Heal Your Body From COVID The Gwyneth Paltrow Way: With $8,600 Necklaces And Snake Oil
Spoiler: It is not even that cute of a necklace.
Last Friday, Gwyneth Paltrow announced that she, like lots of Americans, has been dealing with long-tail effects of COVID-19 since having had it last year. As part of her regularly scheduled service to humanity, Paltrow decided to write up her own recovery protocol on Goop. She's getting better and you can too! And, incredibly enough, everything one needs to follow it can be purchased on the very website that she owns for the low low price of, I'm guessing, somewhere around $12 million.
Sadly, it does not appear to involve any vaginal steaming or anything else that might cause third degree burns on your genitals.
A little background: I had COVID-19 early on, and it left me with some long-tail fatigue and brain fog. In January, I had some tests done that showed really high levels of inflammation in my body. So I turned to one of the smartest experts I know in this space, the functional medicine practitioner Dr. Will Cole. After he saw all my labs, he explained that this was a case where the road to healing was going to be longer than usual.
Just to be clear, Dr. Will Cole is not a medical doctor, he's a chiropractor. One could say "functional medicine is pseudoscience and quackery if one could actually define "functional medicine," which one really can't because everything about it is so supremely vague. it involves a lot of "leaky gut syndrome"-type bullshit. (Intestinal permeability is a real thing and a real side effect of several health conditions, but there is also a bunch of nonsense about it from people who want to claim it's the cause of chronic fatigue syndrome, MS, autism and, well, practically everything else bad on earth.)
[Cole's] credentials include the Institute for Functional Medicine Certification Program (IFMCP) in Functional Medicine and a doctor of chiropractic degree. Dr. Cole is not a fan of conventional medicine, which he refers to as "superficial, disease-centered, autocratic, limited, palliative, reactive and profit-driven." He does not note that Goop has been valued at $250 million, part of which comes from the sale of supplements. In contrast, functional medicine is described as "investigative, holistic, safe, patient-centered, participatory, restorative, preventative, and evidence-based." Who would ever want to see an allopathic physician after reading this?
But anyway, by a stroke of incredible luck, Dr. Will Cole not only writes things at Goop, but also just so happened to write a book about the exact thing he suggested Paltrow do to mitigate her symptoms.
So we've been doing a version of a protocol he outlines in his forthcoming book, Intuitive Fasting . It's keto and plant-based but flexible (I've been having fish and a few other meats), and I fast until 11 a.m. every day.
Incredible!
As part of this "intuitive fasting," she is not drinking booze or having any sugar. She is, however, drinking mocktails that cost as much as booze, in a glass that for some reason costs $112.
To be clear, that is just for the one glass. Not for a set. I don't think the glass does anything special, but it is sold out on the Goop site so apparently a lot of people who aren't me looked at that and thought "That sure is a glass that is worth $112!" I don't know. Maybe the glass cures COVID.
Conveniently, Dr. Will Cole is also prescribing Paltrow's Goop-branded vitamins and detox powder. We would assume they cost her nothing beyond her own buyer costs, because it's her site, but they would cost you $162.
She writes:
Will's also got me on supplements, most of them in service of a healthier gut: There's butyrate , which Will says supports a healthy microbiome, and then in my daily Madame Ovary supplement, I get fish oil, B vitamins, some vitamin D3 (I add more, but there's 500 IU in there to start), selenium, and zinc, all of which Will says are critical for me right now. I get even more zinc and selenium, along with the antioxidants vitamin C and resveratrol, in my G.Tox Detoxifying Superpowder, which I mix with water. Will has me taking the G.Tox morning and night.
Does she drink that in a $112 glass as well?
Her recovery process also includes some very expensive skin serums (please do not pay a lot for serums, you can get really good shit at Marshall's for under $10), an infrared sauna wrap (which I would admittedly very much like to own) and hiking. Hiking seems like a normal, not ridiculously expensive activity, right? Not if you do it in an $8,600 necklace!
The description:
Set on an eighteen-karat-gold belcher chain—note the different-sized links on either side—two personal talismans dangle over the heart: A snake medallion (which represents rejuvenation and growth) and a heart-shaped crest sealed in clear quartz (the roman numeral represents the seven types of love as defined by the ancient Greeks)
Well, I just can't think of a better accessory for long-tail COVID-19 recovery hiking, except perhaps a tiara.
You know, it's one thing for Gwyneth to be promoting her snake oil and a bunch of weirdly overpriced stuff from her site — that's literally her business — but it really is another when she's promoting these things as a way to recover from the after-effects of COVID-19. It just is. Grifters are going to grift, but there's something that is just truly unseemly about grifting off of a virus that has now killed over 500,000 people in America and may result in lifelong health issues for those who have survived it. Quite frankly, there's also something gross about promoting "alternative medicine" in a country where everyone does not have access to actual healthcare. While it's unlikely those who don't have healthcare are trying to mitigate their symptoms with $8,600 hiking necklaces, the promotion of pseudoscience as a valid alternative to actual healthcare has further reaching effects.
If you do have ongoing symptoms from COVID, go see an actual doctor (if you have one), not Dr. Gwyneth and not a chiropractor (or, you know, an orthopedist, dentist or a veterinarian).
And now it is your open thread! Talk amongst yourselves!
[ Goop ]
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And for people of a certain age, you get what my late FiL referred to as organ recitals: comparing medical problems. "My gallstones are killing me!" "Oh, but my gout is so much worse!"
So sorry, you're correct.It was blues singers.