Christiane Northrup

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Christiane Northrup is a obstetrics and gynaecology physician and author who has embraced pseudoscientific alternative medicine and anti-vaccine conspiracy theories. She has a history of opposing vaccination and has embraced QAnon ideology during the COVID-19 pandemic. Northrup reaches a significant audience through popular books and multiple social media platforms and spreads misinformation, notably about COVID-19.

Early life

Northrup is a native of Buffalo, New York.^[1] When Northrup was five years old, her six-month-old brother died after being admitted to the hospital. Another brother was born and refused to eat, but her mother brought the boy home against medical advice. Her mother insisted she knew he would be okay. Northrup calls this "intact maternal intuition" and believes that these early childhood incidents resulted in her current medical beliefs.^[2]

Northrup earned her Doctor of Medicine (M.D.) degree at Dartmouth University and completed her obstetrics and gynecology (OB/GYN) residency at Tufts-New England Medical Center in Boston.^[3][4]

Career

Shortly after starting her practice in 1980, Northrup co-founded the private obstetrics and gynaecology practice Women to Women in Yarmouth, Maine in 1996. The practice incorporated holistic and Western medicine.^[1] Northrup was also an assistant clinical professor of OB/GYN at Maine Medical Center for 20 years and is credited with helping promote the women's health movement in the state.^[1]

Northrup originally became known after writing New York Times best-selling books such as Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom, which has been translated into sixteen languages,^[5] and The Wisdom of Menopause.^[1][2] She was a regular guest on The Oprah Winfrey Show and The Dr. Oz Show,^[6] appearing as a women's health expert.^[4] She has appeared as a guest on Today, Rachel Ray Show, The View and 20/20.^[5] In 2013 she was named one of Reader's Digest 100 most trusted people in America.^[2] She wrote over twenty articles for the Huffington Post between 2011 and 2014,^[7] writes a regular newsletter and has a website.^[8] She appeared on Winfrey's podcast as recently as August 2020.^[7]

Northrup left Women to Women in 1997 and retired from her OB/GYN practice in Yarmouth in 1999 to focus on writing and speaking.^[5][7][9]

Northrup is a member of the American Holistic Medical Association, a pseudo-medical professional association.^[10]

Northrup has many followers on social media. As of November 2020, she has over 110,000 followers on Twitter.^[7] As of January 2021 she has over 149,000 followers on Instagram and over half a million followers on Facebook.^[2]

Views and controversy

Northrup advocates for not using terms such as "aging" and "senior moments", to keep moving and to take pleasure in living. She said, in 2016, when asked about her age, "my biological age is 33. My wisdom age is 300". She recommends regular workouts, such as Pilates, to prevent aches and stiffness common in aging.^[9] In 2016 Northrup decided to post a vlog every day about what she was grateful for, stating that staying positive can be a difficult discipline but becomes a reward that changes the brain. She recommends training yourself to notice blessings, then you will feel more blessed.^[11]

Science-based medicine advocate David Gorski describes Northrup as "...a woo-friendly gynecologist who has some very strange views about the vagina...". She believes that qi gong will cure many female health issues, increase the qi to the vagina and provide better orgasms.^[12]

Northrup believes in astrology, tarot cards, chakras, and regression therapy, all of which have no scientific credibility.^{[citation needed]} Northrup has admitted to using Tarot cards to diagnose her own illnesses.^[4]

Northrup claims that trauma from a past life can cause chronic illness.^{[13][failed verification]}

Northrup believes that the term "conspiracy theorist" was coined by the CIA, which she also claims is run out of China.^{[citation needed]} She contends that the term "anti-vaxxer" was created by Big Pharma.^{[citation needed]}

She believes that in a previous incarnation, she lived in Atlantis and predicted that December 21, 2020, would be the beginning of the "...Age of Aquarius, delivering the world from evil and allowing us to evolve into a new species, Homo illuminus". When this date passed, she adapted and changed her narrative to recommending having positive thoughts.^[2]

