Tag: Woo

OB/GYN Dr. Amy Tuteur on a hot new trend in “the world of birth performance art.”

It used to be that women got pregnant with the intention of having a baby. In 2018, among a certain segment of privileged, white natural childbirth advocates, the performance is the point. For example, freebirth, childbirth without medical assistance of any kind, is a stunt. As such, the baby is merely a prop and an expendable prop at that. According to freebirther Desirea Miller:

A live baby is usually the goal. Not everybody has that same goal but if that’s your goal, there’s no shame in going [to the hospital] to get checked.

Lotus birth is another fringe stunt beloved of those who think bragging rights are more important than a healthy baby. It is the decision to leave the placenta attached to the baby for several days until it rots off. It’s an affectation with no medical benefit and considerable risk, particularly the risk of massive infection.

Also stink.

According to Lotus Fertility.com (“Serving your Inner Midwife”):

…[T]he placenta is placed in a special bowl or wrapped in a ceremonial cloth (it is helpful to rinse it first, and remove clots)… Sea salt is also applied generously on both sides to aid drying and minimize scent. This small pillow and its cord are easily kept with the baby, and some women even use the Lotus pillow as an elbow prop during nursing…

Why would anyone leave a dead chunk of meat attached to her baby?

The practice … [is] called “Lotus Birth”, connecting the esteem held in the east for the Lotus to the esteem held for the intact baby as a holy child … Ahimsa, (non-violence in action and thought within one’s self and towards others) … is from the writings and leadership by Gandhi … and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s civil rights inspired marches followed soon after.

So I guess the idea is that cutting the cord and getting rid of the placenta are “violent”? While leaving the placenta attached to the baby is non-violent? Ordinarily that would be laughed out of court, but if you call it “Ahimsa” and invoke Gandhi and King, that changes everything.

One bright spark couple gave their infant a heart infection and six weeks on antibiotics in the hospital by leaving him attached to the rotting placenta, which injected bacteria into his bloodstream. Clever.

As the authors of the paper note:

Ironically, families seeking a more natural birth option may end up getting a more invasive experience than a family choosing standard delivery and newborn care.

The ultimate irony is that there is nothing natural about lotus birth. There are no primates, nor human cultures in which the placenta is left attached to a newborn. Lotus birth is a thoroughly modern affectation, one with potentially deadly consequences.

But hey, bragging rights.

Dr Jen Gunter finds another jaw-dropper: a “naturopath” using “a remedy made from a rabid dog’s saliva” to fix aggression in a 4-year-old boy.

At first I asked if this was from The Onion, because honestly after reading I wasn’t sure.

But no, Dr. Zimmerman is really a naturopath and, well, this is how she summarized the problem…

This is a 4-year-old boy who is suffering from an inability to fall asleep at night, a fear of the dark, of wolves, werewolves, ghosts and zombies and who frequently hides under tables and growls at people. He is overly excitable and has a tendency to defiance. He was normal as a baby, not affected by sleep or temper problems.

Rabies-drool for him then!

Dr. Zimmerman’s diagnosis was a previous bite from a dog recently vaccinated with rabies thus affecting “the boy with the rabies miasm.”

I am totally sure that was first on every pediatrician’s list as well.

I had to look up “miasm” because it sounded like a totally made up word. A miasma is “the ghost of the disease state still rampant in the energy system.” So it’s a word for a totally made up illness. Rabies is a killed virus, so I guess the ghost of rabies walks among those who have been vaccinated just looking to infect victims? That sounds more like a zombie, but perhaps I’m splitting hairs.

No perhaps about it. You’re supposed to go with it, humming peacefully; otherwise it won’t work.

At first I thought, okay, she is some rogue homeopathy but, yeah, nope. HuffPost in Canada e-mailed the homeopathic board that oversees Dr. Zimmerman and as far as they are concerned DILUTE RABIES SALIVA IS A LEGIT HOMEOPATHIC TREATMENT.

