Gwyneth Paltrow always makes for a hilarious story: is there any New Age nonsense she won’t swallow?
For someone of even the slightest scientific inclination, Goop [Paltrow’s web site] is a veritable cornucopia of What-The-Fuck? There’s “spirit truffles”, which contain “spirit dust” which apparently “feeds harmony and extrasensory perception through pineal gland de-calcification and activation”. In fairness to Goop, those are definitely all real words. They’ve got us there.
There’s the “morning smoothie” which lists as an ingredient Cordyceps, the parasitic fungus which genuinely turns insects into zombies by infecting their brains. Gwyneth Paltrow is literally telling her fans to consume brain-controlling fungus!
At least things have an actual psychical presence. The less said about the products that work by being infused with positive vibes and good intentions, the better. Same goes for vaginal steaming.
Her latest thing is getting stung by bees. She’s a rich, attractive woman with privilege oozing out of her pores (whoa, new marketing idea for Goop: sell sweat scrapings from Gwyneth as a potion for wealth). She can afford to indulge in all of these silly fripperies, and if something goes wrong — like going into anaphylactic shock — she’ll have the best medical care, and if she has to take a week off to recover, it’s not as if she’s at risk of losing her job, failing to make a rent payment, and getting evicted out of her apartment.
Cormit Avital has a name that is about as unusual as Gwyneth Paltrow’s, and she also shares at least some of her goofy beliefs. She thinks vaccinations are bad, and refused to get them because she’s a healthy, fit, organic woman
. (You are apparently out of luck if you’re a healthy, fit, inorganic woman.)
Then she got pregnant and had a baby. Organically, I presume.
Then she got whooping cough. She passed it on to her newborn, who spent three weeks in the hospital in intensive care. At least now she sees the error of her ways.
Within two weeks, Eva’s cough “became pretty scary, horror movie, coughing to the point of going blue, flopping in my hands, can’t breathe,” she said.
“For a moment there you think they’re dead in your hands. [It’s] a lot of suffering for a tiny little cute thing you love so much.”
She’s not an outlier any more. Last month, there was concern about a measles outbreak in California.
California Public Health officials announced Tuesday that they are investigating the potential for a measles outbreak at Yuba River Charter School in Nevada County, California, after an elementary school student was diagnosed with measles following a trip overseas. The California Department of Public Health confirmed that the child has fully recovered, but worried that other students at the child’s school had been exposed to the virus.
The elementary school did reopen Wednesday, but only for children who were up-to-date on their vaccinations. Unfortunately, 55 percent of the student body was ineligible to attend school the next day, because, according to school records, 124 students (out of 225 present the day before) lacked the proper vaccination against measles. Last year, school records reported that only 43 percent of the student body was properly vaccinated, leading the California Department of Public Health to classify the school as “most vulnerable” to an outbreak.
Over half the students had failed to get basic vaccinations? That’s unbelievable. I remember my mother dragging us to the dreaded needle, no questions allowed, and the schools lining us up for mass vaccinations. And now woo has so infected the population, thanks in part to popular idiots like Gwyneth Paltrow, that we’re seeing a majority in some areas rejecting a simple procedure that prevents so much pain and suffering.
Goop suddenly becomes a lot less amusing.
The arrogance of the ignorant knows no bounds.
It seems kind of strange, since Yuba City isn’t any kind of center of woo or rich white person enclave. There are apparently more Sikhs and Muslims than average, but other than that it’s just your basic inland California small city.
There’s a good interview with Dr Dunning (of Dunning-Kruger fame) on the “you are not so smart” podcast.
http://youarenotsosmart.com/2014/11/10/yanss-podcast-036-why-we-are-unaware-that-we-lack-the-skill-to-tell-how-how-unskilled-and-unaware-we-are/
Note: I was cringing somewhat during the interview. Dunning frequently makes the assumption that college students are representative of humanity in general. But that’s the social “science”‘s albatross not just his. I’ll note that he also slides past the possibility that people’s responses to ignorance are learned behaviors and are therefore likely to be strongly influenced by the society we grew up in. A case in point, Paltrow is a part of American celebrity culture, 21st C. edition, which teaches that “celebrities opinions about X, for all X, are more interesting than anyone else’s opinions.” That’s going to have a definite effect on her ability to reflexively assess whether she is talking bullshit or not. Another culture might have an authoritarian structure that reduces the impact of that kind of mistake (e.g.: individuals’ beliefs are placed before the shaman, or Paul Krugman, or whoever, for assessment) Much of what Dunning says makes sense – especially the bits about how ignorant people are – by definition – generally unable to accurately assess their ignorance. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to assess the degree to which Dunning’s effect is a result of his effect.