Northrup does not believe in germ theory,^[12] and states that the reason college students get sick with illnesses such as meningitis is that they are run down and have a "...shaky first chakra".^[14]

Northrup promotes alternative medical therapies and connections between the soul and body. She believes the regular medical establishment overlook these connections.^[4]

Northrup wrote in one of her books and reiterated on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 2009 that thyroid problems in women "...develop because of an energy blockage in the throat region, the result of a lifetime of 'swallowing' words one is aching to say." She advised taking iodine supplements to help with the condition. According to Dr. David Cooper, professor of endocrinology at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, this is bad advice since the thyroid gland is very sensitive to iodine and it will make hypothyroidism worse.^[4]

In 2008, medical doctor Harriet Hall expressed how appalled she was at the information she read in Northrup's third book The Wisdom of Menopause. In the book Northrup supports the idea of "seven emotional centers" that correspond roughly to the seven chakras, and references her belief in astrology, angels, mysticism, feng shui, and Tarot cards. Medical information is mixed with ideas that are not supported with credible evidence: While providing excellent advice on how to treat insomnia, such as avoiding caffeine and exercising regularly, she adds the recommendation to cover bedroom mirrors at night. According to feng shui, mirrors enliven a room and increase the energy flow, making people feel unsafe and jumpy at night. She recommends non-standard laboratory testing from Genova Diagnostics, which consumer protection site Quackwatch advises people to avoid. Northrup recommends large doses of vitamin A to prevent heart disease. According to Hall, this has been linked to increased incidences of lung cancer, hip fractures in menopausal women, birth defects when taken in early pregnancy, and an increase in total mortality. Northrup believes that a woman's "emotional style" influences her risk of developing breast cancer and her ability to recover from it. She stresses empowerment and positive thinking, which Hall considers to be idealistic. Hall thinks that "MDs who recommend quackery along with legitimate medical advice are arguably more dangerous than outright quacks because people are more likely to take them seriously."^[8]

Northrup subscribes to the idea that male circumcision causes dyspareunia. Jen Gunter, an obstetrician-gynecologist known for exposing medical pseudoscience, stated in 2011 that this is biologically implausible. Gunter has seen many men who are wracked with guilt thinking they have caused their partner's condition.^[15]

In a May 2020 interview on the QAnon FAQ podcast, Northrup credits Maine's 2019 law eliminating religious and philosophical exemptions for childhood vaccinations with "galvanizing" her to speak out further against vaccines and policies surrounding them.^[1]

COVID-19

This section may contain indiscriminate, excessive, or irrelevant examples. Please by adding more descriptive text and removing less pertinent examples. See Wikipedia's guide to writing better articles for further suggestions. (August 2021)

Beginning in the spring of 2020, Northrup began posting messages opposing contact tracing, vaccine development, and masking as efforts to curb the spread of COVID-19 in addition to her more traditional medical advice.^[16] On Facebook, she began hosting a series of ten-minute videos she calls The Great Awakening in which she refers to her followers as Warriors of the Radical Light. In these videos, she has also denied the reality of the pandemic and has promoted the anti-vaccination view that vaccines are unnecessary if a person is healthy. Science writer Jonathan Jarry criticizes her statement that a COVID-19 vaccine will "...target specific chromosomes that act as the seat of our empathy," as absurd and unscientific. Another view she holds is that artificial intelligence (AI) has been incorporated into the COVID-19 vaccine and will be integrated into the recipient's DNA and that patented vaccines will make recipients the property of the patent holders, per the majority ruling in Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, Inc.^[2]

During the pandemic, Northrup has admitted to hosting groups of people from the organizations Make America Free Again and Millions Against Medical Mandates at her house. She frequently tells her viewers to disobey rules during the pandemic, recommending that they trust their intuition and reject what does not feel right. Jarry counters by explaining that invisible viruses are not intuitive and it is wrong to ignore the evidence that nearly two million people have died from COVID-19 as of January 2021. She has recommended discredited information sources such as Joe Mercola, Andrew Wakefield, and InfoWars.^[2] On October 22, 2020, she tweeted that Canada was building COVID-19 concentration camps ^[7] for which there is no evidence.^[17]

