Monthly Archives: January 2020

In Gwyneth Paltrows new Netflix series, The Goop Lab, Paltrow explores a variety of wellness management approaches, from energy healing to psychedelic psychotherapy.

Goop has long been criticised for making unsubstantiated health claims and advancing pseudoscience, but the brand is incredibly popular. It was valued at over US$250 million (A$370 million) in 2019.

The alternative health industry is worth A$4.1 billion in Australia alone and projected to grow.

A key driver of the industry is increased health consciousness. With easier access to information, better health literacy, and open minds, consumers are increasingly seeking alternatives to managing their well-being.

Goop has capitalised on the rise in popularity of alternative health therapies treatments not commonly practised under mainstream Western medicine.

Health systems in countries such as Australia are based on Western medicine, eschewing traditional and indigenous practices. These Western systems operate on measurable and objective indicators of health and well-being, ignoring the fact subjective assessments such as job satisfaction and life contentment are just as important in evaluating quality of life.

This gap between objective measures and subjective assessments creates a gap in the marketplace brands can capitalise on not always for the benefit of the consumer.

The Goop Lab fails to engage with the cultural heritage of traditional health and well-being practices in any meaningful way, missing an important opportunity to forward the holistic health cause.

Read more: Gwyneth Paltrow's new Goop Lab is an infomercial for her pseudoscience business

The uncritical manner in which these therapies are presented, failure to attribute their traditional origins, absence of fact-checking, and lack of balanced representation of the arguments for and against these therapies only serve to set back the wellness cause.

Many of the historical and cultural origins of the therapies in The Goop Lab are not investigated, effectively whitewashing them.

The first episode, The Healing Trip, explores psychedelic psychotherapy, suggesting this is a new and novel approach to managing mental health.

In reality, psychedelics have been used in non-Western cultures for thousands of years, only recently enjoying a re-emergence in the Western world.

In the second episode, Cold Comfort, the Wim Hof Method (breathing techniques and cold therapy) is also marketed as a novel therapy.

The meditation component of Hofs method ignores its Hindu origins, documented in the Vedas from around 1500 BCE. The breathing component closely resembles pryma, a yogic breathing practice. The Hof dance looks a lot like tai chi, an ancient Chinese movement practice.

Whitewashing these alternative therapies represents a form of colonisation and commodification of non-Western practices that have existed for centuries.

The experts showcased are usually white and from Western cultures, rather than people of the cultures and ethnicities practising these therapies as part of their centuries-old traditions.

Rather than accessing these therapies from authentic, original sources, often the consumers only option is to turn to Western purveyors. Like Paltrow, these purveyors are business people capitalising on consumers desire and pursuit of wellness.

Paltrow describes Goop as a resource to help people optimise the self. But many of these therapies are economically inaccessible.

In The Health-Span Plan, Paltrow undergoes the five-day Fast Mimicking Diet by ProLon a diet designed to reap the health benefits of fasting while extremely restricting calories. The food for the treatment period costs US$249 (A$368) (but shipping is free!). The average Australian household spends just over A$250 on groceries weekly.

Paltrow also undergoes a vampire facial, where platelet-rich plasma extracted from your own blood is applied to your skin. This facial is available at one Sydney skin clinic for between A$550 and A$1,499.

These therapies commodify wellness and health as a luxury product, implying only the wealthy deserve to live well, and longer.

This sits in stark odds with the goals of the World Health Organisation, which views health as a fundamental human right without distinction of race, religion, political belief, economic, or social condition.

Companies like Goop have a responsibility to explain the science and the origins of the methods they explore.

Given their profit-driven motive, many absolve themselves of this responsibility with an easy disclaimer their content is intended to entertain and inform not provide medical advice. This pushes the burden of critically researching these therapies onto the consumer.

Governments should seek to fund public health systems, such as Medicare, to integrate traditional health practices from other cultures through consultation and working in collaboration with those cultures.

Read more: Traditional medicines must be integrated into health care for culturally diverse groups

Perhaps this will give everyone access to a wellness system to help us live well, longer. This way, citizens are less likely to be driven towards opportunists such as Goop seeking to capitalise on our fundamental human right to live well.

