German New Medicine: A Lot of Magical Thinking & A Little Bit Culty Too - Demetra Gray
Release Date: 02/05/2025
Understanding & Recovering From Life-Changing Burnout - Clara Belize Wisner
Medicine Stories
Energy loss happens gradually and then suddenly, creating confusion and the fear that you might never recover. My guest and I have both spent time in the depths of overwhelming fatigue, and we have both found our way back to ourselves again. Today we share our stories- the lifetime of inputs that set us up for collapse, the precipitating event that pushed Clara over the edge, what we learned while in the abyss, and how we’ve recovered our vitality. Clara is a certified nutritionist, mineral balancing practitioner, and mother living in Montana. Not only has she nourished herself back to...
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What Real Life Nourishment Looks Like - Ashley Wulkan
Medicine Stories
After our recent episode together- The Epidemic of Women Undernourishing- Ashley and I received a flood of questions, so we decided to speak again and talk about what nourishment really means and what it can look like in a woman’s busy daily life. We explore the delicate balance between avoiding food fear and maintaining thoughtful discernment about what we put into our bodies. We talk through macros, how to estimate your daily calorie needs, and how to recognize when you’re truly nourished- including the question, “what if you gain weight when you start eating enough?” We also touch...
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The Energy To Heal: Why Metabolism Matters Most - Kaya of Fundamental Nourishment
Medicine Stories
How well is your body turning food into fuel? At its core, every function in the body depends on cellular energy- your ability to convert carbohydrates, fats, and proteins into usable fuel. When that process is working well, the body has what it needs to detoxify, to sleep deeply, to regulate hormones, and to maintain resilience. When it’s not, we can find ourselves chasing symptoms- fatigue, inflammation, hormone imbalance, chronic illness-without realizing they may all trace back to impaired metabolism. In this episode, I’m joined by Kaya, an independent health researcher and the voice...
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Beyond “HRT or Not?”: Supporting the Bodies of Future Wise & Well Grandmothers - Jane Hardwicke Collings
Medicine Stories
Perimenopause & menopause are often framed as a problem to fix- and the conversation quickly collapses into a single question: HRT or not? But women’s bodies are rarely that simple. In this episode, Jane Hardwicke Collings and I explore a more expansive and grounded approach to the menopause transition. Rather than asking whether hormones are the right answer for everyone, we look at a deeper question: how can we support the complex physiological process the body is already moving through? Our conversation examines the growing tendency to position hormone replacement therapy as a...
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The Epidemic of Women Undernourishing - Ashley Wulkan
Medicine Stories
Many (if not most) women today are- often unintentionally and without realizing it- undernourishing to the point that our basic biological needs are not being met. Exhausted, anxious, and chasing down symptom after symptom, we are spending time, energy, and money on hormone testing, microbiome analysis, genetic sequencing, supplement protocols, etc. all while unknowingly not taking in enough calories and/or micronutrients for our bodies to work properly in the first place. Our culture today is awash in contradictory health information, food fear, warped wellness idealogies, and impossible...
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The Liver Flush Trade-Off (Is It Right For You?) - Sena Maria & Dr. Suuzi Hazen
Medicine Stories
Thousands of people report major improvements in their health after doing the liver/gall bladder flush, but can it be harmful? The answer is- it depends, on a ton of variables, and no two people are going to experience the same physiological impact. Even when flushing is successful, there will be a cost to the body’s nutrient stores. So what can we do to ensure that liver flushing will tip more toward beneficial and less toward depleting? What symptoms might indicate that a flush could benefit you? Are there gentler ways to do a flush? I’m your host Amber and today I am joined by...
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The Peak Is Not the Path: The Physiology of Lasting Healing - Sena Maria
Medicine Stories
Healing is often framed through the lens of heroic breakthroughs, peak experiences, and emotional catharsis, but this episode centers a steadier path. Many modern healing trends—amplified by social media and the promise of instant transformation—can quietly deplete the body, especially for women, leading to every day burnout, long-term exhaustion, and chronic illness. Rather than bypassing the physical, we return to the essentials, recognizing that illness for modern women is often rooted in chronic stress and physiological depletion- not the lack of spiritual epiphanies or endless...
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Modern Midlife Hits Different (Especially for Mothers) - Jessie Harrold
Medicine Stories
Midlife is a powerful threshold, one that is often misunderstood or endured in shame and solitude. In this episode, we explore the in-between terrain where old identities dissolve and new ways of being have not yet fully emerged. Jessie and I reflect on how today’s societal pressures collide with the emotional and biological realities of midlife and motherhood, creating an unprecedented landscape that calls for more compassion, more community, and more honest conversations. By naming and honoring these transitions, especially those unique to women, we open the door to self-discovery,...
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First Blood & Lost Rites of Passage - Kami McBride
Medicine Stories
Menarche- a girl’s first period- shapes how we experience womanhood for the rest of our lives, and the lack of initiation most of us experience is itself an initiation. In this culture that has fractured from the rites and wisdom of our grandmothers, where so many of us met our first period with confusion or shame, how do we begin to heal this tender threshold- for our daughters, and for the younger version of ourselves? In a conversation brimming with practical suggestions, my herb teacher Kami McBride- who has led countless women’s circles, developed and taught a class for cycling...
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TCM's 7yr Timeline of Women's Life Transitions - Dr. Suuzi Hazen
Medicine Stories
Did you notice metabolic changes around age 35 and/or 42? Does perimenopause even exist? Is there an ideal childbearing window? Why are humans one of the only species to experience menopause? Suuzi Hazen, doctor of Chinese Medicine and my closest companion in healing from midlife burnout, gives us the Traditional Chinese Medicine perspective on the 7 year framework for girls’ and womens’ life transitions. that inspired this conversation Join me & Suuzi at the Medicine Stories in Costa Rica November 2026! Related previous episodes with Suuzi- , , by Suuzi by Suuzi herbal...
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