What do you call having your own plasma injected on your face? Answer: A vampire facial. That is, if you're a Gooperite.
How about getting high, posing like a horse, jumping into frozen lakes, communing with the dead and bawling on a yoga mat in order to become one with the spirit of the mushrooms? On the Netflix show ‘The Goop Lab,' it's called wellness.
Who knew?
Does the Global Wellness Institute(GWI) count this kind of woo woo as part of its 4.5 trillion dollar wellness industry?
Who knows? “Probably” is my guess. That can easily be done when the GWI criteria for the meaning of wellness is nearly as wide as the Milky Way Galaxy (i.e., 100,000 light years side-to-side, according to the astrophysicist Eric Idle).
Maybe all organizations peddling wellness should, like the Netflix Goop show, post notices that their material and programming are designed to entertain and inform, not provide rational, scientific or serious information – it's all just entertainment, a lark to help cheer us up a bit with inconsequential drivel, the better to take the edge off the certain realization that life is meaningless and we're all going to die.
Timothy Caulfield, author of “Is Gwyneth Paltrow Wrong About Everything,? calls the Goop show “an infomercial for pseudoscience.” Perth physician Nikki Stamp, a heart and lung surgeon, wrote a scathing piece about Goop in the Washington Post (“Gwyneth Paltrow's ‘Goop Lab' is horrible. The medical industry is partly to blame,” February 8, 2020).
Describing the scourge of the wellness industry, Goop is seen as a platform of misinformation, privilege and anti-science rhetoric. Dr. Stamp believes the energy healing, the cold therapy, the anti-aging treatments… are, at best, a waste of money and at worst, (a host of) harmful methods that actually compromise health.
But, is there not something, at least one product or service on offer at Goop, of value? Anything at all? Well, possibly. An energy practitioner named John Amarai has a one-on-one session in which he hovers his hands over clients who twist and twitch, dry heave, spasm and moan — and a single session costs $2500. What a deal. It's enough to make a world class exorcist jealous. (Source: Ellen Gamerman, “Goop's Aura Comes to TV,” Wall Street Journal, 1/23/2020, p. A12.)
Yeah, compared with the rest of Goop products and services, twisting/ moaning/dry heaving and having a spasm look like good value to me.
