Google Won’t Let You Learn About Holistic Health
Since 2017, in a major Google update, everyone who publishes “alternative health” content lost 60%, 80%, or more of their organic search.
That means that when you put a term into Google to search, you land on WebMD and pharma-supported media.
And you AREN’T shown my or my many colleagues’ content, no matter how high-quality and well referenced it is.
And since then, likely also influenced by the high profit margin of “supplements” and how most influencers and health food stores have become pill pushers–
–I’ve noticed that my colleagues and the general public have embraced a completely different idea of what “holistic health” means.
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What it used to mean is learning to keep the whole organism in homeostasis and health, rather than addressing symptoms of parts. Correcting imbalances, by addressing root causes. Decreasing the toxic body burden, eliminating toxic exposures, eating a clean diet.
What “alternative health” or “holistic health” seems to be now is “take supplements instead of drugs to mask symptoms or feel different.”
Now I’m oversimplifying a bit, because of course the supplement-takers also tend to eat a healthier diet than others.
But even most of my colleagues–I know a couple hundred of them, people you’d call health/wellness experts, chiropractors and ND’s and authors–
–seem to have defaulted into the same “pill for every ill” mindset that allopathic medicine became and embraced around the turn of the 20th century.
Most of them promote lots and lots of supplement taking, and do not know anything about the fact that the vast majority of supplements are actually made by Big Chemical and Big Pharma–
–even if the labeling and marketing is thousands of smaller companies that aren’t Chem/Pharm.
But Google didn’t become “pay to play” overnight. The big update in 2017 is just one of many ways they’ve created gradual change so that you hear mostly good news about drugs.
And you just don’t learn anything at all in the original ideas and strategies behind “holistic health, and how to be optimally healthy.
–and while Stetzer tries to silence him, the scientist manages to get a couple of minutes to say that 31,000 scientists have signed their disagreement with “climate change,” and explains why everyone in the mainstream pushes that narrative.
(You don’t get funding if you don’t align with it.)
Okay, so this article isn’t about tackling “climate change,” but do you see how this playbook is running, using Google and the rest of “Big Tech,” and public mindset has been rapidly shifting to embrace these agendas?
The climate change narrative has in myriad ways drowned out all competing narratives and evidence–much like anyone trying to tell the truth about pharma, supplements, and mainstream medicine gets down-ranked, too.
(If you sat and scrolled and scrolled, for several minutes, you might finally arrive at my article on avoiding steroids and antibiotics when doing oral surgery, for instance. If you searched on that.
It won’t be “above the fold,” and Google knows very few people scroll past Page 1 of search results.)
You’re not exactly removed from the internet–but almost nobody sees your work, all the same.
When this is the case for 7 years, for the entire category of alternative-health journalists and bloggers, the collective cultural mindset undergoes a massive change.
The minority of dissenting voices to ALL of these narratives (climate change, “pill for every ill” being two of them) is bigger among the public than among the scientists competing for grant money.
Scientists don’t dare be guilty of heresy. Out here in the general public, we talk about it much, much more. Some of us read the books and listen to the YouTube interviews with scientists willing to challenge “climate change.”
Or that the Dexa scan is unscientific, and that osteopenia and osteoporosis are a megabillion-dollar industry, NOT helping create strong bones.
(Or, I could give dozens of other examples.)
My colleagues won’t deny that we all lost a lot of our organic search traffic in 2017 and beyond. Some went under, because they were depending on organic search.
Others, myself included, have had to take the hit and adapt. But with dismay we’ve been slowly awakening to the control on information that a few powerful people have. And I hope that if YOU have deep skepticism about the pharma approach to health, and have done a lot of research in your life on health and wellness:
That you make sure to pass your books, your knowledge, your story, onto your children and to anyone who will listen.
Because the internet is where everybody gets most of their information now, and “holistic health” is disappearing from the Web and has been, for some years. Slowly enough that most didn’t notice.
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Around the 2017 mark, I noticed the “no availability” of my normal searches for holistic and/or Functional Med folks that I’d been following during earlier years. Suddenly they were gone. As an example, Dr. Mercola, who I was following pretty closely at the time (not so much these days) was nowhere to be found. I would tell my family, “See what they’re doing? The search engines have pushed out the healthy information. It’s all about supporting Big Pharma.” It made me angry then - and it makes me just as angry now. Like you said, it’s up to us to keep passing along everything we know and learn to the next generations any way we can.
What you write here seems to me to say as much about "the public" as it does about Google.
As a member of the public, I greatly appreciate the problem, having been fooled myself so many times over my decades, beginning long before there was a public Internet. And yet, at least most of the time, I wasn't fooled forever. If there are matters where I still am, I don't know that yet, but Internet search engines, while posing an obstacle for those seeking convenience, have never been a solid barrier for those seeking truth. A porous barrier, perhaps. Seeking convenience, however, rather than seeking truth _is_ a barrier, a very solid one.
My foundational knowledge about holistic health stems from being involved with a cult, when I was growing up in the 1960s, particularly in my teens -- because my mother was part of it -- and as an adult from being a member of other cults teaching about many topics, health being prominent among them. I could never recommend these organizations even if they still existed (they mostly don't) because they had huge problems, but their problems did not include public group think to any great degree. They were counter cultural.
In my experience, then, there is always a way around barriers to discovering truth. But you have to want it, badly. If you live for comfort and convenience you will pay a price, and it won't prove comfortable or convenient. That's a public problem.
Studying health should impress upon us how incredibly well engineered life is, and how well it can function when not being sabotaged, or even when it is. This thing we call life is not a product of random chance. We know intuitively that randomness does not produce higher and higher degrees of order. Rather it produces corruption and decay, all "scientific" fairy tales to the contrary aside. Higher order must originate from even higher order. And what we are did not come into being out of nothing. We know intuitively that out of nothing comes nothing. Otherwise it isn't "nothing".
Why, then, among those people who lately have been learning the hard way that they can't "trust the science", do most still trust it in matters pertaining to our origin and purpose? What an error! It's time to let go of that, and then pass the word on.
In my old age I have found, with what's left of me after 74 years of life enclosing 28 years of cults spread over 50 years, a better way to learn about essential truth that has been hidden. I ask, expecting answers, and answers come. It worked all along, but I didn't expect that, or even seem to notice let alone appreciate what was happening, and the answers were presented through cults -- hard lessons.
When practiced formally, however, this is called "prayer", and answers can come more directly and uncensored, though the lessons may still be hard. Such practice is no more strange than believing that our "something" made itself from nothing. Be careful what you put your faith in.
Try this, if you haven't already. It works better than Google.