As a doctor, I find Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop Lab painful to watch

Despite all its disclaimers, The Goop Lab seems to me to be selling snake oil

At an event this week, NHS chief Sir Simon Stevens took the opportunity at a speaking event to slam Goop, the controversial alternative therapies brand from celebrity Gwyneth Paltrow, as “peddling misinformation and dodgy procedures.”

The Goop Lab is a six-episode series on Netflix, claiming to explore “emerging treatments”. Despite each episode opening with a disclaimer saying it does not offer “medical advice”, the following thirty slick and beautifully-produced minutes do quite the opposite, on topics from energy healing to psychedelic psychotherapy to mind-controlling inflammation.

On the surface, The Goop Lab is harmless; scenes of sunny Californian ”goopers” taking mushrooms, injecting things into their faces and writhing around while their “energy fields” are manipulated are undoubtedly entertaining. The “lab” also explores some fascinating areas. What role does inflammation play in disease? Can we override our hardwired reflexes? As a doctor and a scientist, I have to say some of these are genuinely intriguing questions. My main problem is that the show makes no attempt to answer them.

I have encountered such pseudoscience time and time again in my job as a heart doctor: the man who wanted to try acupuncture for his blood cancer, missing the window for life-saving chemotherapy; the lady who wanted to delay her procedure for the winter solstice, only to have a cardiac arrest that evening.

Underlying some of these attitudes seems to be a belief that if you can Google anything in ten seconds, why can’t medicine be as simple? I once had a teenager discharge against medical advice with a likely life-threatening heart condition, on the basis of her mother’s smartphone Googling and the fact they had Harry Potter tickets.

I’m not averse to the exploration of emerging fields – quite the opposite. The role of inflammation in heart disease, cancer, even schizophrenia is a fascinating and groundbreaking area. But what The Goop Lab is offering isn’t science – it’s unbalanced misinformation that can frankly be dangerous. The Goop Lab is happy to share the MDMA therapy curing a man’s PTSD, for example – less so to share the MDMA patient going to intensive care with her life-threatening brain swelling.

Snake oil it might be, but The Goop Lab isn’t all bad. In fact, there’s an awful lot of excellent medical practice on display: the time they give to each patient; the engaged patient manner; the holistic approach to health. It also doesn't entirely matter whether the treatments they test work or not: the placebo effect is sometimes thought of as meaning “nothing”, but time and time again we see concrete improvements in health through very little other than talking, time and engagement.

The problem is that the Goop “lab” gives itself the appearance of scientific rigour, while in fact offering pseudoscientific laziness: they cite “trials and experiments” without evaluating them, and talk to “practitioners and doctors” without critiquing their conflicts of interest (of course, the largest conflict of interest on the show is Goop's, a billion-dollar brand selling, among other things, alternative health products).

I don’t disparage Goop’s entire approach – frankly, I wish I had the time they do to spend with my patients. I do, however, disparage offering sick and vulnerable people untried and potentially unsafe treatments.

So here’s my professional opinion: take The Goop Lab with a pinch of salt. £30 bath salts, perhaps.

Dominic Pimenta is a cardiology registrar.