Because you grew up in a era when the parents had very clear memories of their schoolmates dying or being maimed by these diseases. Some experienced firsthand what it was like to have measles or whooping cough (my mother had both as a kid). The worst today’s parents experienced was chicken pox—and many of today’s parents are young enough to have benefited from a vaccine to that, too.
What is with people that they won’t believe the lessons of history until they personally repeat them.
Yuba City isn’t any kind of center of woo or rich white person enclave.
So maybe it’s an access problem, that is, parents who would be happy as can be to vaccinate their children but can’t afford to take them to the doctor for their vaccines? In that case, a quick way to drastically reduce the problem would be to have a nurse go out to the kids’ houses and give them their shots. Not that that’s going to help if they’ve already been exposed, but at least that will protect the unexposed from the next outbreak.
@frog, there is indeed much to what you say. Our children are grown and have children of their own, but ours were part of the test program for the varicella vaccine.
Now, the immune have their immunity fading and they question that which nearly eliminated the diseases of their parents childhood and seem bound and determined to bring back a 35% childhood mortality rate.
That is what many forget, why families were so large in the past; around 40% didn’t survive childhood, which was lowered a fair bit by making smallpox extinct.
Measles has only one host: humans. Get everyone vaccinated in this generation and it would be gone, extinct as smallpox. Then, even if there were some sort of risk to the vaccine, that risk would be obsolete.
extinct as smallpox
Smallpox is not extinct, unfortunately. Both the US and Russia have supplies on ice in case they “need to” restart their bioweapons programs.
The same is true of polio, dianne. Even HPV is homo sapiens only.
Most of our vaccine preventable diseases aren’t zoonotic diseases.
Well, the official side of retaining smallpox is “if we need to develop a vaccine” in case it’s used as a bioweapon.
A more accurate way of saying it is, “Smallpox is extinct in the wild, save in a very few labs in several countries”.
@8 and 9: You’re right, right, right, both of you. Though I would point out diseases like tetanus and rabies that aren’t, unfortunately, going to be eliminated by thorough vaccination programs alone.
But we don’t need smallpox for the smallpox vaccine. The actual agent used in the vaccine is vaccinia. I suppose there could be a case made for keeping some frozen in case of someone developing a non-cross reactive with vaccinia bioweapon. Or for use as a therapeutic agent. We use lentivirus (HIV) to introduce genes into cells. Smallpox might also have a medicinal use of some sort, though I’d be scared as crap to try it, personally.
Actually, considering how hazardous vaccinia is, if smallpox ever does get released, it would be nice to have a modern, much safer alternative.
Progressive vaccinia isn’t pretty, eczema vaccinatum is downright lethal and generalized vaccinia is not the slightest bit of fun.
While we do have treatments for eczema vaccinatum and progressive vaccinia, not having to require a treatment would be far preferable.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16080092
While the disease kills ten times more than the vaccine does, we should have a solution on hand that is superior to vaccinia.
After all, we still have camelpox and monkeypox about, one of those could jump the species barrier in a big way in the future. It’d be nice to not have to fall back to an 18th century solution.
@13 Wzrd: It’s a reasonable point. Vaccinia isn’t appropriate for use with immunosuppressed people, among others. However, if we’re serious about having a safer smallpox vaccine for the next outbreak, be it accidental or intentional, the time to work on it is now, not when the outbreak happens. Where we’re going to get the political will for that, I don’t know.
There’s ignorance … and then there’s willful ignorance. I think the anti-vaxx approach and attitude basically comes down to a reaction against a modern world which is perceived as mechanistic and unspiritual. They’re concerned that we’ve gone astray, lost our roots, and have forgotten how to parent. The naturalistic fallacy crosses the left/right dichotomy. So does the tendency to romanticize the past.
I had a Mormon friend who refused to vaccinate any of her children on principle. She really loved all the Little House On the Prairie books and it seemed to me that she was kinda going with that role model, old-fashioned charm and play as we harvest our own wheat while wearing aprons, etc. Then her youngest baby came down with whooping cough and turned blue in her arms. She later told me she suddenly realized that yes, children can die. They really can.
We have forgotten that it was once rare to find a family which did not mourn a dead child. Cross that with a heavy dose of pseudoscience, a battlestance from the Mommy Wars (“I care more about MY child than you do about yours”) and a huge helping of the blithe assumption that if you do everything right then the Cosmic Consciousness/God/Heavenly Father will bless you with good fortune — and we’ve got a nasty recipe. It’s virulent arrogance masquerading as spiritual insight and motherly love.
