What do you call having your own plasma injected into your face? Answer: A facial vampire. That is, if you are a gooperita.
How about getting high, posing like a horse, jumping into frozen lakes, communicating with the dead, and crying on a yoga mat to become one with the mushroom spirit? On the Netflix show ‘The Goop Lab,’ it’s called wellness.
Who knows?
Does the Global Wellness Institute (GWI) count this type of courtship as part of its $ 4.5 trillion wellness industry?
Who knows? “Probably” is my guess. That can easily be done when the GWI criterion for the meaning of well-being is almost as wide as the Milky Way (that is, 100,000 light-years across, according to astrophysicist Eric Idle).
Perhaps all organizations that sell wellness should, like the Netflix Goop show, post notices that their material and programming are designed to entertain and inform, not to provide rational, scientific, or serious information; it’s all just entertainment, a joke to help cheer us up a bit. With inconsequential nonsense, it is better to alleviate the certainty that life is meaningless and that we are all going to die.
Timothy Caulfield, author of “Is Gwyneth Paltrow Wrong About Everything?”, Calls Goop’s show “a pseudoscience infomercial.” Nikki Stamp, a Perth physician, heart and lung surgeon, wrote a scathing article about Goop in the Washington Post (“Gwyneth Paltrow’s ‘Goop Lab’ is horrible. The medical industry is partly to blame”, February 8, 2020) .
In describing the scourge of the wellness industry, Goop is seen as a platform for disinformation, privilege, and anti-scientific rhetoric. Dr. Stamp believes that energy healing, cold therapy, anti-aging treatments … are at best a waste of money and at worst (a number of) harmful methods that they really compromise health.
But isn’t there something, at least one product or service offered at Goop, of value? Nothing at all? Well possibly. An energy practitioner named John Amarai has a one-on-one session where he runs his hands over clients who squirm and contract, move, spasm and moan, and a single session costs $ 2,500. What a great 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.)
Yes, compared to the rest of Goop’s products and services, squirming / moaning / flailing and having a spasm seems like good value for money to me.