Program: Calling out wellness bullsh*t with Dr Jen Gunter

Jen
It was very interesting that they called me strangely confident. I've got a medical degree, a five-year residency. I did a fellowship in infectious diseases. I'd probably been in practice for like 22 years at that point, a world expert in vaginal health. And you call me strangely confident, but the woman who says you can recharge a jade egg by the energy of the moon, she knows what's going on. And I'm like, no bitch, I'm appropriately confident.

Yumi
Dr. Jen Gunter is a gynecologist and an internationally renowned expert in women's health. And she's on a crusade against disinformation. She's a warrior on social media, calling bullshit on everything from turmeric supplements and coffee enemas to bio-identical hormones for the treatment of perimenopause. And she's fiercely protective of women's reproductive rights. Dr. Gunter made a name for herself when she wrote an open letter to a certain actress cum wellness company founder, hint, rhymes with poop and whoop, with a ponchon for jade eggs and vagina-scented candles. Dr. Jen is the author of The Vagina Bible, The Menopause Manifesto, and a book about the medicine and mythology behind menstruation called Blood. She also writes a blog, The Vagenda. Dr. Gunter is fighting the good fight for science at a time when it's getting increasingly tricky to sort fact from fiction. She wants women to have access to evidence-based content because as she says, you can't be empowered about your health with inaccurate information. I'm Yumi Steins, ladies. We need to talk about tuning our wellness bullshit detectors with Dr. Jen Gunter. Dr. Gunter was an establishment medical professional until something happened in her own life that changed everything. In 2003, pregnant with triplets, her waters broke at 22 weeks. She had to deliver one of her sons who died soon afterwards, but managed to stay pregnant for a little longer and her other sons were born at 26 weeks, both with serious health complications. Suddenly, the doctor was the patient.

Jen
I took quite a lot of time off work and along the way I had some very wonderful interactions with the healthcare system. And I mean, there are doctors who saved my children's lives. And I also had some awful interactions with the healthcare system.

Yumi
Dr. Gunter began to understand on a visceral level how not having the answers can lead people who are desperate down rabbit holes, even when there is no actual solution.

Jen
There's questions medicine can't answer. So there are legitimate reasons people go looking elsewhere and people take advantage of that.

Yumi
She saw that there were plenty of other people ready and willing to take advantage of this desperation by selling so-called miracle cures or snake oil products that have very little to do with science.

Jen
And so that's where I kind of really got interested in what I would sort of call this gray space, sort of between the facts and the patient care, how you translate that knowledge into actually helping somebody. Because if somebody can't understand, can't hear, or doesn't agree with what you're trying to explain to them, then it doesn't matter how good that data is.

Yumi
So did that experience change the way that you wanted to interact with your patients?

Jen
Well, I would say that I've always been considered a good explainer. That's kind of been considered my superpower. But I think what really changed for me was making sure that I was really listening to where the patient was coming from, making sure that they were really being heard, right? Because sometimes people just wanna tell their story and that's really important. And so I think that helped me understand that more. And it also really gave me a lot of empathy for when people come in and they have been misled. When I have patients that come in and they've seen some naturopath and they have all this just scammy hormone testing and ask for all this stuff, you know, I'm not rolling my eyes. I feel really badly for them that they were taken advantage of, that the system resulted in this. You know, when somebody has the cloak of a so-called professional body behind them, why would you not believe them? It's not like they're saying you should wrap tinfoil around your head. They did a blood test at a lab. You know, why would you think that isn't correct?

Yumi
Gosh, and have you seen an increase in these predatory practices since your sons were born 21 years ago?

