeavor.
Right.
Well, great.
I'm glad we were able to do it.
I'll end on this.
I just also loved near the end where she discusses that a lot of conspiracy theories have to do with health, and that how she even said that she was talking to her colleagues right before when the pandemic was starting, and they were like, get ready, get ready, it's coming.
