Wellness influencers profit from medicine’s sexist abandonments rather than fixing them.

Evidence

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.” — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 586

Categorization

• DEFINE: Cohen’s formulation — profit from abandonments rather than fix the system — is a precise mechanism for how the Mirror World captures real grievances.
• XREF: This is a sharp articulation of the diagonalism thesis: wellness, anti-vax, conspiracy converging. Also connects to how institutions offload care and create markets for quack substitutes.