Doctolib is under fire from critics. The group, a French heavyweight in making medical appointments, suspended 17 profiles on Monday August 22 after virulent criticism of the presence on the platform of specialists in naturopathy, a discipline with no medical basis. “We immediately suspended appointments for 17 profiles,” Doctolib told AFP, who “undertakes substantive work” with the site’s medical committee, orders and health professionals.
On social networks, health professionals and patients criticize the group for allowing its users to make appointments with naturopaths, some of whom have dangerous practices, close to quackery, and sectarian aberrations. Naturopathy is a practice that claims to maintain the body in good health through a set of “natural” methods, but which has no proven scientific or medical basis.
Doctolib’s criticisms have notably targeted naturopaths claiming to be Thierry Casasnovas and Irène Grosjean, two influential personalities in the naturopathic milieu but with discredited positions in the world of health. The first has been pinned on multiple occasions for the dangerousness of his advice and worries the authorities. The second, aged 92, presents herself as a “naturopathic doctor since 1958” on Facebook, where this influential personality in the “wellness” sphere is followed by 135,000 people.
As specified by magazine Usbek & RicaIrène Grosjean believes that “all diseases are curable”, not thanks to antibiotics or competent doctors, but rather by changing a diet that she considers unsuitable for our digestive system and which would be the cause of all deviations human beings”. According to her, “the original sin is cooking food”. given to the channel We take action! where she delivers her “philosophy of life to understand happiness and the keys to good health.”
Irène Grosjean defends raw food, or “living food”, a diet consisting of eating exclusively raw fruits and vegetables. “If you eat cooked, you are cooked”, she launches in the preamble to a conference given in June 2022 during the “Festival of the living”. The naturopath has created a website “which provides testimonials, recipe videos and offers, for a fee, courses whose amount can amount to up to 990 euros”, reports the site Conspiracy Watch.
Questionable health advice
Irène Grosjean recommended that parents perform acts on their children that are similar to sexual assault on minors in order to bring down their fever, such as The Extractor reminds us, a collective informing about the dangers of certain pseudo-alternatives in terms of health and food.
“If it’s a little girl, you have to sit the child on a bowl with ice water (…) with a washcloth, we’ll rub the lips and the clitoris a little,” he explains. -she in a video dating from 2018, also advocating the same for little boys. “At first, the child will not be very in agreement, because it bothers him, but very quickly it will calm him down,” she continues.
The naturopath, never worried by justice, also recommends nursing mothers to fast and replace their milk with coconut milk and pregnant women to practice dry fasting and to do “purges, cleanings”. For her, HIV is a disease that can be cured by eating “germinated seeds, fruits and raw vegetables”, she explains in a book published in 2018. A diagnosis that she makes on the basis of dubious observations, saying that “the food tastes of the patient […] reveal beyond any doubt that cancer patients love meat and that HIV-positive people have a marked attraction to pasta, bread and pizza.”
She is also convinced that “If the Germans hadn’t been fed beer and cold meats as they were, they would never have been able to do what they did in World War II.” In other words, according to her, food is the answer to all evils.
Covid-19? A “connarovirus”
According to this naturopath, the Covid-19 is a “connarovirus” which will “make us sell vaccines”. As the site notes Solidarity Journalists, Irène Grosjean believes that “the coronavirus is a commercial affair set up to sell drugs and vaccines”. The solution ? Do not fear it, or even fight it, because the virus would be “ecological, like a cleaning system”. “With Hippocrates, we made a lot of hypocrites”, also launched this follower of the punchline one day.
Irène Grosjean no longer provides consultations. It refers, on its site, to a list of practitioners among which one can find the naturopath Miguel Barthelery, one of the speakers of the conspiratorial film Hold-Up, sentenced on October 15, 2021 to a two-year suspended prison sentence and a ban on practicing – he appealed this decision. The latter was prosecuted following the death of one of his clients to whom he had affirmed that he could cure his testicular cancer by resorting to fasting, as noted The Parisian.
But Irène Grosjean still gives her lectures. She is invited on September 3 at the Grand Rex, in Parisduring an “exceptional day of meetings and exchanges around the laws of life and the incredible power of the human body, around the film the footprint” supported in particular by France Soir. This film was co-directed by Pierre Barnérias, co-director of Hold-Up. The conference could however not take place: “We are in talks with the organizer of this event to cancel his coming”, indicated on Twitter the Grand Rex this Tuesday, August 23.