Wellness nonsense and your health

There is an industry that attempts to free you of your hard-earned money while offering little or no benefit. This is the wellness industry. Can you tell the difference between things that can keep you healthy vs. wellness nonsense?

Tarot cards, to crystals to full-body MRI scans to detox IV treatments that have little or no evidence of working.

When I was in chiropractic college, we were required to deliver and receive a high colonic with the belief that cleaning out the colon solves all sorts of health problems. While we do know that many autoimmune problems have to do with inflammation, and permeability in the colon, we do not know that a high colonic solves any of that.

Many mainstream medical wellness approaches have also been disproven as well. While they do use science to develop new drugs and treatments, the things we are told to keep us healthy such as taking cholesterol-lowering drugs may seem like wellness approaches but it is a treatment that can cause problems with many of those who take it to lower future risk. That is a wellness approach too. The yearly physical, once a ritual with physicians has proven to increase interventions with little long term benefit but those tests and interventions could also cause great harm.

Even the supplement industry has many people selling wellness approaches, yet, this does not substitute for a healthier lifestyle more can it make you physically fit or alter your genetics.

We all want to stay healthy, and live long productive lives. The irony is that you can do everything right and then get hit by a bus.

In the chiropractic profession, our overall wellness approach has also included primary holistic care of the human frame and body. Many studies tell us pain is a result of poor movement and chiropractors for years have helped people move and feel and function better. Patients who visit chiropractors for years are likely to be more active and may have fewer physical problems than those who are sedentary and are less likely to care for themselves, eat well maintain their frame, and body mechanics. Movement is life, and a lack of movement is death.

Wellness is not just physical and we are social beings. Perhaps, this will be one of the lingering problems left over from our Covid-19 experience; mental health issues. In one study, it showed men with spouses lived longer than those without.

Even spirituality can help you stay well. Sometimes having a higher power as our moral and ethical guide can help us move forward in life, deal with the challenges that life brings us and help us mentally as well.

Here is an article that covers the idea of wellness and what works and doesn’t. While it is general, life is a challenge to keep it in balance.

We’ve Reached Peak Wellness. Most of It Is Nonsense. Here’s what actually works.

by Brad Stulberg

In Silicon Valley, techies are swooning over tarot-card readers. In New York, you can hook up to a “detox” IV at a lounge. In the Midwest, the Neurocore Brain Performance Center markets brain training for everything from ADHD, anxiety, and depression to migraines, stress, autism-spectrum disorder, athletic performance, memory, and cognition. And online, companies like Goop promote “8 Crystals For Better Energy” and a detox-delivery meal kit, complete with “nutritional supplements, probiotics, detox and beauty tinctures, and beauty and detox teas.” Across the country, everyone is looking for a cure for what ails them, which has led to a booming billion-dollar industry—what I’ve come to call the Wellness Industrial Complex.

The problem is that so much of what’s sold in the name of modern-day wellness has little to no evidence of working. Which doesn’t mean that wellness isn’t a real thing. According to decades of research, wellness is a lifestyle or state of being that goes beyond merely the absence of disease and into the realm of maximizing human potential. Once someone’s basic needs are met (e.g., food and shelter), scientists say that wellness emerges from nourishing six dimensions of your health: physical, emotional, cognitive, social, spiritual, and environmental. According to research published in 1997 in The American Journal of Health Promotion, these dimensions are closely intertwined. Evidence suggests that they work together to create a sum that is greater than its parts.