Dr. Michelle Cohen, a family physician and assistant professor in the Department of Family Medicine at Queen’s University, has tracked the often insidious role of pseudoscientific women’s wellness influencers in the Covid era. While recognizing the real failures of her profession, she argues that these influencers are exploiting “medicine’s sexism to create a new and gendered market for snake oil”—instead of trying to fix the system, they profit from its abandonments. “The wellness industry isn’t pushing for more and better science into women’s health—it wants instead to create a secondary pathway for women’s issues outside of the mainstream. The subtler risk is that wellness will continue to evolve along a gendered path, disproportionately exposing women to the harms of quackery.”

QUESTION: What specific tactics do wellness influencers use to recruit women who feel failed by mainstream medicine? SEED: Pitch: how gendered wellness marketing creates a parallel, unregulated health track for women — and the downstream harms.

Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, loc. 586