During her October 12, 2020 video she expressed her anti-mask sentiments, encouraging a teenage boy who did not like wearing a mask to school to perform an act of civil disobedience with a group of like-minded individuals. In the same episode she recommended the book called The Case Against Masks and encouraged her audience to tweet about medical freedom.^[7]

In an October 2020 video interview, Northrup claimed that COVID-19 vaccines would change human DNA, would insert "nanoparticle robots" with two-way 5g radio into the body, and thus would collect and communicate extensive biometric data. She claimed that the data would be connected to cryptocurrency and that in this way humans "would become literally slaves to the system". She explained that the robots would be permanent and would enable people to be controlled by outside forces.^[1]

Maine Women Magazine featured Northrup in a positive light on the cover of the April 2020 issue of their free monthly magazine. The founders of a Maine business who had purchased a full page advertisement on the back of the magazine were unhappy with the promotion of Northrup. They pulled their ad, expressing their discontent about the article not addressing Northrup's anti-vaccine stance or her public statements that COVID-19 is a hoax. Northrup responded saying she did not think that COVID-19 was a hoax, just that it was being misrepresented by the media. Three weeks later, on May 5, 2020, Northrup promoted Plandemic which falsely states that mask-wearing activates your own virus and that COVID-19 came from a laboratory.^[7][18] After posting the link her following grew by more than 100,000 people on Facebook.^[7] The New York Times found that more than 1,000 people shared the link to the video on her site, with many of them being against vaccination.^[18][1]

In November and December 2020, Northrup used her Twitter account to disseminate false claims that asymptomatic carriers of COVID-19 do not spread the disease, that masks are harmful to the wearer's health, that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump, and that global public health leaders created the COVID-19 pandemic to enact genocide and to cull, track and control the human race.^[1]

In April 2021, Northrup used her Facebook page to praise Centner Academy in Miami, where some of her grandchildren attend school,^[1] for prohibiting teachers who receive COVID-19 vaccinations from being in the classroom.^[19]

On April 16, 2021, Northrup spoke at the Health and Freedom Conference hosted by Rhema Bible Training College in Tulsa, Oklahoma. In her 20-minute speech, she claimed that COVID vaccines are ineffective against the virus but would cause widespread sterility in humans; that vaccinated mothers who breastfeed could kill their babies; that vaccinated people are a health risk to those who are not vaccinated; that people should not wear masks, and that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is collecting physiological information via COVID vaccines, cell phones and cryptocurrency.^[1]

After the April 2021 publication on LifeSiteNews of an article about reports of menstrual irregularities^[20] and reproductive dysfunction following COVID vaccines, Northrup recorded a video in which she used an oral tradition technique to relay first-person narratives and highlight her disquiet about COVID-19 technology. Health Feedback and Politifact accused her of spreading disinformation that vaccines against COVID-19 affected women's fertility and menstrual cycle,^[21][22] while as of June 2021 "more than 4,000 women have reported changes in their menstrual cycle after getting a COVID jab" to the British Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency.^[23][24]

QAnon

According to Nathan Bernard and Andy O'Brian in an article for the Mainer titled Dr. No, "[Northrup's] aligned herself with a loose network of crackpots and charlatans who profit off people’s fears, and is promoting their projects and products, along with her own, to her massive online audience using cult-like techniques." Bernard and O'Brian declare that Northrup has been leading her supporters down the QAnon rabbit hole, talking about the group frequently in her videos and has been a contributor to spreading conspirituality, (a portmanteau of the words conspiracy and spirituality that was coined in 2011).^[7] Beginning in March 2020, Northrup posted links to QAnon-related memes and videos such as Out of the Shadows which talks about QAnon ideology, and she often included the Qanon-affiliated #savethechildren hashtag with her posts.^{[7][16][25][26]} The title of her video series, The Great Awakening is known to be linked to the QAnon movement.^[25]

