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Doctors Are Not Gods

By Jennifer Block on November 26, 2019

Credit: Sergio Mendoza Hochmann Getty Images

Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop brand is annoying, unattainable and overpriced, forsure. But Goop does more than just annoy. It incites an interesting rageamong medical professionals in particular, most prominently Jen Gunter. Anob-gyn and the author of The Vagina Bible (also a New York Timescontributor, prolific Twitterer, TV show host and soon-to-be podcaster),Gunter wrote an open letter to Paltrow in 2017 and hasn’t stopped harping onher since. Gunter points to Paltrow as emblematic of the “wellness industrialcomplex” that is not only exploiting gullible women with snake oil butthreatening their health. At a recent event in Toronto, Gunter went so far asto call Paltrow “a predator.”

The internet loves a celebrity takedown. Gunter has 250,000 Twitterfollowers and counting, and Paltrow is a salad of low-hanging fruit (lastmonth her dining and family room shelving were featured in a lifestyle pieceabout a high-end bookshelf curator).

Gunter, who has personal experience performing abortions and losing herown very premature baby, also spends a lot of Twitter time nimbly smackingdown fetal rights trolls. She’s sending a copy of her book to every member ofCongress, hoping they might learn something, anything, about femalebiology. She’s sex-positive and rightly defends the vagina as "a self-cleaningoven." So, she has considerable feminist cred.

But as Gunter tours the continent promoting her book and other mediaventures, she’s also been calling out Our Bodies, Ourselves for spreading“misinformation,” because it was originally written in the 1970s and not bydoctors. In a letter to Gunter, the board of directors (it is now a nonprofit)defended its more current editions, which have been continually updated andvetted by “dozens of physicians and researchers.”

Gunter was a child in the 1970s, but surely she has read some history. A bookwritten for women by women—and not by doctors—was the whole radicalpoint. The feminist health movement challenged what was then an extremelymale-dominated, misogynist, paternalistic and not very evidence-based establishment. It disrupted the whole notion of expertise, or whatscholars call “authoritative knowledge”: women sat in circles and talked abouttheir experiences with their own bodies; they took off their pants and lookedat their own and each other’s cervices, they shared long-standing homeremedies that had rarely been codified or perhaps ever written down, andthey compared all this gathered wisdom to what men in white coats had beentelling them and doing to them. They wrote books like Our Bodies, Ourselvesas a corrective: Sorry, no, you are not the experts of us. We’ll consider youropinions, but henceforth you will not have a monopoly on our health, thanks.

Today these concepts live on in the ideals of informed consent andparticipatory medicine. This was also the movement that, ahem, sent drovesof women to medical school.

In attacking the feminist health bible, Gunter tips her hand. What irks herisn’t actually the manipulative capitalism of Goop, but really anything thatundermines her authority as a physician: Jade eggs and vaginal steaming andhome remedies like yogurt or garlic to balance vaginal flora cannot possiblybe beneficial because the medical establishment, the authorities, have notresearched or endorsed them as such. She often begins a tweet: “I am a boardcertified OB/GYN and ...”

This is exactly the kind of doctor-as-god attitude the feminist healthmovement fought to reform.

Because if we dismiss everything that isn’t patented or presciption-only, wedismiss people’s lived experiences. When writer Sarah Barmak tweeted thatclinicians had actually recommended yogurt to her in the past, and that shehad found it helpful, Gunter tweeted back: “They are wrong and I am correct.Any provider who recommends vaginal yogurt for yeast does not understandthe vaginal ecosystem.”

Gunter goes so far out of her way to debunk yogurt, in fact, that she missescredible research suggesting that it might be beneficial. No, it hasn’t beenrigorously studied in large randomized clinical trials. But in every editionsince the 1972 original, Our Bodies, Ourselves has cautiously reported someversion of “some of us have had success.” There’s nothing scandalous orunscientific or pseudoscientific about that statement.

On her CBC show (unironically titled Jensplaining), Gunter channels WonderWoman to wield her lasso of truth to separate “myth from medicine.” But thedistinctions aren’t always so clear. The occasional glass of wine in pregnancy?Data-cruncher Emily Oster settled that one, but Gunter says no, not even adrop. In her book, she calls tea tree oil an endocrine disruptor, which seemsto be based on one unpublished case report presented at a meeting withindustry sponsors.