Continued here:

Marketing, not medicine: Gwyneth Paltrows The Goop Lab whitewashes traditional health therapies for profit - The Conversation AU

Allow author Deepak Chopra to teach you the seven spiritual laws of big fit success:

The Law of Pure Sneaker Potentiality: let your loud sneakers do the talking. Don't force the rest of your fit to compete with them. Let them simply BE.

The Law of Giving: let a simple and harmonious outfitred trim on a jacket picking up the vivid splash of your red sneakersbe a present to the world

The Law of Karma: each accessory will generate a force of energy that returns to the entire outfit. Good glasses make for good fits.

The Law of Least Effort: let a statement staple, like a velvet, mandarin collar jacket, do most of the leg work.

The Law of Intention and Desire: make a list of clothes you want, but find ways to bring these ideas to fruition using the contents you already possess.

The Law of Detachment: Not every piece has to be a showstopper. Sometimes black pants are just what the alternative-medicine healer ordered.

The Law of Dharma: We get dressed to fulfill a purpose.

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Deepak Chopra Has Mastered the Seven Spiritual Laws of Big Fit Success - GQ

MY WAR CRIMINAL

Personal Encounters With an Architect of Genocide

By Jessica Stern

Where do malevolent leaders come from? What drives them, and why do people follow them? The rise of populist demagogues around the world, from Hungarys Viktor Orban, Turkeys Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Russias Vladimir Putin to our own Donald Trump, has given these perennial questions new salience. In My War Criminal: Personal Encounters With an Architect of Genocide, the counterterrorism expert Jessica Stern seeks an answer from one of those leaders himself: Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb strongman implicated in atrocities committed during the ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Croats and Muslims between 1992 and 1995, including the deadly four-year siege of Sarajevo and the murder of thousands of Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica. Indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in 1995, Karadzic, a trained physician, changed his name and, disguised as a practitioner of alternative medicine, managed to evade capture for over a decade. In 2008, he was finally arrested in Belgrade, Serbia, and sent to The Hague to stand trial before the ICTY, which in 2016 convicted him of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide (his conviction was recently confirmed on appeal).

Stern, who has made a practice of speaking with terrorists of various stripes in order to understand their motivations, sought and exceptionally, as such requests are usually denied received permission to visit Karadzic from 2014 to 2016 in his jail in The Hague. In My War Criminal, she interweaves excerpts from their conversations with explanations of the history of the Bosnian war and reflections on the influences that shaped Karadzic. As the title of the book suggests, Stern also sees herself as part of the narrative, frequently calling attention to her own responses to her war criminals statements and behavior.

Understandably skeptical of Karadzics self-serving answers to probing questions, but determined to make a fair attempt to understand him, Stern goes in search of his family members, friends and former colleagues. From her interviews, and from her investigations into Serbian history and culture, she is surprised to find some truth in Karadzics claims. His insistence that Serbs were merely defending themselves against external threats, she observes, is rooted in memories of actual historical wounds that continue to exert a powerful influence. Karadzic writes poetry, and Stern explores the Serbian tradition of epic poetry and music that glorifies historical victimhood and martyrdom, and formed a backdrop to his youth.

Stern quotes extensively from the large body of literature on the former Yugoslavia, and also explores such related topics as the legal definition of genocide, the international law on secession, the complexities of globalization and the new man that Communism hoped to create. These citations and digressions, often in lengthy footnotes, can lend the book the feel of a graduate school thesis, and some errors and false impressions creep in: a misleading suggestion that the ICTY one-sidedly prosecuted only Serbs (it did not); the mistaken characterization of a Serbian case against Croatia at the International Court of Justice as involving World War II rather than the more recent conflicts; the incorrect claim that the indictments of Karadzic and his notorious general Ratko Mladic were the first to be handed down by the ICTY. In an effort to be evenhanded and to consider all sides in the conflict (and perhaps because of her own expertise), Stern devotes more space than may be warranted to the question of the influence of fundamentalist jihadis on the (traditionally quite secular) Bosnian Muslim population. Despite interventions during the war by several Muslim countries, she rightly concludes, the fears raised by Serbian propaganda regarding an Islamic fundamentalist takeover were considerably overblown.

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Conversations With a Mass Murderer - The New York Times

WHO/Europe is pleased to release details of the 2020 Culture and Health webinar series. For the second year running, the series shines a spotlight on the cultural contexts of contemporary health challenges.