Orac had a more depressing story about whooping cough.
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2015/11/04/horrifying-suffering-caused-by-treating-pertussis-naturally/
At least both children survived.
The material blockquoted by PZ above contains this sentence: “At least things have an actual psychical presence.” I am glad to see that the Guardian article linked to has now corrected “psychical” to “physical”!
Cordyceps? Why is Paltrow LARPing “The Last of Us”?
It seems kind of strange, since Yuba City isn’t any kind of center of woo or rich white person enclave.
Do you know Yuba City? I don’t but it is a relatively small community in rural California with 3 Catholic, 5 Mormon, 7 Southern Baptist, 7 Assemblies of God, and 9 nondenominational (probably fundamentalist) churches…perhaps a significant portion of the population is conservative, religious people. Plus, the school is a charter school which might be a front for a fundamentalist school. Fundamentalists have an affinity with the anti-vax position because it feeds on their fear of government control and conspiracy.
The thing about the Cormit Avital story is: sure, good to hear that you _can_ change your mind, but it’s a bit distressing that it only changes when it affects you, or your immediate family. How many other people’s family members did you make sick before it actually impacted you enough to make you open your eyes?
We made some spirit truffles once. Baileys ones. I’m thinking we’ll try an orange liqueur next time.
Wzrd1, don’t underestimate the effect on family size of access to contraception. Where it’s available, birth rates plummet, as women get control over reproduction. I question whether families cynically thought “better have more kids, in case these ones croak” while planning their families, because family planning wasn’t an option. Or at least I doubt the women did, anyway, being the ones whose bodies were wrecked physically from those ten-children families without modern medical care.
I think your explanation is more of a just-so story for the phenomenon, one which ignores evidence like women’s diaries and journals, as well as birth rate correlations and causations. Watch Call the Midwife sometime, it’ll open your eyes. :)
@2 Cliff Hendroval and @19 robroL
I am not certain why you are discussing Yuba City. I have family that lives in Yuba City. Yuba City is not even in the county mentioned. Yuba City is in Sutter County.
The charter school is in Nevada City, in Nevada County. Yuba City is a little closer to Nevada City than Sacramento is (47 min or 69 min). There are multiple cities that built up along the Yuba River, like many decent sized rivers.
(Those of you who live in the eastern US may disagree with my characterization of the Yuba River as ‘decent’ sized. But for western US, it is. That does not make it ‘big’.)
Nevada City on the other hand may be “any kind of center of woo or rich white person enclave.” I am not familiar with Nevada County other than what my relatives have told me…and that does suggest white person enclave. Not rich. Plenty of hispanics, but lots of rural white folks including a few with views like Cliven Bundy. Fairly standard for smaller cities in northern California.
Disclosure: my relatives in Yuba City are LDS and vaccinate their kids. Very nice people. They seemed genuinely sad that we couldn’t attend weddings and happily invited us to the receptions.
Damn you, Google Image search.
“(You are apparently out of luck if you’re a healthy, fit, inorganic woman.)”
And yet one of my favorite comic book characters from when I was a kid was http://comicvine.gamespot.com/platinum/4005-13685/
Sounds delish! Can I order some through her website?
For any who is in a giving mood, I’ll suffer with these truffles:
http://www.godiva.com/80pc-ultimate-signature-belgian-truffles/78337.html
As near as I can count, this would be the penultimate truffle collection the third. ;)
See, I think I might be the minority opinion on truffles. I love the rare mushroom kind, but I can’t stand the chocolate-filled-chocolate kind.
I’m not a chocolate fan, but I’m 100% into succulent truffle carbonara
Vivec, I’m both. I like the chocolate ones and I love the fungal ones. :)
Speaking of believing really stooopid, dangerous, woo-woo (and I don’t mean truffles!), in the discussion Treating the eye with ghee, food colouring, semen etc at Dr Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science site (Dr Goldacre is one of the good guys), a reader made this amusing comment:
I remember when no stoner would have dared use heroin. They saw what happened to the famous addicts in the 60’s and 70’s and it faded from popularity. Each generation seems to need to learn it’s own lessons. A polio epidemic might end this madness unfortunately.
The funny thing about heroin is, in the US, it’s an uncontrollable drug, utterly useless.
In the UK, it’s a hospital drug, used for post-operative pain.