Vaccinations

Northrup opposes vaccination^[26] and describes it as a cultural ritual that is imperfect and unnecessary if people have a good immune system.^[14] She stipulates that vaccines are designed to only boost the first chakra, a view which has no foundation in science.^[13] Regarding pertussis (whooping cough), she recommends breastfeeding to support a baby's immune system, claiming the vaccine for this disease is not reliable and possibly unnecessary. Medical Doctor Peter Lipson, in his article "Christiane Northrup: more bad medicine," expresses his concern, admitting that although vaccines are imperfect they do offer protection against potentially horrifying disease; in the case of whooping cough, they offer protection against an asphyxiating death.^[14] As early as 2006, Northrup has spoken out against Gardasil and encouraging parents not to give it to their children.^[1]

When an audience member of The Oprah Winfrey Show asked Northrup about the HPV vaccine, Northrup advised against it despite evidence that it is safe and protects against a virus linked to cervical cancer.^[12][4] Instead, she recommended a dietary program to build immunity. According to Susan Wood, a research professor at the School of Public Health at George Washington University, there is no evidence that diet can stop the spread of HPV.^[4] Jen Gunter is also critical of Northrup for her HPV opinion, noting that while Northrup has not published one paper in support of her ideas, the researcher who made the connection between the HPV and cervical cancer won a Nobel Prize.^[15]

Northrup was an outspoken advocate of failed efforts in 2019 to expand the exemptions to student vaccination requirements in Maine^[7] and was a leader of the people's veto movement, opposing the elimination of religious and philosophical exemptions to vaccinations, which appeared as a statewide ballot referendum in 2020. Regarding mandatory flu shots for health care workers in Maine Northrup is "...adamantly opposed to the Maine CDC rule change to mandate flu vaccines for healthcare workers."^[27]

In March 2021, an analysis of Twitter and Facebook anti-vaccine content by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) found Northrup to be one of 12 individual and organization accounts producing up to 65% of all anti-vaccine content on the platforms.^[28][29] The report called the twelve the Disinformation Dozen.^[29] In late April 2021, Northrup's Instagram account was disabled.^[30]

Breast thermography

David Gorski, a surgical oncologist, states in his article, "Oprah’s buddy Dr. Christiane Northrup and breast thermography: The opportunistic promotion of quackery" that Northrup advocates for "...ways to prevent breast cancer at the cellular level..." using thermography. She makes the claim that current medical professionals focus more on testing and poking and prodding. Gorski calls this a typical "alt-med" trope. He explains that thermography is just another test and is not preventative in any way. Northrup claims that using thermography, breast cancer can be diagnosed from eight to ten years earlier and produces unambiguous results, reducing further testing. However, according to Gorski, studies show that thermography is unreliable. A study in 1977 showed it to be the least effective of the existing screening modalities in finding breast cancers. Northrup cites a study from 1982 in her written articles about the topic, despite many more recent studies showing its ineffectiveness. Gorski believes Northrup is guilty of malpractice when she encourages patients who believe they have healthy breasts to forego mammograms, even if this is against the advice of their doctors. Gorski has encountered many women in his practice who resisted their doctor's request for testing because they "knew they were fine" only to find they had invasive cancers. Gorski concludes that science does not support the use of thermography instead of mammography.^[31]

Personal life

In 1999, Northrup and her husband divorced.^[5] She has two daughters^[5] and lives in Yarmouth, Maine.^[7] In March and April 2020, she was the primary caregiver for her terminally ill boyfriend, who died on April 21.^[1]

Publications

• — (1994). Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom. United States: Bantam. ISBN 9780553081206.
• — (2001). Wisdom of Menopause. United States: Little Brown Book Group Limited. ISBN 9780356248981.
• — (2015). Goddesses Don't Age:The Secret Prescription for Radiance, Vitality, and Well-Being. United States: Hay House. ISBN 9781401945169.
• — (2019). Dodging Energy Vampires. United States: Hay House. ISBN 9781401954796.

References

External links

• List of Laboratories Doing Nonstandard Laboratory Tests on Quackwatch