who is the naturopath criticized by Doctolib?

DOCTOLIB. The naturopath Irène Grosjean and her controversial or even illegal measures are excluded from the Doctolib platform which suspended 17 practitioners trained by the figure of alternative medicine. Who is she ?

[Mis à jour le 23 août 2022 à 12h38] Irène Grosjean is at the heart of the controversy affecting Doctolib. The former naturopath has often been singled out for her decried and some illegal methods, and this time it is the medical appointment booking platform that denounces these practices. On Monday August 22, Doctolib suspended the profiles of 17 naturopaths, all claiming to be practitioners trained by Irène Grosjean or followers of her methods. The decision of the start-up came after the denunciation by the collective of the fight against medical misinformation “l’Extracteur” of a video dating from 2018 in which Irène Grosjean promotes practices without scientific foundations and similar to aggressions sex to treat fever in young children.

In the video extract, Irène Grosjean details the manipulations to be carried out on the genitals of feverish children to lower their temperature. “At first, the child will not agree, because it bothers him, but very quickly it will calm him down”, explains the former practitioner before adding: “You will be surprised and amazed to see how, after 10 minutes, the fever no longer exists”, praising the effectiveness of his method which nevertheless constitutes a sexual assault on a minor punishable by 10 years of imprisonment.

Who is the naturopath Irène Grosjean?

Specialist in naturopathy for 60 years, Irène Grosjean is a former practitioner and a figure of the discipline in France. Aged 92, she no longer exercises but still provides training in her practices several times a year in seminars of five to six days and the price of which is between 690 and 990 euros. According The Parisian it also offers “general public courses”, some of which are co-hosted with Miguel Barthéléry, a former naturopath sentenced to two years in prison suspended and now banned from practicing after the death of several of his trainees.

Irène Grosjean is used to controversy. These tips promoting touching and sexual assault had already been denounced when the video was first published, but other of its practices have also been decried. Many criticisms concern a hypothesis defended by the naturopath and according to which “food is the basis of all our sufferings, all our miseries and all our diseases” as written on her website. Irène Grosjean had taken the example of people with cancer and HIV-positive people to support her argument: “Cancer patients love meat and HIV-positive people have a marked attraction for pasta, bread and pizzas”, she adds. . Still according to the naturopath’s ideology, food could also be enough to cure or “gay-laugh” according to his declarations all diseases.

The practices of Irène Grosjean suspended from Doctolib

Asked by doctors and Internet users about the presence of alternative medicine practitioners, the Doctolib platform was already at the heart of a controversy before the suspension of 17 naturopathic profiles from its directory on Monday August 22. All the targeted practitioners specified to be trained or followers of the methods of Irène Grosjean or Thierry Casasnovas, another decried practitioner, prosecuted for “illegal practice of medicine” and closely monitored by the Interministerial Mission for Vigilance and the Fight against Sectarian Abuses . Doctolib continues to hunt for the profiles of practitioners using these inappropriate practices and invites users of the platform to report practitioners who mention Irène Grosjean in their training and more generally to report all files likely to correspond to an illegal exercise of Medicine.

On Twitter, Doctolib assured “take very seriously” reports on actions that would be dangerous or condemnable by law” and promised to “verify as far as possible each element brought up by Internet users”. The company also defended itself and indicated that it does not promote alternative medicine despite their presence on the platform. It indicates that “97% of practitioners who use Doctolib are referenced with the Ministry of Health” and that only “0.3% of all appointments made” on the platform concerns practitioners not recognized as health professionals but with legal activities. The start-up insisted further: “It is impossible for a patient to make an appointment on Doctolib with a practitioner referenced by the Ministry of Health without having expressly sought to do so”, writes the company. Another mention allows Internet users to distinguish between health professionals and practitioners. For non-doctors, it indicates on each profile that the “practitioner exercises an unregulated profession” and that his “diploma is not recognized by the State”.