The Wellness Industry Sells Solutions to Problems It Helped Create
Wellness is now a substantial global industry, and like any industry it grows by expanding its market. In this case, growth requires more people believing they are not well — which is a structural problem the sector rarely acknowledges.
Ordinary states have been reclassified as deficits
Being tired on a Wednesday, feeling flat in winter, or having an unremarkable digestive day have all been converted into conditions with names and corresponding products. This medicalises normal variation and creates continuous demand. The person who feels fine is not a customer; the person who suspects they could feel better is.
The evidence base is thin and rarely examined
Supplements, detox protocols, elimination diets and most devices in this category have limited or no supporting evidence. Where studies exist they are frequently small, industry-funded and short. The marketing borrows the vocabulary of science without its methods, and most consumers have no straightforward way to tell the difference.
Individual solutions for structural problems
A meditation app is a reasonable thing to use. It is also being sold to people whose exhaustion comes from working sixty hours a week, and it cannot fix that. Framing burnout as a personal resilience deficit is convenient for everyone except the person experiencing it, and it displaces the conversation about workload, hours and pay.
What has genuine evidence behind it
Sleep of sufficient duration. Regular physical activity of almost any kind. Social connection. Time outdoors. Not smoking. Moderate alcohol. Treating actual medical conditions with actual medicine. This list is boring, cheap and extremely well supported, which is precisely why it is not the basis of a growth industry.
The useful test
Ask whether the intervention would still be recommended if nobody could sell it. Sleep, walking and friendship survive that test. Most of what appears in a wellness marketplace does not.
Some of this sector does real good. But an industry that profits from your sense of insufficiency should be read with that incentive firmly in view.