Jen
Oh yeah. It's getting worse every single year. Thirty years ago, you might hear of a, you know what, we would consider to be complete pure snake oil, like coffee enemas, for example. Okay, no, there's no reason to do a coffee enema. There's no science behind it. Everybody supporting it is a grifter, a crackpot. They're just not interested in your health, right? There's so many words I could use. But now there's coffee enema Facebook groups. So instead of you maybe hearing about it in a fringe way, all of a sudden it gets legitimized because why would there be a Facebook group if it wasn't legitimate? We're really in, you know, I would say a misinformation epidemic and now there really are people profiting from it in ways that just didn't happen when I was a medical student and in residency in my early years of training.

Yumi
Once a person has been sucked in by misinformation, it's hard to convince them they've been fooled. And even if they can see that continuing down the same path is futile, they're reluctant to change course because they've invested so much time, energy, and money into the idea. This is what's known as the sunk cost fallacy.

Jen
And I have a lot of empathy for that, but how to undo it seems to be coming harder and harder because with social media, it gets reinforced so many times. You know, 30 years ago, you wouldn't have been exposed to a hundred people in the course of half an hour telling you that AIDS was made up by big pharma. And now you can be.

Yumi
What do you think it is about menopause in particular that is attracting grifters?

Jen
Well, I mean, I think that women's health has been underserved for a long time. So you have a need. You have people who have stepped into a space and are taking advantage of it. Unfortunately, after the Women's Health Initiative came out, lots of people stopped prescribing hormone therapy, menopause hormone therapy. And so that meant people with symptoms suffered. And then this created a space for grifters to come in.

Yumi
The Women's Health Initiative that Dr. Gunter is talking about was research that linked hormone therapy in the treatment of menopause to higher rates of breast cancer.

Jen
For those of us who've been doing this for 30 years, we know what hormones can do and what they can't do. And it can vary a little bit, but they're certainly not going to fix every single thing that's wrong medically. And every single ache and pain isn't necessarily menopause, right? But that's what happens when you have a gap and you have a vacuum, and then you have people who maybe didn't really understand their menstrual cycle because of, they didn't get the education in school, their doctors never explained things, the sexual shame and stigma about talking about your bodies. And so then you have people coming into menopause at a time where maybe they don't have quite the same information that I would have going into it. They have trouble getting help from their doctor, and there's all these people on Instagram promising them the world.

Yumi
Is there any way in your experience to be successful in getting through to people who've gone down the rabbit hole and gotten lost?

Jen
So actually, I met a lovely dietician when I was in Australia who reached out and said that, she had kind of been like full-on goop and all that. And it was some of my original articles that got her thinking like, hey, wait a minute, wait a minute. And then she started researching and researching, and now she's on this completely different path and is like so evidence-based. And I think it's very easy for people to be victimized because these people are incredibly great at making a sale, right? Why wouldn't you believe them? And we know that repetition breeds accuracy. So you hear it over and over and over again. And medicine is complex. And when you're beholden to the truth, it limits you a little bit, doesn't it? And then there's rhetoric. If you're saying that, oh, I've got a natural cure. Well, everybody believes that natural means good, right? And that's actually really harkens back to thousands of years ago when medicine and religion were the same. You wanted to be pure and good. You wanted to be godlike, right? You want to be clean. And those words still hold power for us.

Yumi
But you can get through once in a while.

Jen
Yeah, you know, there are people out there who really do want it. And I think that they see these people making bold promises and they're like, wait a minute. Nothing's perfect like that. What are you talking about?

Yumi
In your experience, why do you think supplements have become so popular? Like it seems there's a supplement now for everything.

Jen
I see people who tell me, oh, this supplement was fantastic. You couldn't help me, but I got on this supplement. Oh, you're still taking it. Oh no, no. After three months, it stopped working. So I moved on to the next one. And then after three months, that stopped working and we moved on to the next one. And what they're describing is the placebo response, right? But to them, it was that their needs changed and they just had to keep changing. And that's why you see people who sell supplements always coming up with the next big thing, because if they worked, first of all, we'd have evidence. So we'd all be recommending them because it would be so easy to prove. And secondly, people wouldn't switch. There's not a lot of money in, you know, in having just one product that people take. You need them to keep taking products continually, right?

