This Doctor Is Clapping Back at Gwyneth Paltrow's Potentially Harmful Health Advice

Gwyneth Paltrow is known for dispensing dubious advice through her lifestyle site Goop, but [...]

Gwyneth Paltrow is known for dispensing dubious advice through her lifestyle site Goop, but because of its new-age nature, it isn't always easy to pinpoint exactly what's fact and what's fiction.

One board-certified OBGYN is clapping back at the media mogul, shining a spotlight on the not-so-scientific part of Goop's content... especially when it involves telling readers how to 'tend to their gardens'.

In response to Goop's assertion that 'vaginal steaming' is the wave of the future—or, by her estimate, nothing short of a necessity—Dr. Jen Gunter had one choice word for Paltrow: "Don't."

According to Dr. Gunter, "The vagina (and uterus and vulva for that matter) should be viewed as self-cleaning ovens," not something that needs to be steamed like your dry cleaning.

And while, culturally, the practice of douching is on the way out (good news for vaginas everywhere), it's Paltrow's claims about the benefits of steam on the uterus that are particularly offputting. Despite Paltrow's claim that steaming also aids the uterus, science just doesn't back that up.

"Ms. Paltrow and the people who push V-steams also need a little anatomy lesson because unless that steam is under high pressure (like with ejaculation) it's not getting from the vagina into the uterus," says Dr. Gunter.

Unfortunately, the inconvenience of science hasn't seemed to put much of a dent in Paltrow's reputation (or her profits, for that matter). At the start of the summer, Paltrow hosted a Goop Wellness Summit in California where attendees paid $500-$1,500 per ticket to listen to pseudo-scientific lectures.

The summit, like the rest of Goop's content, was filled with dubious assertions that diseases could be cured by crystals or frog venom. But for all of her misleading advice and frankly harmful assertions, Paltrow seems to be too big to fail.

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