Hey Garry?

A few days ago, I found myself hate-watching the Instagram pages of natural health gurus. At this point I've impulsively clicked on so many alt-health and MAHA links, that I am doomed to receive these video suggestions for life. Rather than make the healthy choice to exit the app, I typically tell myself, "Ok, I'll just look at one. For research reasons."

One post that drew me in was made by the Rebecca Weiss Podcast featuring the ginger haired Dr. Bryan Ardis (a chiropractor, not a medical doctor). In the clip, Ardis looked like Your Average White Dad in a blue button-up shirt with his hands clasping the knee of one leg that was crossed over the other. The text on the still frame read, "THEIR CULT WORSHIPPED SNAKES." The clip's caption said, "Have we been lied to? We had such a mind-blowing conversation with Dr. @thedrardisshow this past week and this is definitely an episode that you need to watch."

So, have we been lied to? Well, uh, it wasn't very enlightening and felt incomplete. In a series of rhetorical questions that I found irritating, Ardis smarmily argued that the symbol of modern medicine (the "snake around the pole" or the Rod of Asclepius) is the symbol of a Greek cult. A cult symbol! "And symbols matter!" declared Weiss, looking proud of herself.

Perhaps you don't obsessively follow fringe pseudoscience like I do, so what they're referring to here is an element of the Big Pharma conspiracy. The idea is that Big pharma controls us and makes us sick with its poisons masked as medicine and it earns lots of money doing evil stuff. The symbol of the Rod of Asclepius on the sides of ambulances and hospitals is what global conspiracy theorists have identified as a breadcrumb of a bigger truth– You Are In A Cult!

If you're seeking an alternative to Big Pharma, you are welcome to browse Ardis's enormous selection of supplements. For $54.95, you can buy a tincture that simultaneously claims to clear your system of yeast, bacteria & parasites AND carries a mandatory label stating, "These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease." The supplement industry can generally say whatever it wants and it is a barely regulated, multi-billion-dollar-per-year earner. The pharmaceutical industry is not perfect, but for god's sake at least there are standards!

Another video appealed to my lizard brain. An older guy in casual clothes was featured on an Instgram page called "Human Garage" where he relaxes, stretches, and eats during what I call the "Hey Garry? POV". My Millennial brain also can't stop reading "Human Garage" as, "Human Garbage." He is Garry Lineham and he has strange ideas.

"Hey Garry? Is cancer a final attempt to release unprocessed emotions?" asks the videographer, approaching Lineham as he reclined on a sofa and attempted to look like the moment was spontaneous.

"Cancer is sadness," Lineham starts. "And if you're sad in your body, you're gonna feel like you're not at ease. When you're not at ease in your body, that's called dis-ease. You hold it in long enough and you're going to have an issue like cancer and cancer like anything else, is the body needs flow and it needs to restore its natural balance. That's what minerals and flow do. Cancer is not anything more than a disease, that's saying, 'I need you to pay attention.' And when you pay attention, like anything else, it goes away."

Cancer is sadness? What the hell? I began to type, "You are stupid" in the comment section of Lineham's video. I'm an adult woman with a Master's degree, and the most persuasive argument I can come up with in the moment was to let this idiot know he is a moron. I hit send, but Instagram hit me with a gentle reminder that I needed to "Consider editing your comment. Your comment may contain language that's hurtful or doesn't follow our Community Standards." I deleted it, not entirely convinced of the efficacy of taking the high road.

In May, Jia Tolentino published an article in the New Yorker called, "My Brain Finally Broke", which detailed a post-truth malaise she experienced in the first few months of Trump's second term. I felt her distress in my bones. "I feel a troubling kind of opacity in my brain lately—" she wrote. "...As if reality were becoming illegible, as if language were a vessel with holes in the bottom and meaning was leaking all over the floor."

With the dismantling of public health initiatives and having RFK Jr. in charge of Health and Human Services, I have started to wonder when the decay of good medical information will settle in. AI seems to have flooded Google with weird search results, and social media apps for women around my age seem pre-programmed to push raw milk, anti-vax, and free birthing propaganda.

Tolentino noted that the things the Trump administration are currently doing create headlines that are so distressing, that it's psychologically hard to accept them as true. And when these articles appear alongside AI Slop and fake news, it only adds to the malaise. She wrote, "Many of these news items feel too horrific to be true, except that they are true, although they are reported in media outlets that many Americans refuse to believe, and appear in news feeds alongside a wide variety of things that are obviously false—or, maybe even more treacherous, weirdly indeterminate."

This is exactly where I'm at right now. The quantity of strange and misinformed information flooding our feeds is overwhelming. I feel like I shouldn't have to write a thousand word essays that explain why we shouldn't take medical advice from bodybuilders who perform sphincter releases on patients' rectums after describing the human body as, "Basically a tube within a tube that's pressurized... the tissue of my lips is basically the exact same as the tissue on my butthole. If we should torque fascia on the butthole, then it should actually work its way all the back up to the neck!" But here we are, in a strange new reality.