Now, either all US physicians are incompetent or politicians got involved in the standard of medical care within the US.
Which do you think it is?
@#3, Marcus Ranum
That’s been true for a very long time. Authors were making fun of that phenomenon back before World War I. (If you really want, I can dig up a reference to G. K. Chesterton complaining about it.)
@#4, frog
You’re being too generous. Our modern society can’t even reregulate the stock market after it crashed the economy again, and within a decade of creating a disaster by destroying the government of Iraq, we destroyed the government of Libya.
@#30, blf
Actually, Scott Adams, cartoonist of Dilbert, woo promulgator, and IRL Internet troll, and said more or less the same thing back in the period before it became apparent he actually believed all the atrocious nonsense he was spouting in humor books. (The transition was, IIRC, in the book The Dilbert Future, where he talks about affirmations — yes, the woo kind — and how gravity doesn’t really exist.) (Yes, really.)
:one eyebrow climbs high:
Okay, I think I’ll go pound my head into a wall. Too much stupid everywhere.
AAAAUUGH. Fucking idiot. So bees have to die for this empty-headed person? Great. Just great. Can’t someone talk her into the best sting for the buck, wasps? At least they don’t have to die.
Breaking news: First person ever says that wasps are preferable to bees at something
(I kid, being a big wasp fan.)
Well it’s hardly her fault – it’s clearly the brain-controlling fungus forcing her to do it!
Well, we have two types of bee around these parts, one being Africanized and both on the decline.
I’ve lost track of how many types of wasp we have around here when I hit 20, but I suspect there are a full two dozen types.
Avital is a common-enough Hebrew/Israeli name. If her first name were spelled Carmit it would be a not-at-all unusual Hebrew/Israeli name too. Not that it matters. I guess the country of my birth has to do its share in contributing to dangerous global irrationality.
You don’t have to be all that old to have gone through the roster of “childhood illnesses”. I’m 61 and caught measles, mumps, chicken pox (varicella), rubella and whooping cough (the last I don’t remember, as I was very young, but it was apparently very alarming for my parents). The varicella virus is probably still lurking in my nerves, ready to reactivate as my immune system declines with age, causing shingles or various neurological problems. However, I believe I can get a partially effective vaccination when I reach 65 (or 67, I’ll have to check) on the NHS.
@Nick Gotts, you can get a vaccine. The shingles vaccine is simply a higher dose chickenpox vaccine.
Got mine in January, along with my flu shot. Most of my other shots are close enough away in time to still be up to date, even for Yellow Fever.
Still, I’ll not go off schedule again, my wife is getting treatment for Lupus.
Well why not? Fungi are delicious and they’re immune to the adverse effects.
Nick@40: the shingles vaccine is pretty expensive at the moment (here in Australia the private script retail price is around $200, or about 107 UK pounds), but it’s not outrageously expensive if you’re prone to shingles. Like the UK, we have the vaccine on our routine free schedule, but not until you’re aged 70. Having said that, the vaccine is indicated from age 50, so you might be able to access it earlier if you’re at risk (immunocompromised or have a history of shingles).
Unfortunately people like Paltrow are always happy to give you advice even when you ask them not to.
Interesting, chrislawson. My US mandatory health insurance covers our shingles vaccine.
I guess there’s one thing for paying out the nose for health care. About the only thing, really. Getting special dispensation for various tests sucks.
This was also the era of Ben Casey and Dr. Kildare, when MDs were considered nigh unto infallible, and surgeons were trying to remove as much tissue from our bodies as possible (tonsils, adenoids, appendixes, gall bladders, uteruses, etc., etc., etc.), and the government was trying to get us to eat ever larger portions of wheat and dairy products, and, at least in my case, giving me poor advice during elementary school classes on how to brush my teeth. So, not trusting the advice of medical experts today is somewhat understandable. WRONG, in the case of vaccines, certainly, but somewhat understandable.
Spouse got whooping cough a couple of winters ago. As a 40-something adult, he could barely handle it. We think he might have cracked a rib coughing at one point, but he didn’t want to go through the bother of an x-ray so we’re not sure. It was terrible just watching him, a grown person, go through it. Once he ended up in urgent care when it rebounded, and the doc there refused to believe it was actually whooping cough until he produced the documents from his previous tests because “it’s so rare and adults almost never get it”. Yeah, that used to be the case. Until the hordes of anti-vaxxers let it come back, and now we see that immunity fades in adulthood. I honestly can’t even fathom watching it happen in a child or baby.
