Medicine Stories 114. German New Medicine: A Lot of Magical Thinking & A Little Bit Culty Too - Demetra Gray
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 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 Nourishing Motherlines Substack
Amber’s website MythicMedicine.love
Take our fun Which Healing Herb is Your Spirit Medicine? quiz
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