A Tale of Two Institutions. Healing or Horrors ? Part 1
By Dr. Naomi Wolf
Outspoken
June 17, 2026
I've had yet another journey to and back from a Gehenna, presented to me yet again by an allopathic hospital experience; as well as, perhaps - not to jinx the outcome - a beautiful 21st century healing, also presented by another such institution.
It seems, right now, to be the story of two institutions; two approaches to medical care. I don't have an argument in this essay, because I can barely process for myself what I've been through. I just feel so lucky to be alive, and walking, and pain-free, and as much as anything, grateful to be cogent. I am grateful beyond words to be using words - that atmosphere, that system of starlight.
I'll lay out what happened, and what I think at this moment about what happened, and you can draw your own conclusions. Maybe I was saved. Maybe I was almost lost. Maybe both. Maybe I was redeemed by incredible vigilance from a deadly coma, or minimally, from brain damage; maybe I was subjected to unnecessary tortures, the worst I've endured in my life.
Maybe both are true. Maybe all of it. Maybe it was all completely necessary, including the unbelievable physical suffering I underwent. Far be it from me to quarrel with my far-from-guaranteed survival, apparently intact.
And, as everyone knows, I am not a medical doctor.
So this is Part One.
Via my diligent pursuit of alternative treatments for a hip that was painfully malfunctioning, secondary to the spina bifida occulta with which I was born, and which condition is stabilized by hardware at multiple vertebrae - l5-S1 - I had pushed the no-alternative-left option, a hip replacement, by 18 months. It's not uncommon for conditions such as the one with which I was born - which imperfectly closed my spine in utero - to cause secondary damage, over time, to a hip. So I felt I was doing pretty well.
Since, as you know, I had been told by an allopathic neurologist in 2013 that by now I'd be in a wheelchair, losing all my functions, I considered my general good health, stamina, focus, and my relative mobility - even as I began to limp and have pain in my right hip over the course of 2025 and 2026 - to be gifts from God, and daily manifestations of a miracle.
I also attributed my overall wellbeing to my extensive network of the best and bravest alternative healers, notably the brilliant and distinguished Dr Henry Ealy of the Energetic Health Institute ( energetichealthinstitute.org) who advised me all the way. I also credit the journey I have taken with you here, that led me to understand far more deeply than I had, my basic anatomy and its systems: to get a sense of how joints work, and what supplements and foods protect them; to have a deeper insight into the role of blood circulation in overall health, and to know what herbs promote healthful circulation; to know what muscles to stretch and work daily to give my spine and pelvis maximum support; to understand (via Thermography for Health New York, which uses the incredible diagnostic tool of thermography, which shows via color, "hot spots" in the body, in place of the dangerous protocol of mammography) the value of a working lymphatic system in eliminating toxins and preventing cancer. As a result of learning all about the importance of lymphatic flow, I started to build activities such as red light saunas, and other forms of sweating, into my weekly schedule. Through all of this and more, I came to understand more about the activity of my cells themselves, down to the mitochondria.
I benefited from interviewing some of the leaders in the alternative wellness space. I learned what specific vitamins and periodic internal cleanses I needed via Dr Hadar Elbaz, of The Vibrant Glow (who analyzed things sent through the mail I won't describe here); I tried to walk a few miles daily, to get sun on my body, and to avoid toxic thoughts, per my interviews with Dr Ben Tapper and Dr Kelly Victory of The Wellness Company; I took nattokinase supplements daily, due to what I had learned from the pioneering work of Dr Peter McCullough, since, though I am unvaccinated by an mRNA vaccine, I have no idea what are the impacts on my blood from others around me who are mRNA-vaccinated. I took kimchi supplements and ate fermented foods, after having interviewed Kim Bright, founder of Brightcore. I had chiropractic from Dr Paul Milone in Marblehead, MA; and I worked - among the serious high school and college athletes; I was lucky to have been accepted as a client - on a physical therapy plan developed by trainers at Accelerated Physical Therapy, also in Marblehead, MA .
As I've said elsewhere, my journey into alternative health and healing has led me to rethink what "health" really is. We have such a black-and-white, dualistic notion of "health" and "illness" in the West. I now know that you can have a serious physical condition - such as my problems with my skeleton - and still be systemically otherwise very healthy and heading always in the direction of healing; you can be like several friends of mine with cancer diagnoses, who radiate health in every other way, and who have beautiful qualities of life; or, conversely, you can have nothing "wrong" with you as far as allopathic tests and measurements reveal, and yet still be in a state of lassitude, toxicity or general unwellness, sadly heading toward a disease state.
I was so lucky to be able to invest in these alternative modalities. And as I learned over time how each one of these was preventing a condition or complication that allopathic pharmacy would just treat with more and more prescriptions, bringing with them in turn the risk of more and more side effects, I came to believe that this approach was ultimately far less costly than would have been my remaining ignorant and passive in the face of my degenerating gait, pursuing only what allopathic medicine recommended.