The naturopathic board told HuffPost, “Lyssinum is not excluded from the pharmacopoeia for naturopathic doctors in B.C. Homeopathy, which includes the use of substances such as lyssinum, is a traditional modality with a long history in the naturopathic scope of practice; it is still used by some naturopathic doctors today.”

What tf is a “modality” in this context? Just an impressive-sounding word for “we’re making it up as we go”?

The thing that bothers me the most though is naturopaths also push Lyssin/Lyssinium as a way to vaccinate animals against rabies. Put aside the idea that they believe the vaccination of a dog and the treatment of a child’s behavior requires the exact same medicine and just think about the damage that could be done if more people stop vaccinating their dogs and cats against rabies, a disease with essentially a 100% mortality that is also essentially 100% preventable.

This whole idea would be ridiculous if it were not so enraging.

Or it’s both at the same time, like so many things right now.

Someone called Luna Love peddles her wisdom and spiritualityismness on Facebook. She has a long post titled How We Numb.

Today I had a medical practitioner cut a piece of my vulva off. I’m grateful she let me bring in my own holistic medicines into this strange and sterile environment to treat myself before and after the procedure.

They wanted to inject my yoni with lidocaine and numb the whole area. I said no. They wanted to clean me with something that was hot pink before they cut into me, I said no. Then they wanted to put some strange chemical filled substance on my yoni to stop the bleeding, which was profuse. I said no.

Ahhh…just two paragraphs in and I’m cringing in horror. No to numbing? No to cleaning? No to stopping the bleeding? Wtf is wrong with people? Does she know any history of medicine at all?

I was prepared. I didn’t just do what they told me to do because they’re doctors. I know my body. I know what it wants and needs. I stated my boundaries.

Oh yes, “just because they’re doctors.” Of course. Just because they spent several years in med school learning a highly technical subject in order to know how to do things like surgery on female genitalia without killing the patient – that’s no reason to do what they instruct. Personal knowledge of one’s own body is way better than technical knowledge of bodies in general and medicine in general.

I didn’t want to numb it, I wanted to feel it. Go ahead, cut me, I can handle it. It hurt for sure. Not going to lie, but it’s just sensation. Sensation in my most sacred sanctuary.

Yes, bad sensation, stressful sensation. Maybe she’s so Enlightened that she can feel the pain without stress, or then again maybe that’s not really possible.

We don’t want people to feel pain. We stuff people full of chemicals to avoid experiencing life (…and death). We shop, we watch TV, we use drugs and alcohol to escape this Great Mystery.

Oh some of us do want people to feel pain. People who like to hit and cut and shoot others do want them to feel pain. Nice of her to give them a shout-out.

I did an herbal steam this morning, painted the area with a kava, willow, frankincense paste and iced it until the procedure. I cleaned it with a diluted palo santo extract. I stopped the bleeding with helichrysum essential oil, which acts as a liquid plasma and applied pressure, and have an herbal sister-made salve on it to help heal.

Blah blah blah kava blah palo santo blah blah helichrysum blah plasma blah salve blah blah – how does she know her words work better than the doctors’ words? That is, how does she know the stuff she labels with her Special names work better than theirs? What’s the source of her knowledge? It can’t be just internal, just “knowing her own body,” because she got the words from somewhere. How reliable is the somewhere, and how does she know?

I know this is my work. As the Feminine Leadership Academy Emotional Mastery series just closed last week and I continue to receive clarity on next year’s/my life’s work it continually becomes more and more revealed, begging me to step in more.

My work is, has been, and forever will be about The Art of Remembrance. This to me, is why we’re here on Earth – to remember our Divine Nature and choose to embody it through our beings. The willingness to devote ourselves to doing so takes courage, it takes a brave soul, it takes all of us. To continually surrender to Life’s mysterious gifts and welcome them in when they’re packaged in a way we didn’t expect or want is part of that remembrance.

Numbing is not Living. It’s getting through it all in a haze of sensationless existence.

May we learn and help each other live and die well. This is my prayer, my path, my work, my humble service. May the land that will hold the ‘Center for Living and Dying Well’ be brought forth with ease and grace for this work to be made manifest.

