Can authors/teachers' previous work remain reliable if they've gone batshit crazy?

[Kaity]

Today I'm talking about Dr. Christiane Northrup but I guess it could be a general question too about once trusted individuals. She's an author (previously unknown by me) whose work from Women's Bodies Women's Wisdom has been cited all over the place by people I quite respect. Knowing nothing about who she is now, I started reading her book and read about 30% of it. It was casually new-agey and nothing really shocked me or stood out as overtly alarming. In fact, I found a few parts quite helpful and was looking forward to finishing the book. 

But today I discovered that this lady whose (some) ideas I found helpful has apparently lost her mind. She's an anti-masker, far-right anti-vaxxer, thinks being around a vaccinated person is harmful, and believes a billion other nonsense that conspiracy theorists do. She's super active and preachy on social media and I think calls her followers "warriors?!" 

Naturally, I'm utterly turned off from ever touching her book again knowing who she has become. But at the same time, her insanity seems to be recent and maybe I shouldn't rule her previous work out completely? Can once-reliable people go cuckoo all of a sudden or they were never really reliable in the first place? I gravitate towards abandoning her work forever but not sure if that's the right way to go in situations like this. Of course my trust in her future work is forever lost but does that mean I should treat her past work the same way?

 

[Leo Gura]

It's important to realize that ideas stand on their own merits regardless of whose mouth they come out of.

An idea's validity does not depend on the speaker.

If Hitler told you that God is Love, that is irrelevant to whether or not God is Love.

Stop getting hung up on the personality of the speaker/author. It does not matter. What matters is the ideas.

[gettoefl]

 

sometimes we grow faster than the people we admire and respect

do not get overly attached

be merciless if someone goes off the rails

you are your own oracle, know this and live this