German New Medicine: A Lot of Magical Thinking & A Little Bit Culty Too - Demetra Gray
Release Date: 02/05/2025
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Medicine Stories
My most beloved herbal elder and I talk about our favorite subject- women throughout time using plants for self care, family healing, and community connection. After nearly 4 decades as a practicing herbalist and teacher, and in an age of informational overabundance, Kami has seen what actually works when it comes to truly embodying herbal knowing. (including the peek at what you see when you log in to the course). Two for this episode- 1) an extended conversation with Kami where we share our stories of Mothering Without Elders 2) two free videos with Kami entitled Garden Herb...
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Nourishment Lost: in Culty Spaces, Self Induced, & Culturewide - Dr. Suuzi Hazen
Medicine Stories
Suuzi and I continue the discussion sparked by my last episode about culty trends in the wellness space by talking about her past with Kundalini yoga- what drew her in and, eventually, how noticing the state of nourishment of those deepest into the cult precipitated her exit. We then catch listeners up on our midlife metabolic meltdown hEaLinG jOuRnEyS and what path we’re taking forward as we continue to recover our vitality and deepen our understanding of why women’s bodies are so metabolically expensive. for this episode include an extended conversation w/ Suuz about the reaction to the...
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German New Medicine: A Lot of Magical Thinking & A Little Bit Culty Too - Demetra Gray
Medicine Stories
GNM is an alt health trend that has grown in popularity in recent years. It is attractive to so many (including me and my guest, once) because it acknowledges the role that emotions and trauma play in physical health and symptom manifestation, something that mainstream medicine still somehow refuses to do. But just because some aspects of an ideology are true and helpful does not mean that the entire framework is valid. Critical thinking and humility are essential tools for navigating information overload and complex frameworks, especially when it comes to health. The allure of certainty and...
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Women's Bodies are Metabolically Expensive (Why Things Break So Easily) - Dr. Suuzi Hazen
Medicine Stories
Chinese Medicine holds that women’s bodies are 10x harder to heal than men’s, as our reproductive system is biologically much more precious and metabolically more intensive to maintain. In this conversation my good friend, third time guest, and Doctor of Chinese Medicine Suuzi and I catch up one year after we both underwent severe energy loss to share how we’ve rebuilt and healed. We talk about shifting away from the mindset of achieving “optimum human health” (an illusion that contributed to our health crises), working and mothering in a state of total burnout, how our childrens’...
info_outlineGNM is an alt health trend that has grown in popularity in recent years. It is attractive to so many (including me and my guest, once) because it acknowledges the role that emotions and trauma play in physical health and symptom manifestation, something that mainstream medicine still somehow refuses to do.
But just because some aspects of an ideology are true and helpful does not mean that the entire framework is valid. Critical thinking and humility are essential tools for navigating information overload and complex frameworks, especially when it comes to health.
The allure of certainty and specialized knowledge can lead people to adopt rigid belief systems that don’t hold up to critical thinking, and the the zealotry of believing that your group’s belief system will save the world only further strengthens unconscious confirmation bias (along with other logical fallacies common in GNM- loading the language, heads you lose tails I win, us v them thinking, bizarre antisemitic conspiracies, etc).
But what might be most worrisome about this growing movement is the purity mindset demanded of its more extreme adherents- the belief that nothing outside of us can affect us if only we believe strongly enough in our own omnipotence and prove our righteousness and purity by attaining a total lack of symptoms.
What is viewed as radical sovereignty and empowerment is really just outright magical thinking reinforced by an absence of humility, mystery, and the reality that ultimately we are not in control of what happens to us. The body is not a closed system; we are deeply embedded in overlapping ecologies.
This episode has been years in the making, and I have been asked time and time again for my take on GNM. When I was sent Demetra’s essay on the subject I knew that I had finally found the right person to have this conversation with. Her past cult experience, and my years of deep dives into culty thinking and behavior, provide a lens through which to view this phenomenon.
Though we do not claim that GNM is a cult in the traditional sense, cultishness is a spectrum and GNM is definitely on that spectrum.
Also its tenets are demonstrably false, and have led to death in some cases. NBD.
In our Patreon bonus conversation Demetra shares her cult story- joining what she thought was a good thing, slowly realizing it wasn’t, leaving, being attacked by the leader and other members, and the long “deprogramming” and stabilization process that all cult survivors undergo
Demetra’s essay The Culty Fraud of German New Medicine
Dr. Moss’s report German New Medicine- Hope or Hoax?
Demetra’s podcast Impolite Company on Spotify and Apple
Amber’s website MythicMedicine.love
Take our fun quiz Which Healing Herb Matches Your Energy?
Mythic Medicine on Instagram
Medicine Stories Facebook group
Music by Mariee Siou (from her beautiful song Wild Eyes)
Mentioned in this episode:
A Little Bit Culty podcast (the best!)
Cult documentaries (by no means an extensive list)- The Vow (NXIVM), Stolen Youth: Inside the Cult at Sarah Lawrence, Breath of Fire (Kundalini yoga), The Way Down: God, Greed, and the Cult of Gwen Shamblin
Steven Hassan’s BITE model
Cult expert Robert Jay Lifton