Yumi
And switching. I love that. That's really good to point that out. You mentioned goop before, and that's how you came to a lot of people's attention. Dr. Gunter was calling out Gwyneth Paltrow, the products she was selling in those early days of goop. One of the things that you did was you wrote an open letter to her on your blog. I just wanted to read out, if it's all right with you, read out a bit of what you wrote. I read the post on goop. All I can tell you is it is the biggest load of garbage I have read on your site since vaginal steaming. It's even worse than claiming bras cause cancer. And then you go on to say, as for the recommendation that women sleep with a jade egg in their vaginas, I would like to point out that jade is porous, which would allow bacteria to get inside. And so the egg could act like a fomite. That is not good. Okay. When I see a woman like you taking on a big organization, I feel scared for you. It's David and Goliath. Did you have a sense of your size in the fight?

Jen
No, you know, it's so funny. I never thought about it at all because I'm like, you guys are like making a bunch of stuff up and people are suffering and this is so ridiculous. And people could get hurt, but it's mostly that people would waste their money. I mean, the bigger issue that I always had with goop was they were an entry into conspiracy theory thinking. So they platformed a lot of conspiracy theory doctors. So for example, at one of the goop wellness events, she had Kelly Brogan speak, who's a psychiatrist who is an AIDS conspiracy theorist. And she's platformed the people who say that bras cause breast cancer. I mean, she platformed anti-vaxxers. So I think that that's the greater harm is that introduction and that you have that shock value for her to sell product, to get attention, whatever the value of the traffic is for her. But for me, it's the introduction to the world of supplements and the world of conspiracy theories. And it's really interesting, why do all these supplement shills lean into conspiracy theories? Well, the more conspiracy theories you believe, the more likely you are to take a supplement. Is that true? Oh, absolutely. So there's a letter published to JAMA, I think it was in 2014, surveying people on their belief in conspiracy theories and also surveying them on their supplements. And they're absolutely linked.

Yumi
JAMA, or J-A-M-A, is a peer-reviewed medical journal published by the American Medical Association.

Jen
And I'm sure you all have heard of Alex Jones down there. He's one of this awful shock jock up here who has a line of supplements.

Yumi
Quick aside, if you're lucky enough to have never come across Alex Jones, not only is he a US broadcasting blowhard prone to red-faced shouting about how much he loves Trump and how women are annoying, he's also the man behind the conspiracy theory that the Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax. Parents of the victims sued Jones.

Jen
And in the trial, it came out that his team saw that their supplement sales skyrocketed when he mentioned the conspiracy theory. And I just think that people need to be really aware of that.

Yumi
To be clear, it's not about whether the man believes in the conspiracy or not. It's that it's been proven profitable to spread the misinformation. And so that you don't have to, I went on the website and listened to Alex Jones' unhinged toddler ranting. And within seconds, there were pop-ups urging me to buy his muscle-building supplements and merch that includes a red baseball cap with the words bigger balls on the front. I'm not joking. When it comes to conspiracy theories around health and medicine, there are some that Dr. Gunther sees come around time and time again.

Jen
AIDS is made up by big pharma, that vaccines cause autism, mammograms cause breast cancer. That's one I just saw today on Instagram. They don't. And I think that people need to be really mindful of their social media habits and you should be blocking people that promote conspiracy theories because it really takes about five exposures for you to start to believe it. That's all.

Yumi
Yeah. Everything that you just said in answer to my question did not talk about David and Goliath and you in the fight, which is fine. But I just find the courage required to say on air, Alex Jones is a bullshit artist knowing that there will be a certain proportion of his fans who are violent and aggressive and threatening and will find you. Maybe not find you personally, but find you on social media and make your life toxic.

