- ‘Wellness’ makes you feel bad. Our new section focuses on living a good life
One afternoon five years ago, my face swelled up like a helium balloon. My lips became tire-like, so thick I could no longer speak. At the ER, after deflating me with a cocktail of epinephrine, a steroid and an antihistamine, the doctors scolded me for not coming in more quickly: I could have died of asphyxiation.
It was a bizarre episode, unrelated to any discernible exposure, but it wasn’t isolated. In the time since, mounds have formed beneath my skin and ping-ponged up and down my limbs. Golf ball-sized lumps appear on my wrists, grapefruit on my hips. My fingers fatten into sausages; my labia distend. I’ve grown accustomed to bailing on dinners, bowing out of meetings, postponing travel. My kids try to mask their horror by making light of it, puffing up their cheeks, just like “mommy’s monster face”.
It’s hard to find help for a condition that has no name, but I’ve made the rounds of allergists, immunologists, rheumatologists and gastroenterologists. I’ve filleded the end of their expertise and, unable to confer a diagnosis, punted me on to the next
And that is how I found myself tripping down the garden path of wellness.
Where conventional medicine shrugs its shoulders, the wellness industry brims with answers.
Once I glanced up from the narrow list of hospital-affiliated physicians at least partially covered by my insurance, I found a world of solutions waiting in the form of functional medicine, somatic therapies, boutique institutes and diet coaches. What they offered put traditional healthcare to shame. They weren’t just going to relieve my symptoms, they promised root cause treatment and complete remission.
From thesentolerance, mold exposure, sensitivities to chicken, clams and chocolate, dormant Lyme disease, heavy metal poisoning, motherhood, hidden but newly awakened traumas, over-stress, under-sleep and nutrient deficits. But! With these pills and powders and out-of-pocket consultations – along with exacting combinations of vegetables, broth and, of course, mindfulness – I would become well
The wellness industry “really gathers the masses with certainty”, says Rina Raphael, journalist and author of The Gospel of Wellness. “They say, ‘I can definitely help you. This supplement is definitely going to cure your symptoms. You should try this diet. It’ll get rid of all your pain.’ This is what gets people and hooks them in.”
Today, wellness represents a vast and amorphous industry, encompassing everything from diet and fitness to workplace resilience programs, bespoke IV drips and CBD-infused skin creams. It’s filled with practices borrowed from the world’s traditions, like yoga and plant medicine, that have been repackaged for affluent consumers. Fariha Róisín, the author of Who is Wellness For?, says such practices have become commodities and are often rebranded to obscure their roots in brown, Black and Indigenous cultures. The industry flaunts terms like authenticity, truth and meaning but, she argues, these are at odds with the extractive activities it depends on. (For instance, one rarely hears of the culture behind your morning meditation ritual and almost never of the labor behind the turmeric brightening your latte.)
The industry’s size depends on which sectors you think fair to include, but a look at the field indicates that there’s room enough for just about everything. At this year’s Global Wellness Summit, held in November in Qatar, topics include the usual suspects like spas and spirituality, but also tourism, technology, real estate and design. According to a 2019 report by the