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And don’t even think about trying a jade egg, commands The Vagina Bible—the stone is porous and might harbor bad bacteria. That sounds logical,though, here it doesn’t seem to matter that there’s no evidence of polishedgemstones causing harm. If you’re at all hesitant about glyphosate intampons, however, Gunter says don’t be. No need for precaution, becausethere's not enough research.

This is exactly how industry weaponizes science to shirk accountability.

In an open letter to Gunter last month, physician Jennifer Lang wrote that the“condescending tone and overall arrogance of the stance you take on theseissues is, in my opinion, the precise reason why so many women are movingaway from allopathic medicine and seeking alternative or complementarycare and sources of information.” Lang also shares a personal testimonialabout jade eggs giving her orgasms in her sleep.

“Who really knows how the mind-body connection works,” says Lang, “I don’thave a problem with women taking some control with what goes on, in, andaround their bodies, and doing what feels comfortable to them. That doesn’tintimidate me.” Furthermore, “the risks of those things pale in comparisonwith the risks of things that are offered every day in doctors’ offices aroundthe country.”

Goop’s grandiose claims about the ancient Chinese origin of jade eggs andtheir magical powers so incensed Gunter that she teamed up with prominentarcheologist Sarah Parcak, winner of the TED prize, and surveyed databasesof 5,000 Chinese artifacts for evidence of the concept’s provenance. Theyfound none.

I called up Parcak because I was curious why she, an internationallyrenowned Egyptologist who created satellite analysis that finds lostcivilizations, would care enough about something so relatively insignificant asa Goop trinket. Parcak focuses on “harmful mythologies” writ large—forinstance, the racist idea that aliens built ancient monuments. And when sheand Gunter crossed paths on Twitter, she was equally perturbed by Goop’sprofiteering off what looked like another harmful, racist myth.

“I’m just so sick of the way that people’s money and time and belief systemsare being warped,” she says. She did the research because to her, Goop is partof the crisis in facts. “It’s all connected to this bigger theme of what role doexperts have in our world today. Who should you be listening to?”

Gunter, who has tweeted “I’m the fucking expert,” takes the same hard-NOstance on vaginal steaming, which she warns could cause a burn (as if womencan’t handle boiling a pot of water). Out of curiosity, I tried this at home overthe weekend. It was warm, gentle, contemplative—all qualities I also happento value in a health care provider.

“Anyone who promotes vaginal steaming is the patriarchy,” Gunter tweetedrecently. But proponents say this is a complete misunderstanding; it’s notabout hygiene, it’s about bringing comfort and blood flow to areas that havesuffered trauma, disconnect and abuse. There are, anecdotally, many womenhealing from sexual violence and cancer treatments, who find that steaminghelped them regain sensation. Are you really going to argue with them? Isn’tthat called gaslighting?

In September, several ob-gyns took issue with the premise of an article inCosmo. The piece reported that the standard surgical procedure to removeabnormal cervical cells (called LEEP) may damage nerves involved withorgasm. Thousands of women have joined Facebook groups claiming a loss ofsexual sensation, sometimes even their orgasmic abilities entirely, followingLEEP. The reports are anecdotal, yes, but such reports are what the FDA callsa signal.

This information seems important, especially to patients, who might opt for aless invasive technique.

Physician Kimi Chernoby accused Cosmopolitan of ‘spreading vagina myths’.Youtube myth debunker @mamadoctorjones called it “so dangerous.” Guntertweeted: “It is not well researched. I will be writing something soon.”

So far, Gunter has not written about LEEPs, or any other urgent gynecologiccontroversies besides labiaplasty. And this is what’s most troubling: instead oftaking shots at what’s in your fridge or nightstand, she could be using herplatform to talk about, say, obstetric violence, the rising maternal death rate,the pelvic mesh disaster or the overuse of hysterectomies, to name a fewtrends more threatening to women’s health and lives than yogurt.

If this were Gunter’s “vagenda,” she’d be part of a much larger conversation,led by people with humility about the body, healing, and the not infallibleprofession of medicine. They are concerned with medical reversals, devicesthat have been permanently inserted into humans without any study at all,predatory pharmaceutical practices, conflict of interest in research, and the“perverse incentives” of our health system. And they see the fear-mongeringabout “Big Wellness” for what it is: a distraction from the most egregiousharms.

The views expressed are those of the author(s) and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

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A B O U T T H E A U T H O R ( S )

Jennifer Block

Jennifer Block is the author of Everything Below the Waist: Why Health Care Needs a FeministRevolution. She was among dozens of editors of the 2005 edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves.

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