Jen
I mean, it's really interesting. So I write a lot about abortion and I get more hate for writing about supplements than I do for writing about abortion. So what does that tell you? Wow. It tells you something. I would write about goop. I mean, not that often, but I would do it. And then apparently I got so under Gwyneth Paltrow's skin and I was like, well, because I'm right and you're wrong, that they wrote this like letter calling me strangely confident. And of course, you know, when a celebrity says something, it obviously goes viral, right? And so, you know, I was vacationing in England and I get this call from a reporter, you know, did you know that Gwyneth Paltrow has called you out? Like, I don't care. I'm not gonna defend myself against someone who platformed an AIDS denialist. We're not like on the same footing. I don't care what she has to say. But what came of that was I said, you know, it was very interesting that they called me strangely confident. How feminist of them, you know? I've got a medical degree, I have a five-year residency. I did a fellowship in infectious diseases. I'd probably been in practice for like 22 years at that point, a world expert in vaginal health. And you call me strangely confident, but the woman who says you can recharge a jade egg by the energy of the moon, she knows what's going on. And I'm like, no bitch, I'm appropriately confident.

Yumi
This reminds me of some of the commentary around the film, Get Out, which if you haven't seen, you should. Although I'm about to give a really big spoiler. Okay, so spoiler alert. The attractive white girlfriend in the film turns out to be a villain. And when the movie came out, people watching it were like, what? Is she a villain? Hang on, has she been brainwashed? Was she really the baddie? And the actor playing the villain and the filmmakers were like, yes, dude, yes. It was clear cultural evidence that people cannot help but presume innocence from a good looking young white woman, even in the face of overwhelming evidence. And I'm just going to sit that seemingly irrelevant anecdote right next to Goop. For all those people listening to this right now, kind of wanting to give Gwyneth Paltrow the benefit of the doubt. The other thing to keep in mind here that lay people like me might not get right away is that when you're a medical academic, you're meant to be paid enough that you don't need to side hustle for extra income. And that public education is inherently part of your vocational remit. So while it's one thing for a Hollywood actress to be spreading misinformation, it's another for a qualified medical professional. I asked Dr. Jen Gunter about calling out TikTok doctors with degrees in medicine, using their platforms to sell products.

Jen
Yeah, nothing they could say would bother me either. The only thing that would bother me would be if I got the science wrong. That would bother me. So someone who's selling a tumour supplement, like I don't care what they have to say. I don't care what people who are taking advantage of other people think of me. I hope they think ill of me because that means I'm doing my job correctly.

Yumi
How do, okay, but how do people like me, mortal people, resist? Because that blurry line between the jade egg, that can sit over there. But what about when they are actually an expert in something and they're trying to sell me something?

Jen
So do you want a salesperson or do you want somebody who is offering you medical advice? You can't be both if you're selling the same product. Now, if they're selling you makeup, that's fine. I, you know, it's not related, right? I mean, I'm still waiting for Tiffany's to sponsor me. say I was working for, we'll just say pharmaceutical company A and say I helped them develop a birth control pill. And so I get a dollar for every pack of those pills that are sold. And I was then giving people content on Instagram that involved managing heavy bleeding and contraception. And some of the advice, I was giving not all of it, but some of it involved taking contraception to help. Would you think my content was biased? Of course you would. Of course you would say, I don't think I should listen to her because she makes money from that. So if you have somebody saying, well, you can take turmeric to treat some symptom in menopause. Well, they've made that up or cherry picked the science. So, you know, I personally wouldn't get health advice from somebody who sells supplements. Yeah.

Yumi
You know? Yeah, I absolutely know. I agree. But I also know that if you, Dr. Jen Gunter, suddenly started selling a birth control pill, I would be like, well, she's, I trust her. I'm gonna buy her thing because she's done the work and I don't have time to do the work. You know, like you could make millions if you decided to sell out.

Jen
I couldn't look at myself in the mirror. I would be disgusted with myself.

Yumi
I wanted to talk about women in particular. I know it's your field, it's mine, and it's this podcast as well. Why are women so drawn to this snake oil stuff?