I live in Nevada County CA, very close to that school (we’re sort-of right between Nevada city, where the school is and Grass Valley, though the two small towns basically overlap). The area is more diverse than Minnesota and Iowa, where I’ve mostly lived previously, but still mostly white. It’s a counterculture-heavy area. Major hippie influences. Sort-of liberal, but of the “earth mother” variety rather than the political variety. I was handed a pamphlet today while walking down Main Street in Nevada City, about a “cancer fundraiser.” The pamphlet, among other things, alleged that there is a massive conspiracy to hide the “fact” that marijuana (some sort of oil derivative, in particular, though it wasn’t clear) is a miraculous cancer cure. Which brings me to the local economy. It’s moderately rural, tourism-heavy. It’s a beautiful area with lots of colorful people. And it’s largely a tourism and horticulture economy. Horticulture of a sort, anyway. I guess you can eat it too.
We have some of the lowest vaccination rates in the nation here. Their hearts are in the right place, and they want to be skeptical, which can be a healthy urge. But aggressively ignorant skepticism might be worse than no skepticism at all. So we end up with this shit. This will happen again here. The area is just perfectly designed to be a disease incubator. And that’s not even counting the local communes and off-the-grid cultural dropouts that there are quite a few of. We, all of us not just our son, are up on our shots. Because, yeah.
Sastra@15: Did your friend somehow miss the fact that Laura’s older sister was blinded by an infectious disease?
The missed vaccine that scares me is Tetanus. That’s a wound infection, not a communicable disease. No herd immunity.
I hesitate to comment about the remark about bees for fear of being thought an advocate of woo woo and some kind of a fool or a nut case. I am some what of a fool and a nut case generally any way so Here goes.
I am not going to read the mentioned web site how ever, so I do not know what they are talking about but there is serious research into bee venom and there seems to be some positive effects with sufferers of RA in increased mobility and less pain and swelling.
here is something I found quickly I am sure there is probably more
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18807725
uncle frogy
Maybe I’m being unkind, but every time I hear a story like this, I can’t help but imagine:
“Wow, it’s almost as if Whooping Cough was like a real disease or something! I just figured babykins would get a cute widdle sniffle on his cute widdle nosie!”
There’s a reason we created a vaccine for it, dumbass.
I had Whooping Cough. I was 45.
I didn’t have it too bad, perhaps because I’d gotten the vaccine update a few days before I’d started to show symptoms. There had been an outbreak in the state and I lied to the GP, saying that I had an infant at home so I could get a free shot. I did have a young child, but she was no longer an infant. At first I though it was a reaction to the vaccine, served me right for cheating the system. I spent that first night in a cycle of chills and sweats, and the bed was sopping come morning. But very shortly after the coughing started, and it didn’t end for three months.
How bad was it? As I said, I didn’t have the full expression of it. By day I simply coughed, and coughed and coughed. Only occasionally, maybe a couple of times while awake, would I get a whooping fit where it felt like I’d become allergic to oxygen. But at night it was much, much worse.
Every time I lay down the coughs would chain together, shaking the bed until I sat up. I had to ‘sleep’ in another room from Ms. Fishy so at least one of us would get some rest. I took to propping myself against the headboard and dozing only when fatigue pulled me under. In the morning I’d change the sweat stained sheets before Ms. Fishy could see them. I was worried enough for two people.
It was around a month before I could sleep consistently laying down flat. By that time the world had narrowed to a tight focus. All I could do was get through the day was to focus on the task right before me. I chopped my life as fine as it would go because to getting to the next hour felt impossible, let alone the next day. I used the exact same coping mechanism I used to get through he worse of my clinical depression years before.
How bad was it? I ride a bicycle to work as befits the owner of a bike shop. Before pertussis that commute was around 12 minutes. The first time I managed to get back on the bike it took me 45 minutes to cover that same distance. A year after the symptoms first appeared it was still taking me 20 minutes, a half an hour on a bad day. Today, almost five years later I still take 15 minutes or more, though some of that may be due to simple ageing combined with a life that no longer allows me much time for extra exercise.
It was one of the most miserable times in my life, physically speaking. When I remember how hard it was for a mature, fit adult I want to do violence to these anti-vax scumbags. Not for my own suffering, but for the unimaginable torture they inflict on those too young to understand what is happening to them. Not for my own slow to heal disability, but for the horror, the helpless vulnerability that the parents and carers must feel watching their child struggle to breath.
Woo kills, and when it doesn’t it wounds in ways that may never heal.
Fuck every last one of those science denying, selfish assholes.
Contempt is the absolute least they deserve.