He was one of the most active representatives of alternative medicine. Olivier Soulier died on the night of June 28 to 29, according to information from There Voice of the North, confirmed to L’Express. This homeopathic doctor, naturopath, figure of pseudosciences and protest against health policies, convinced of the existence of a great global health conspiracy, went away at 67 years old. An investigation for “manslaughter” and “illegal practice of medicine” has been opened, specifies the Paris prosecutor’s office.
That evening, Olivier Soulier devoted himself in the capital to “a shamanic session based in particular on hallucinogenic mushrooms”. He did not survive the experience. In the middle of a session supposed to give him answers about the universe, a malaise was fatal to him. The causes of his death were not communicated, but the man had suffered for years from heart problems, a “complete arrhythmia by atrial fibrillation”. Untreated, the condition can lead to death.
Of these palpitations, Olivier Soulier thought he was cured. They are the ones who plunged him into the alternative. When he was younger, he multiplied his crises; conventional treatments, those recognized by scientists, did not change anything, he said. Until the day he had the idea of consulting a homeopath. A few capsules would have been enough to keep the cardiologist at bay, he assured, in a video promoting his training, in November 2018. Never mind the absence of studies demonstrating the effectiveness of such therapy.
Olivier Soulier was convinced that diseases have a hidden meaning, that they are not just the result of biochemical reactions and the sum of interactions of our cells with the environment. They would deliver a message; it would be necessary to listen to them in order to heal. “The disease is an incident that will tell you what is wrong. If we understand it, we need fewer drugs (medicine), and therefore side effects”, he explained in his videos . “He preserved the dimension of art in medicine”, summarizes in an online intervention his friend, supporter of his theories, the anthropologist Jean-Dominique Michel.
The “medicine of meaning”
From this faith, much less arid than science, but so risky, Olivier Soulier then invented his own alternative medicine: “medicine of meaning”. No scientific value, but a title that resonates with its time. To patients who pass through his office on the outskirts of Lille, sometimes confused by the growing flood of contradictory information online, he prescribes introspection, to understand the hidden mechanisms of a fever or a chronic illness, and to access the “wisdom of the body”. Although totally ineffective, even dangerous if it replaces proven remedies, the posture is reassuring.
Hyperactive, jovial, author of numerous books, but relatively unknown to the general public, the doctor participated in the founding of several structuring organizations in anti-science, including the Independent Scientific Council, a collective that serves as a forum open to all sorts of former covid-skeptical scientists. He is also the father of the Liberty Health union, anti-vaccine, or of Citizen Light, an alternative media co-founded with Pierre Barnérias, the director of the conspiratorial documentary Hold-Up.
Above all, Olivier Soulier has worked for the development of ReinfoCovid, a group with several thousand members, one of the main propagators of false medical information in France, since the health crisis. It was in his family home, in Saint-Cyprien-sur-Dourdou, in Aveyron, that the executives of the collective met in 2020. He then had to form a “Noah’s ark”, sheltered from the health dictatorship, 5G, vaccines, and the power of Bill Gates, as told the journalist of WorldWilliam Audureau.
Convinced that vaccines are 60 times more dangerous than Covid, Olivier Soulier also thought that drugs or generational trauma caused autism. Associations of perilous ideas, which do not stop at biology. The knife attack in Annecy? Possibly manipulation, just like global warming. The government ? Notorious pedophiles in his eyes. The announcement of his death created a great stir within his disinformation organs, against a backdrop of conspiracy theories. “What a coincidence that it happens like this now”, “this is very obscure and opaque”, could we read in the exchanges of part of his community.