And so it is.

I actually agree with her about resisting numbing and distraction. But the anti-medical woo Feel the Pain shit? Oh hell no.

I don’t think I’d heard of “clean eating” before. Apparently it’s a thing.

In the spring of 2014, Jordan Younger noticed that her hair was falling out in clumps. “Not cool” was her reaction. At the time, Younger, 23, believed herself to be eating the healthiest of all possible diets. She was a “gluten-free, sugar-free, oil-free, grain-free, legume-free, plant-based raw vegan”. As The Blonde Vegan, Younger was a “wellness” blogger in New York City, one of thousands on Instagram (where she had 70,000 followers) rallying under the hashtag #eatclean. Although she had no qualifications as a nutritionist, Younger had sold more than 40,000 copies of her own $25, five-day “cleanse” programme – a formula for an all-raw, plant-based diet majoring on green juice.

Huh. Sounds very Gwyneth Paltrow, doesn’t it. Be a person with no technical expertise in the subject whatsoever, and tell people to put jade eggs up their vaginas and avoid eating everything except kale and coconut oil. What could possibly go wrong?

For as long as people have eaten food, there have been diets and quack cures. But previously, these existed, like conspiracy theories, on the fringes of food culture. “Clean eating” was different, because it established itself as a challenge to mainstream ways of eating, and its wild popularity over the past five years has enabled it to move far beyond the fringes. Powered by social media, it has been more absolutist in its claims and more popular in its reach than any previous school of modern nutrition advice.

At its simplest, clean eating is about ingesting nothing but “whole” or “unprocessed” foods (whatever is meant by these deeply ambiguous terms). Some versions of clean eating have been vegan, while others espouse various meats (preferably wild) and something mysteriously called “bone broth” (stock, to you and me). At first, clean eating sounded modest and even homespun: rather than counting calories, you would eat as many nutritious home-cooked substances as possible.

But it quickly became clear that “clean eating” was more than a diet; it was a belief system, which propagated the idea that the way most people eat is not simply fattening, but impure.

Of course it’s impure. We’re impure, and we require impure stuff to keep us alive. Purity is not an option for organic beings.

As the negative press for clean eating has intensified over the past year, many of the early goddesses of #eatclean have tried to rebrand – declaring they no longer use the word “clean” to describe the recipes that have sold them millions of books. Ella Mills – AKA Deliciously Ella, the food writer and entrepreneur whose coconut-and-oat energy balls sell for £1.79 apiece in British supermarkets – said on Yeo’s Horizon programme that she felt that the word “clean” as applied to eating originally meant nothing but natural, real, unprocessed food. “Now, it means diet, it means fad,” she complained.

But however much the concept of clean eating has been logically refuted and publicly reviled, the thing itself shows few signs of dying. Step into the cookbook section of any book shop and you will see how many recipe writers continue to promise us inner purity and outer beauty.

Good lord. Food is food, it’s not magic.

But “clean food” is a belief system, complete with hostility to questioners.

It’s striking that in many of the wellness cookbooks, mainstream scientific evidence on diet is seen as more or less irrelevant, not least because the gurus see the complacency of science as part of what made our diets so bad in the first place.

Amelia Freer, in Eat. Nourish. Glow, admits that “we can’t prove that dairy is the cause” of ailments ranging from IBS to joint pain, but concludes that it’s “surely worth” cutting dairy out anyway, just as a precaution. In another context, Freer writes that “I’m told it takes 17 years for scientific knowledge to filter down” to become general knowledge, while advising that gluten should be avoided. Once we enter the territory where all authority and expertise are automatically suspect, you can start to claim almost anything – and many #eatclean authorities do.

That night in Cheltenham, I saw that clean eating – or whatever name it now goes under – had elements of a post-truth cult. As with any cult, it could be something dark and divisive if you got on the wrong side of it. After Giles Yeo’s BBC programme was aired, he told me he was startled to find himself subjected to relentless online trolling. “They said I was funded by big pharma, and therefore obviously wouldn’t see the benefits of a healthy diet over medicine. These were outright lies.” (Yeo is employed by the University of Cambridge, and funded by the Medical Research Council.)

