Emily Kumler: I'm Emily Kumler and this is Empowered Health. This week on Empowered Health, we're covering a story that sort of blew up on Med Twitter1 over Thanksgiving. A reporter named Jennifer ​ ​ Block2, who is a feminist health reporter with an extensive background covering women's health, wrote a story3 in Scientific American4, which is ​ ​ sort of the gold standard for science news, but like sort of consumer friendly science news, I guess I would say, and she wrote it about Dr. ​ Jennifer Gunter5, who is sort of known as the OB/GYN of the internet. She has a huge following on Twitter. She also has a New York times column6. ​ She's the bestselling author of The Vagina Bible7, and she has I think ​ about 270,000 followers8 on Twitter and she's really well known for trying ​ to, or exposing sort of inaccuracies9 in women's health and debunking ​ things like Goop10, the Gwyneth Paltrow brand, like Goop's claims about ​ products that are supposed to help your vagina. But, the Scientific American piece was, I think, attempting to expose holes in the credibility of doctors who maybe aren't listening to their patients. In some ways, it was sort of calling Dr. Gunter a bully. The title of the piece was actually "Doctors are not Gods11." And so we wanted to get into this a little bit because my initial reaction was these are two women who are both trying really hard to move the needle on women's health. And they're really both, in many ways, fighting the same cause. And yet they're also sort of going at each other in this way that I'm not sure, and maybe that's a part of progress, but maybe it's not, or maybe there's a better way to have this kind of dialogue. And so we're going to get into the specifics of the story, 1 This is one of the first tweets from Jennifer Block. There are many tweets and threads off of this that can be found on both Jennifer Block’s twitter, @writingblock, and on Dr. Jen Gunter’s twitter, @DrJenGunter ​ https://twitter.com/writingblock/status/1199677634218774534 2 http://jenniferblock.com/ ​ 3 This story has since been removed. However, this is a link to the archived version. https://web.archive.org/web/20191127013500/https:/blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/doctors-ar e-not-gods/ 4 https://www.scientificamerican.com/ ​ 5 https://drjengunter.com/ ​ 6 Her NYT column is called “The Cycle.” https://www.nytimes.com/column/the-cycle ​ 7 https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-vagina-bible-jennifer-gunter/1129963581#/ ​ 8 She has 272,060 followers at the time of this podcast’s publication. ​ https://twitter.com/DrJenGunter?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor 9 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/29/style/goop-gwyneth-paltrow-dr-jen-gunter.html ​ 10 https://shop.goop.com/shop?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI6PjOjZ-r5gIVwoFaBR3d8gIMEAAYASAAEgJTyvD_Bw E&utm_campaign=SEM_ALL_NOTARGET_BRAND_CORE_E&utm_medium=sem&utm_source=google &country=USA 11 https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/doctors-are-not-gods/ ​ but we're also going to sort of talk about the state of women's health at large. You know, how women do often feel disregarded. And how does that manifest itself when you're trying to find good advice about your body or about medicine or about treatments or even products that are sold, and who do you turn to? And we have this sort of credibility crisis, both in medicine and I would say in journalism, that are feeding into this and leaving women really feeling uncertain about who they can turn to. So we asked Dr. Gunter to join us. I felt like it was really important to have her voice in this story. And she's a source who we had reached out to before about other things. And so hopefully we will have her on the podcast at some point. But she did decline to talk about the story. So I'm sure that she's just decided that she doesn't want to give it any more attention, which is understandable. So, we're going to spend this whole episode instead just talking to Jennifer Block about her story and about some of the criticism that I had of her story and where this leaves us all. Jennifer Block: My name is Jennifer Block. I am a journalist and author. I began my career at Ms. Magazine12 almost 20 years ago, ​ where I kind of became the health editor, unofficially, and got all the health related mail and that sort of sent me out on this beat. So I was writing about, you know, contraception and abortion and a story came across my desk about maternity care and the rising C-section rate13 and ​ the increasing use of labor induction. And that story eventually turned into what became my first book, Pushed14. I continued focusing at this ​ intersection of health and feminism. So I wrote about surrogacy15. I wrote ​ about the politics of breastfeeding. I wrote an investigative piece16 about ​ the contraceptive Essure17 that came out a couple of years ago in the ​ Washington Post magazine and I think contributed to the product ultimately being taken off the market. My latest book, Everything Below ​ the Waist18: Why Health Care Needs a Feminist Revolution is about the failures of the health care system more broadly and the unfinished business of the feminist health movement19 of the 1970s. ​ Emily Kumler: We are so excited to have you on because I feel like there's a lot to talk about. And you have been in the news recently in a way that I'm sure has been somewhat overwhelming, but you 12 https://msmagazine.com/ ​ 13 https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2007-sep-24-oe-block24-story.html ​ 14 http://jenniferblock.com/pushed-2/ ​ 15 http://jenniferblock.com/the-other-side-of-surrogacy/ ​ 16 https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/style/2017/07/26/essure/?utm_term=.b6a422baef51 ​ 17 https://www.essure.com/what-is-essure ​ 18 http://jenniferblock.com/everything-below-the-waist/ ​ 19 https://www.jognn.org/article/S0884-2175(15)33790-4/fulltext ​ wrote a piece for Scientific American that was a criticism of, people are calling her the most famous doctor on Twitter, she is an OB/GYN, Dr. Gunter, who has taken a stance, a very strong stance, against misinformation regarding, you know, Goop, and other places that sort of maybe are preying on women. I would think that's sort of her stance and that reinforcing the need for good medical care that is evidence-based. And so this podcast is really about trying to do just that, which I actually think you're both doing. Right? And so the idea that you're trying to get women information that's well-researched and that's knowledgeable and that allows them to make the best decisions for their own bodies is something that's very much in line with our mission here. We spend a lot of time going back to primary sources and data collections and redoing statistical analysis and like just really getting into the mud of how do people come to this decision and how much advice is given to women that's actually been only researched on male bodies or the priority has been on male bodies. And even looking at things like the maternal ​ mortality rate20, which you know a lot about, and how that really is the kind of thing where there is a judgment being made, I would say, on like the value of a woman's life versus the value of a baby's life. Like there's a lot of really interesting stuff there that we could definitely talk about, but what I want to get to first is just sort of this piece which has caused all this controversy so much so that the publication actually took it down, which as a journalist is sort of, you know, unbelievable to me. I don't know about that, and I think that's worth exploring too. Just to start. It would be helpful to know why did you write this piece? Jennifer Block: You know, I've followed Dr. Gunter's work for a long time now and I appreciate a lot of it. I appreciate that she's open about being an abortion provider21. That's a really brave thing to be in our country right now. And she's open about her, her own personal ​ experience22. And I think you're right, that we do share a lot of the same interests and values that, you know, we both, I think would agree that the health care system is failing women. And I think we probably agree about the ways it's failing women. But I wrote this piece because, you know, she does have this extremely large profile. She's called, you know, the Internet's OB/GYN. The book that she wrote recently, the Vagina Bible, has become a bestseller. She's been getting a lot of attention. And I've noticed an approach that she has, maybe it's a blind spot, maybe it's an inconsistency, but she's very, very critical of anything that might fall under the umbrella of "natural." And so I understand the criticisms of Goop and 20 https://empoweredhealthshow.com/maternal-mortality-black-mothers/ ​ 21 https://drjengunter.com/tag/abortion/ ​ 22 https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/26/opinion/born-alive-abortion.html ​ share them. You know, I think Goop is luxury capitalism at its worst.