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Natural Awakenings
| Against allopathy Alternative medicine |
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| Clinically unproven |
| Woo-meisters |
Natural Awakenings is a franchised, free alternative health and medicine publication filled with articles and advertisements of a highly suspect nature. The main reason that these are suspect is because most of the articles are advertisements. An article on "Personal Evolution through Ancestral Healing and Plant Medicine" on the page 11, August 2019 of the New York release was penned by Monica M. Aparicio, who is selling a week long "all-inclusive shamaninc healing retreat", advertised later on page 20.
As a free publication Natural Awakenings is an on-ramp to New Age and alternative medicine related belief, lifestyle and commerce. The magazines are found in stereotypical New Age aligned spots, such as yoga studios or college campuses to attract the young and curious as well as chain pharmacies such as CVS where they lure in the sick and desperate.[1]
The franchise[edit]
Not everyone is selling all-inclusive shamanic healing retreats in Colombia. What about the local mom-and-pop holistic dentist/Navajo spiritual center? That's where you need local focus. Natural Awakenings is set up as a franchise publication. Franchisees are in charge of networking: finding alternative medicine and New Age businesses in their area to both sell ad space and write short articles that refer to their ad space. The franchisees also locate willing spots where they can leave their free magazines.[2]
The franchise zones are moderate in size, containing 100,000 people or more so in dense populations such as the New York Metro area where there are separate magazines for Northeast NJ, New York City and Long Island.
The franchiser, a "regenerative whole health hub" known as KnoWEwell,[3] provides the physical magazines and some general content to fill out the page count.
Advertisements, articles, editorials, advertorials, adverticles and artitorials[edit]
The articles in Natural Awakenings are a varied lot. In a sample issue (August 2019, New York City) we have simple, honest articles about how the Journal of the American Medical Association suggests you should not eat too many eggs or how petting dogs is good for your stress and oxytocin levels. These are a few pages away from an article celebrating publicist Jan Goldstoff's[4] 25 years in the arts and metaphysical fields (no author listed, who possibly could have written it?), an article about candidiasis (that mentions an expert whose clinical nutrition center has a full page ad a few pages earlier), a podiatrist[5] who treats candidiasis with ozone therapy while blaming it for 36 possible medical symptoms (this one is helpfully labelled "advertorial"), and an article about children and their chakras (Did you know children don't develop protective screens over their chakras until the age of 7? read about it in the new book advertised two pages later.)
Editing is generally slipshod. Text is copied and circulated with articles referencing incorrect pages or referring to a diagram on single page articles with no diagrams.