It’s increasingly clear that clean eating, for all its good intentions, can cause real harm, both to truth and to human beings.

I’m sticking with ice cream.

Hmmmmmm.

A site called “healthy holistic living” asks us when we last “drained our lymph fluids.” You what now? That would be never, and who the fuck says we should?

A guy called Paul Fassa says so.

Your body’s lymph system is the sewage system for even normal metabolic toxins, and more so if there are health issues. Lymph nodes provide antigens for purifying fluids containing anything from allergens to cancer cells. That fluid is simply called lymph. There is more lymph in your body than blood, but unlike blood, there is no pump for lymph.

If lymph doesn’t move out of small lymph nodes through their ducts into the kidneys and liver, it backs up like a clogged sewer line. Lymph nodes can become infected and you wind up with the misnomer of “swollen glands.”

Lymph nodes are not glands, but the accumulation of contaminated lymph fluids leads to all sorts of health complications, some serious.

Hmmmmmm. What does that sound like? Oh yes, like bullshit.

Obviously, anyone who eats and drinks processed food and sodas or alcohol while leading a sedentary lifestyle is stuck with a compromised immune system from clogged lymph fluid toxins that need to be drained and eliminated through the kidneys. But the sedentary lifestyle can be a killer for even those who eat healthy!

Obviously? Obvious to whom?

So, how do you go about “draining” this “accumulation of contaminated lymph fluids”?

You bounce.

Rebounding or bouncing works very well for moving lymph fluid enough for the kidneys and other bodily organs to purify it. A mini-trampoline bouncer can be purchased for around 50 US dollars, more or less. It is like a mini-trampoline, around four feet in diameter.

It’s close to the ground, so all you do is step up and bounce up and down for 10 to 15 minutes, indoors or outdoors.

You don’t even have to leap high enough to clear the spring-bound mat, and you can hold onto something nearby to stabilize yourself if there are balancing issues.

And if you do fall off and crack your skull, well, your now immaculate “lymph fluids” will fix that in no time.

Each time you bounce you increase the gravitational pull on your lymph. You’re getting low level “Gs”or increased gravitational pulls similar to what you feel from sudden changes of vehicular speed and direction or crazy carnival motion rides.

With intense walking or even gentle rebounding, the “G’s” are in vertical alignment with your body and its lymph system.

If you enjoy the more difficult task of jumping rope exercises or more strenuous activity such as half-court basket ball, tennis, or racquetball, there you go, moving your lymph node fluids enough to facilitate toxin elimination. Any athletic activity that requires jumping and/or running is great.

I hit the Google to learn more about this health crisis and learned that the more usual fix is massage. I also learned that even Andrew Weil calls bullshit on the claim that all couch tubers need lymph drainage.

Dr. Weil believes that lymphatic massage is a worthwhile treatment for lymphedema, but he emphasizes that individuals who do not have lymphedema do not need lymphatic drainage, no matter what health claims are made for it. He notes that some internet sites warn of the health consequences of “sluggish lymphatic flow” and promote lymphatic drainage for all manner of supposed benefits ranging from detoxification of the body, regeneration of burned, injured or wrinkled tissue, anti-aging effects, and relief of sinusitis, bronchitis, ear infections, chronic pain, fibromyalgia, constipation, insomnia, memory loss, cellulite, and obesity. He also says he has seen lymphatic drainage promoted as a beauty treatment. However, Dr. Weil has not seen good evidence supporting any of these effects of manual lymphatic drainage. Dr. Weil emphasizes that manual lymphatic drainage is not a necessity for general health and explains that lymph fluid circulates as result of muscular contraction, including the muscles used during normal physical activity. As long as long as your lymphatic tissues or lymph nodes have not been damaged or removed, Dr. Weil maintains that that there is no need to worry about lymphatic flow and drainage.

Cancel that trampoline purchase.