Featuring speakers from a variety of backgrounds including policy-makers, historians and people with lived experience the 2020 series will examine topics such as the rise of vaccine hesitancy, the digital footprint on health equity, the homecoming of traditional childbirth, and the mental health and well-being of youth in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) era.

In addition to having a live audience, each webinar will be webcast and participants will be invited to tune in online and ask questions in real time.

The series is a collaboration between WHOs Cultural Contexts of Health and Well-being (CCH) project, the Centre for Global Health Histories at University of York, and the Wellcome Centre for Culture and Environments of Health at the University of Exeter. The Culture and Health webinar series is generously supported by the Wellcome Trust.

Join us for the first webinar of the year: What works? Complementary and alternative medicines in the biomedical world.

The use of complementary and alternative medicines, such as acupuncture and chiropractic treatment, is growing rapidly. However, there are still many obstacles to their integration into standard health services. How do cultural differences, prejudices and the history of medicine play a role in these practices and their acceptance? And how do we draw the line between what works and what doesn't?

The webinar will take place at the University of York on Thursday, 6 February 2020 at 13:0014:00 CET (12:0013:00 GMT). To join the conversation and watch the event live, please visit the webinar page.

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Data and evidence - Launching the 2020 Culture and Health webinar Series - World Health Organization

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has announced that Medicare will now cover acupuncture for patients with chronic low back pain in part because of the widespread abuse of opioids in America. Medicare will now cover up to 12 sessions in 90 days with an additional 8 sessions for those patients with chronic low back pain who demonstrate improvement. Until now, acupuncture was not covered by Medicare.

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Expanding options for pain treatment is a key piece of the Trump Administrations strategy for defeating our countrys opioid crisis, US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Alex Azar said in a statement. President Trump has promised to protect and improve Medicare for our seniors, and deciding to cover this new treatment option is another sign of that commitment. Medicare beneficiaries will now have a new option at their disposal to help them deal with chronic low back pain, which is a common and sometimes debilitating condition.

A federal agencyin the HHS, CMSadministers the Medicare program and works in partnership with stategovernments to administer Medicaid, the Children's Health InsuranceProgram (CHIP), and health insurance portability standards.

We are dedicated to increasing access to alternatives to prescription opioids and believe that covering acupuncture for chronic low back pain is in the best interest of Medicare patients, said CMS Principal Deputy Administrator of Operations and Policy Kimberly Brandt in a statement. We are building on important lessons learned from the private sector in this critical aspect of patient care. Over-reliance on opioids for people with chronic pain is one of the factors that led to the crisis, so it is vital that we offer a range of treatment options for our beneficiaries.

The CMS announced this week that its decision to cover acupuncture was the result of an examination of coverage policies of private payers and takes into account an assessment of benefits and harms and the opioid public health crisis. And while there is variation in whats covered and the allowed number of visits to acupuncturists among private payers, a large number of them provide some coverage of acupuncture, CMS reported.

While a small number of adults 65 years of age or older have been enrolled in published acupuncture studies, patients with chronic low back pain in these studies showed improvements in function and pain. The evidence reviewed for this decision supports clinical strategies that include non-pharmacologic therapies for chronic low back pain, CMS reported.

Some 47,600 deaths related to overdose involved opioids in 2017, the CMS reported. The CMS said it is now keenly focused on fighting the opioids epidemic including by supporting access to pain management using a safe and effective range of treatment options that rely less on prescription opioids.

The CMS said it has made significant strides in preventing opioid use disorder by, for example, issuing safety alerts to pharmacists when a beneficiarys opioids prescription exceeds certain levels. Given these and other efforts from federal partners, total opioids dispensed by pharmacies nationwide declined 31 percent since 2017, CMS reported.

Practitioners of acupuncturea form of alternative medicine and a key component of traditional Chinese medicinestimulate strategic points on the body, most often by inserting thin needles through the skin. The alternative therapy is most commonly used to treat pain but is increasingly being used for overall wellness and stress management.

