There is rarely a fiercer critic than disappointed lovers. Sohan Tricoire became known thanks to her YouTube channel, where she deciphers the main principles of naturopathy, to better denounce its excesses. If the young woman knows the workings of this pseudo-medicine so well, it is because she let herself be caught up in these beliefs to the point of becoming a naturopath herself, before realizing that this practice was totally inept. A period of professional questioning, the contempt and even hostility of the medical profession towards some of her choices (veganism, sterilization, etc.), a strong interest in ecology and everything related to the “natural”: “At a certain point in my journey, all the conditions were met for me to adhere to these precepts”, explains the thirty-year-old.
The trigger came in the form of a video by controversial naturopath Irène Grosjean, whose nauseating advice (sexual touching to bring down fevers in babies) has since caused controversy. “It was a raw food colleague who recommended it to me. She talked about healthy living, took on the role of a caregiver while giving a very positive and caring speech about plant-based diets,” says Sohan, who at the time did not have “the tools to understand that this woman was in no way a health professional.” The woman who alternated between small administrative jobs thinks she has found a way to retrain for a job that is both “meaningful” and a little “alternative, outside the system.”
She enrolled in the “best” naturopathy school for a year’s training. “I was quickly convinced. Not by rational arguments, obviously, but by the group effect, by the fact that what was presented to us seemed to work, that we felt very strong things. At the time I knew nothing about the placebo effect, the power of suggestion, the contextual effect,” Sohan Tricoire remembers. The price of the training, 12,000 euros, probably also played a role, she admits in hindsight: “Unconsciously, we want such an investment to be justified.” On the program: iridology (diagnosis by analyzing the iris of the eyes), Bach flowers, plantar reflexology, detox, purges, morphopsychology (determination of character traits from physical appearance), water treatments, nutrition, food supplements, herbal medicine, revitalization cures, etc.
“I wanted to sort it out, but soon there wasn’t much left.”
With all this “knowledge” stored up, the young woman set up her own business in the Toulouse region. Alone, with few clients at the start, she had time to “step back a bit”. She began by discovering other crazy practices, such as food intolerance analyses. “The medical biology laboratory next door to me was doing them. Health professionals! That totally legitimised my practice”, she laments retrospectively. However, little by little, doubts crept in. At first, paradoxically. “I found the effect of Bach flowers so powerful that at one point I didn’t even need the elixirs anymore, I just had to think about them to feel them. I started to tell myself that it was useless”, she smiles today.
Then she discovered content related to zetetics (Editor’s note: the art of doubt) and critical thinking on YouTube. “First, I wanted to “save naturopathy”, by sorting and eliminating what was not based on scientific evidence. But there was quickly nothing left,” sighs Sohan. The anti-vax speeches of her naturopathic “colleagues” during the health crisis ended up turning her away from these practices.
Since then, she has completed a BTS in dietetics and has taken “science-based” courses on veganism, to remotely support people who want to turn to this diet. “My biggest regret with naturopathy is having prescribed these famous and very expensive intolerance tests to my patients at the time, having pushed them to adopt very restrictive diets, by demonizing gluten, dairy products and products cooked at very high temperatures, or by encouraging them to dissociate foods according to meals, because all of this can be the breeding ground for eating disorders,” she sighs. Mistakes that she has since tried to correct, with her videos and publications on the Internet.
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