When I could put off surgery no longer, I chose the best orthopedic hospital in America. As you recall, I had nearly died of sepsis in a hospital after a bizarrely delayed surgery subsequent to my having sustained a burst appendix in 2023.
So I definitely had a fear of hospitals.
This fear had, it seemed, indeed led me to put the operation off for too long. Learning that face also frustrated me.
I wished that my exposure to the hot mess behind the last major public health effort, as revealed in The Pfizer Papers amazon.com, had not caused such a dramatic, reasonable loss of confidence on my part, in the whole allopathic system. I wished I could have just done exactly what my doctors advised me, without the need for second-guessing or resistance; but until I found a surgeon I really trusted, I knew too much to simply take that leap without a lot of other assurances.
I'd been walking around with no cartilage on the right, it seemed, and my hip bone had started to chip; so my surgeon would need to add a bone graft.
The surgeon I chose at last, was a legend in orthopedic surgery; but I was just as impressed with the way he answered all of my questions, and did not rush me. I was impressed too with the way his staff seemed knowledgeable, respected, and able to give great independent advice - so unlike the automaton-like manner trained into support staff in other hospital settings.
I tried to pay out of pocket for the surgery, as I also feared having health insurance again. All my friends and loved ones with health insurance seemed to live from one medical scare subsequent to a costly test, to another. But when I learned that the surgery would cost about $70,000, I bit the bullet and applied for, and received, health insurance.
This major orthopedic hospital in Manhattan, in my brief stay at least, and even with the drama of what I underwent - really worked. From the first time I entered it, I felt a lively organizational intelligence. From the patient-friendly training of the staff at the front desk who warmly welcomed us, to the administrative mindfulness that led to the positioning of an actual human being in front of digital login screens to help scared or frail people sign in to enter the system, to the fact that there was a range of lower and higher upholstered chairs in the waiting areas, so that whatever people's level of mobility, they would be comfortable - all of it bespoke a coherent, institution-wide level of consideration.
I saw humanity in action again and again. What was surprising was how surprised I was, to see humanity so prominently given a role in the administrative processes, as well as in the healing processes, of a major American hospital.
At an early appointment checkin, for instance, I was standing behind a young man who had been born, it seemed, with a spinal deformity. He was a little over four feet tall, and he stood on crutches. The counter was higher than his head. The staffer welcoming us into the waiting room checked in the taller person in front of him, and then she turned to me. She hadn't seen the young man in front of me. When I gestured to indicate that someone was ahead of me, she looked over the counter and saw that she had overlooked him; the regret and embarrassment on her face at her oversight, were genuine and profound. I saw humanity of that kind manifest at that hospital again and again.
My own fearful and aversive views of some aspects of allopathic medicine, which are based on evidence to which I was exposed in my work with The Pfizer Papers, were not ridiculed or belittled by hospital staff. This was an extraordinary level of acceptance of others' perspectives, to encounter in a traditional hospital setting. I did not mention my work on that project, of course. But views I held about what I did not want from a hospital setting, definitely came up.
For instance, I did not want a blood transfusion during surgery. I was afraid of receiving mRNA-vaccinated blood, because of the many clotting diseases and blood problems that followed mRNA vaccination, as detailed in The Pfizer Papers; because of our lawyer Ed Berkovich's FOIA showing that the White House had concealed cases of thrombotic thrombocytopenia following mRNA vaccination; and because of the damaging impact of the spike protein and of lipid nanoparticles on blood and on blood vessels.
(DailyClout has recently been hacked, and many of these reports that link to the original Pfizer documents are no longer available online - leaving online, however, AI claims that my presentation of this blood damage evidence is "medical misinformation." We are working to republish all of the reports, but they are available meanwhile in The Pfizer Papers books, and the White House FOIA results are linked above).
I learned, in preparing for my own surgery, that there are methodologies in place in New York City for storing one's own blood in advance of surgery. This is called "autologous blood donation." NYU Langone offers it, as does Memorial Sloan Kettering. There is a facility, Memorial Blood Centers, that will store your blood prior to surgery - but you need a prescription from your doctor a week in advance.
I had not arranged for this in time, but orthopedic hospital staff treated my concern about this issue with respect. They may not have seen the problem of vaccinated blood as I did; but the staff of this hospital did not dismiss or belittle me.
I also learned when you enter the allopathic medical system, that you are in a constant battle with shadowy nonprofits and government entities, just to keep mastery of your own data, and even of your own body parts and tissues.
This hospital was literally the only one I have encountered, that let me strike the many paragraphs in the initial consent forms that give third parties access around HIPAA privacy law. This may seem like a nerdy and trivial concern, but it is important. HR 3103 - HIPAA law - is Federal law, and it robustly protects your medical privacy. (Interestingly, there are a lot of summaries, but you have to look a bit for the text itself, which I embedded above).
As a result of HIPAA law, many nonprofits and state entities who are part of the marketplace of your data, and even part of the marketplace of your organs and tissue, if you are an organ donor, want you to sign away your protections.
After the battle we fought in 2023 against vaccine passport databases, I am never going to let anything weaken the protections around my medical privacy, again.