Jen
I mean, I think everybody is. I think that, you know, women have been held to impossible standards about weight, right, and appearance. And a lot of women's health is underfunded, understudied, but there's also people taking advantage of that and making bold claims about things being underfunded, right, and sort of cherry picking them from guidelines and using that. So I think also too, because women have been held for eons to sort of as purity standard, right? So be pure, clean, natural. Those God words that I got back to, those, if you think about purity, you know, who do you think about, you know, historically? You think about women, not men, right? And so I think that when you've been steeping in those kinds of patriarchal messages for, since the beginning of time, like my mother and her mother and her mother and her mother, it's around us in so many ways that like, we just don't realize.

Yumi
Can we talk about how those words often specifically zero in on our vaginas? Sure, yeah. Pure, clean, just that idea that there's something inherently germy and disgusting about a vagina.

Jen
Absolutely. So, you know, historically, a wet vagina meant that you were loose, right? That you'd had sex before. And that's why, you know, in so many cultures, the vaginal products were all astringents because they all dried the vagina and made it tighter. So the vagina was dirty because, you know, that's the fall of man, right? You know, Eve tasting the apple, Eve luring, you know, man to his downfall because it's a way to control people. If you make them feel dirty about their vagina, that's a really effective weapon of control.

Yumi
This idea of purity and a germy vagina and this center of sin. How is that message being sold through media today?

Jen
Oh well, if you walk through any drugstore in the United States, you would see shelves and shelves and shelves of products designed to fix the vagina. Your wipes to go to the bathroom, your sprays, your douches, your pH balancing. None of these things work. They're all useless. Every product useless except lubricants and moisturizers. We'll put those off to one side. Product after product after product that women are gross and stinky. I would say if you were an alien and you were plopped on this planet and your job was to find out about female and male biology and you were sent into a drugstore, you would come out going, whoa, those women are toxic shit, aren't they? My God, look at all those products they need to clean themselves, right? I mean, when I was growing up, nobody said women needed to use baby wipes to go to like, you know how to go to the bathroom, right? You don't need a wipe. You're not inherently filthy. Why are women filthy when they go to the bathroom and men aren't? They have a rectum too. So there's something inherently unhygienic about being a woman. Like that's what that implies. And I mean, still today in drugstores, they call it the feminine hygiene section.

Yumi
Dr. Gunter is living in the United States under a Trump presidency that's promised to continue the work of the states in strangulating the reproductive rights of people with uteruses. It used to be that a fetus became a legal person when it was born. The far right are currently pushing for a fetus, a zygote, and even a fertilized egg in a freezer to be assigned legal personhood.

Jen
So personhood is the idea that a fertilized egg actually has more rights than a woman because if you're a woman and somebody breaks into your house in the United States and they were threatening you and really trying to harm you, you could pull a gun and you could kill them, right? You can do that in self-defense. But if you're pregnant and you're bleeding almost to death, but you're not quite bleeding to death, if there's personhood, there's nothing you can do about it, too bad. So it means you really have less rights. It means that you're an incubator. And so personhood would outlaw abortion, which will increase poverty, increase maternal mortality, and increase a neonatal mortality. We've already seen that in places where abortion is illegal now, like Texas. And so, this has been a very evangelical agenda in the US to promote the lie that birth control pills and IUDs are abortifacients.

Yumi
What Dr. Gunter means by abortifacients is something that induces an abortion, but that's not what the pill and IUDs are used for. The far right in America has a furiously active disinformation campaign going linking the contraceptive pill and IUDs to abortions with the long-term aim of making it more difficult to access those methods of birth control.

Jen
And so then contraception falls. And if you're in menopause, you know what? Well, then you can't use the birth control pill to manage your perimenopausal symptoms, or you can't use the IUD as part of your menopause hormone therapy because nobody's gonna manufacture an IUD for a country where using it is illegal unless you're menopausal, right? So the fallout here is catastrophic. And it's really to create a feudal system where women are complete second-class citizens, complete, right? That you don't have rights. You're basically a breeding class.