According to Mayo Clinic, traditional Chinese medicine explains acupuncture as a technique for balancing the flow of energy or life forceknown as chi or qi (chee)believed to flow through pathways (meridians) in your body. By inserting needles into specific points along these meridians, acupuncture practitioners believe that your energy flow will re-balance. In contrast, many Western practitioners view the acupuncture points as places to stimulate nerves, muscles and connective tissue. Some believe that this stimulation boosts your body's natural painkillers.

Whatever the reason, reviews on its effectiveness are also mixed, and many want even more alternative therapies covered.

To me, the best therapy is chiropractic and massage therapy, said Bonnie Huffman. Massage therapy should be covered. The benefits of it are remarkable. I have had successful back surgery, and I would not be working if it wasnt for my chiropractor and massage therapist. I have tried the needles. They dont work for me, but I know people that they do work for.

I tried [acupuncture] once on the reference of a pain management doctor to a physical therapist, said Lois Martin. She hit a nerve, and that did not feel good at all. Couldnt tell any difference even after the treatment. She was young and may have been inexperienced. Chiropractic has given best results. Massage therapy would be awesome but its expensive and not covered. I think it would speed up recovery after a flair up.

Currently, Medicare only covers chiropractic care as a treatment for a condition called spinal subluxation. According to the latest information regarding Medicare coverage in 2020 from AARP, original Medicare pays for only one chiropractic service: manual manipulation of the spine if deemed medically necessary to correct a subluxation (when one or more of the bones in your spine are out of position). This procedure, when performed by a chiropractor or other qualified provider, is covered throughMedicare Part B, the component of original Medicare that includes outpatient services.

Medicare will pay 80% of the Medicare-approved rate for this procedure, and you will owe 20% of the amount. In addition, you must also pay your deductible for Part B before Medicare begins to pay its share. You pay all the costs for other services provided or tests that a chiropractor orders, includingmassage therapy and X-rays. Medicare will cover the cost of an X-ray a physician orders to demonstrate that a spinal subluxation requires treatment but will not if a chiropractor ordered the X-ray. SomeMedicare Advantageplans do offer routine chiropractic services, however, as an additional benefit.

According to Mayo Clinic, acupuncture has been used to relieve discomfort associated with a variety of diseases and conditions, including:

The risks of acupuncture are low as long as patients seek a competent, certified acupuncture practitioner who uses sterile, one-time use needles. Common side effects could include soreness and minor bruising or bleeding at the site where the needles were inserted.

Still Mayo Clinic cautions that not everyone is a good candidate for acupuncture. You may be at risk of complications if you:

Mayo Clinic recommends taking the same steps in choosing an acupuncturist that you would if you were choosing a new doctor:

And not everyone responds to acupuncture.

Many people who have chronic low back pain have found acupuncture to be helpful. But the scientific evidence to support these claims has been mixed, partly because it can be difficult to devise a good form of sham acupuncture for comparison, said Brent A. Bauer, M.D.

According to the National Center for Commentary and Integrative Health (NCCIH), several studies indicate that both traditional (actual) and simulated (sham/placebo) acupuncture decrease pain, but other studies have suggested that the neural mechanisms involved may be different. (Simulated acupuncture mimics actual acupuncture, but without piercing the skin or using specific points.) There is evidence that simulated acupuncture appears to work just as well as real acupuncture. Evidence also shows that acupuncture works best in people who expect it to work.

Scientific studies have indicated that sham acupuncture works just as well as real acupuncture for back pain, Bauer said. This could mean that sham acupuncturecould be having an effect, or it could mean that the effects of acupuncture may be due in part to a placebo effect.

Bauer said the research on acupuncture is growing, but interpreting it is still a challenge. For now, most studies seem to indicate that, for most people, acupuncture results in some beneficial effect with a low risk of side effects when provided by a well-trained practitioner. So if other treatments haven't helped your low back pain, it may be worth trying acupuncture. But if your back pain doesn't begin to improve within a few weeks, acupuncture may not be the right treatment for you.

Mayo Clinic has ongoing studiestesting treatments for pain management, including acupuncture.

For the purpose of the CMS decision, chronic low back pain is defined as:

Physician assistants, nurse practitioners/clinical nurse specialists and auxiliary personnel may furnish acupuncture if they meet all applicable state requirements and have:

Read more:

Medicare Will Now Pay For Acupuncture In Part Due To Opioid Abuse - Forbes