The desire for perfect wellness and perennial glowing youth is certainly what is driving a great many people to influencers like Christiane Northrup, the Martha Stewart of the conspiritualist world, who promises unending vitality if you buy her books, menopause supplements, eye serum, and vaginal moisturizer, all for sale on her website. … There are other forces propelling many into these circles, including the limits and missteps of conventional medicine. Specialist doctors and pharmaceutical companies frequently fail people with complex diseases and disorders. And as I learned early on from those inappropriate dinner-table conversations about my father's research, reproductive health is woefully understudied, and women's legitimate complaints are too often discounted, dismissed, or disbelieved as hypochondria. Childbirth can be a terribly disempowering experience, and all of these failures and abandonments by conventional medicine are vastly more severe for Black and Indigenous women, who are consistently treated as unreliable narrators of their own bodies. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, "Black women are three times more likely to die from a pregnancy-related cause than white women," while a 2021 study found that infant mortality rates were more than twice as high for babies born to Black women than to white women.

XREF: Connects to broader journalism about how medical system failures push patients toward alternative and fringe practitioners.

Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, loc. 581