Yumi
It's alarming. And for you to describe us as a breeding class is genuinely chilling. Can I ask you, going back to wellness, what connection do you see between the wellness and anti-abortion industries?

Jen
Oh, well, right now it's almost a direct overlap, I would say. So a lot of the anti-birth control pill stuff that you see on social media is funded by the right. So there's that. We know that anti-vax in the States is almost directly politically aligned, completely politically aligned. It's incredible how partisan it's become. There are two things that we see in wellness. So we see the people who are definitely anti-abortion and they hide it because they talk about how contraception is bad for you and all these other things. And it's all about this experience of birth that is this romanticized 1940s, I don't know, you pop it out and all of your hair and makeup is all done. It's so outrageous, right? But if you want women to believe that being a breeder class is good, then you wanna have that whole trad wife thing, right? Which is very big on Instagram or TikTok. So there's that. But I would also say there's probably groups of wellness influencers that are probably pro-choice. They don't talk about it because they don't want it to affect their sales, right? So Republicans buy supplements, people who believe in conspiracy theories buy supplements. So why do you wanna talk about something that could affect your supplement sales? So you might stay away from that. And I would actually consider that worse because when people who know better don't speak up, I mean, that's how we get where we are.

Yumi
How do you stay sane when you're battling nonsense all the time?

Jen
Well, I take breaks, I bake, I post pictures of baking. I'm thinking of taking up knitting. And then I have to sometimes just step away from the news because sometimes it's just so awful.

Yumi
One of the things I wanted to ask you about is how scientific studies are reported in the media. How do you think the mainstream media does when it comes to interpreting science for a general audience?

Jen
Well, I would say when they write about it in a way that's accurate, those articles probably don't get seen very much. And when they write about things that are in a less accurate way, they probably get seen more. And one of the problems is sometimes the article's written really well, but the headline is shit. It's just absolute shit. And the journalist usually has no say in the headline. And we know that many people just read headlines. So that's kind of the problem is you can have this amazing article, and you know what? The headline's terrible. But we're in a clickbait world. And I would also tell people to be mindful of your clicks. Think about, do you really wanna tell whatever person has sent that information to you that you wanna see more of that? Because when you click, that's what you're doing. So do you know that drugs like Viagra, phosphodiesterase inhibitors, they can cause blindness? No one knows that. It's true, they can. And the risk of blindness, so maybe like on par about the risk of breast cancer with menopause hormone. But it's definitely there, something people should know about. I've yet to read an article about it. So I was interested in it because scaring men doesn't make coffee.

Yumi
Damn it. I could be really good at that. I know, maybe we need to be

Jen
like in a world where men.

Yumi
Are terrified by smart women. Thank you so much, Dr. Jen, you're a legend. So good to see you. I'm sorry that you're going through living in a hellscape. Oh, hopefully I can get back to Australia someday.

Jen
Well, you're planning it, aren't you? It's all planned, isn't it? Oh, I live in Tasmania in a heartbeat. I would have some sheep and maybe grow some grapes. And make some wine and knit cheese. Tasmania is just stunning. Take it, love it to see you. Good to see you again. Take care. Bye-bye.

Yumi
Hey, if you love the show, please give us a little thrill and rate and review us wherever you listen. It does actually make a difference. Oh, and if you know someone who's fallen down a wellness rabbit hole and is shoving jade eggs up their hoo-hoo, please share this episode with them. This podcast was produced on the lands of the Gundungurra and Gadigal peoples. Ladies, we need to talk is mixed by Ann-Marie de Bettencor. It's produced by Elsa Silberstein. Supervising producer is Tamar Cranswick and our executive producer is Alex Lollback. This series was created by Claudine Ryan.