Elle Macpherson , who refused chemotherapy as cancer treatment.
A familiar trope , particularly in the so-called Wellness industry, is that people should listen to their ‘personal truth’ rather than medical expertise when treating illness, the latest example being the former model Elle Macpherson declaring that she had beaten cancer using ‘holistic methods’
“I relied on my inner sense, not chemotherapy to beat breast cancer” reads the headline in the Daily Telegraph, celebrating the journey of the revitalised wellness guru, who happens to have a wellness business, WelleCo. It sells something called ‘Greens Powder’ - which is a food supplement, selling for a mere £63 for 300grams. Entirely clinically unproven it seems, but what you are buying is Elle’s personal truth, not just some cleverly marketed powdery green stuff.
While I am not entirely sceptical about holistic approaches to health, the idea that ‘inner sense’ can beat cancer strikes me as a highly improbable (albeit very seductive) idea.
The idea of the power of ‘inner truth’ trumping empirical evidence goes way beyond the wellness industry. ‘Personal truth’ and ‘speaking your truth’ entred the mainstream lexicon after the MeToo movement emerged in the mid 2010’s. The idea was that, given the difficulty of proving cases of sexual assault, personal truth should be given as much credence as ‘hard’ legal evidence. Likewise ‘personal truth’ should count as evidence for racism, more than, say survey evidence on social attidudes ( which suggests that most people at least in this country are far less racist than they were a generation ago).
There are still tickets left for my day teaching retreat for Oct 25 in Sparsholt, Oxfordshire.
All the details are here:
https://www.easeretreats.com/storytelling
I am sure there is something in using aggregated personal experience to gauge the temperature of some social trend or other, like racism or sexism. It is a valid strand among a wide number of factors. But the idea that it should trump all other factors is misguided.
Personal truth is just that - a truth based on your experience, and your experience is necessarily limited to, well, you. It is not a portal into a wider reality.
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