What do you call having your own plasma injected into your face? Answer: A vampire face. That is, if you’re a gooperite.

How about getting high, posing like a horse, jumping into frozen lakes, communing with the dead, and crying on a yoga mat to become one with the spirit of mushrooms? In the Netflix show ‘The Goop Lab’, it’s called wellness.

Who knows?

Does the Global Wellness Institute (GWI) count this kind of woo woo as part of their $4.5 trillion wellness industry?

Who knows? “Probably” is my guess. That can easily be done when the GWI criterion for wellness meaning is about as wide as the Milky Way (that is, 100,000 light-years across, according to astrophysicist Eric Idle).

Perhaps all organizations that sell wellness should, like Netflix’s Goop show, post notices that their material and programming are designed to entertain and inform, not provide rational, scientific, or serious information; it’s all just entertainment, a joke to help cheer us up a bit. with inconsequential nonsense, better to soften the certainty that life has no meaning and that we are all going to die.

Timothy Caulfield, author of “Is Gwyneth Paltrow Wrong About Everything?” calls the Goop show “an infomercial for pseudoscience.” ‘Goop Lab’ is horrible. The medical industry is partly to blame”, February 8, 2020).

Describing the scourge of the wellness industry, Goop is seen as a platform for misinformation, privilege, and anti-science rhetoric. Dr. Stamp believes that energy healing, cold therapy, anti-aging treatments… are at best a waste of money and at worst (a host of) harmful methods that actually compromise health.

But isn’t there something, at least one product or service on offer at Goop, of value? Nothing at all? Well, possibly. An energy practitioner named John Amarai has a one-on-one session where he runs his hands over clients who squirm and twitch, dry out, spasm and groan, and a single session costs $2500. What a great deal. It’s enough to make a world-class exorcist jealous. (Source: Ellen Gamerman, “Goop’s Aura Comes to TV,” Wall Street Journal, 1/23/2020, p. A12).

Yes, compared to the rest of Goop’s products and services, I find the sprains, moans, dry gags, and twitches good.