Dylan Stoll | Health Editor
Featured Image: Naturalistic health remedies are a serious threat to communities today. | Courtesy of Pixabay
The “naturalistic health” trend, as positive as it sounds, may be causing more harm than good, and for more than one reason.
Generally, for those who follow this trend, regular health products, such as life-saving medication or vaccines, are ineffective at their best and poisonous at their worst, making the “naturalistic health” trend a serious and disconcerting movement.
How serious, you may ask? A survey completed by the World Health Organization determined that 87 per cent of North Americans support vaccination. If you were to get this percentage on an exam, you would probably be ecstatic, but to see these numbers applied to the millions of people who call North America their home makes that 13 per cent difference equivalent to hundreds of thousands of people. That’s hundreds of thousands of people unwilling to be vaccinated against nightmarish diseases that haven’t been seen since we fought with swords, wore plate-metal armour, and buried toads in our backyards to cure fever.
On that note, just last March, it was found that many of California’s homeless population were plagued by medieval diseases such as typhus and tuberculosis due to their low vaccination rates. If that isn’t a cause for concern, I don’t know what is.
Despite being one of the more serious issues associated with the “naturalistic health” trend, the anti-vaccination movement is still only a portion of the problem. A Canadian couple, David and Collet Stephan, were accused in 2013 of failing to “provide the necessities of life” for their 19-month-old son, who tragically passed away after they denied him life-saving treatment. Their reasoning for this decision was due to a “bad experience” with general hospitals, as well as their strong support of choosing natural remedies over modern medicine.
Apparently the Stephans felt that maple syrup, juice with frozen berries, and a mixture of apple cider vinegar, horseradish root, hot peppers, mashed onions, garlic and ginger root would be the perfect cure for their son’s bacterial meningitis, an infection of the membrane that surrounds the brain and central nervous system of the human body. Of course, this “natural remedy” did nothing but barely fill his stomach. Due to its ineffectiveness as a treatment for a serious, life-threatening condition, it left the boy without a breath in his lungs. He passed away five days later at a hospital after David and Collet finally decided that their natural remedy just wasn’t doing the trick.
Despite their inexcusable actions, it should be noted that many people like the Stephans are unfortunately not only influenced by the size and therefore assumed “validity” of this naturalistic health movement, but also by the faces who choose to represent it. Gwyneth Paltrow is one such face.
Most of you may remember her from one of her films, but recently, Paltrow has made headlines as a health and wellness guru through her company aptly named “Goop”. Through Goop, Paltrow has sold everything from psychic vampire repellent to mustard bath additives, each with their respective outlandish claims of “banishing vampires” and “detoxing;” she has recently even gone as far as to release a scented candle that smells like her vagina. Victoria Strassler, a third-year English student at York, had a look at the many products Goop is offering, and graciously offered her opinion on the company.
“All of their products look like gimmicks. I wouldn’t necessarily call them ‘useless’ but they look like they are products that no one asked for,” said Strassler.
But, as Strassler explains, perhaps the members of the creative think tank behind Goop are smarter than they seem.
“Maybe they wanted to make these ridiculous products to get people talking about the brand?” poses Strassler, “This may be a good marketing ploy.”
All nonsensical products aside, Paltrow is a strong supporter of many anti-science, anti-modern medicine movements. For those of you wondering whether her head is in the right place, and whether or not her health advice is credible, just take a quick gander at Goop’s website, or better yet, you could listen to the woman herself, as she was quoted on Jimmy Fallon exclaiming to the late night show host: “I don’t know what the f**k we talk about.”
