The Wellness Industry is Booming. Why Are We Surprised?

I recently came across a brilliant post on Instagram. In it, creator Jess Britvich calls out wellness influencers for constantly fearmongering about "big pharma", all while selling their audiences both ideas and products as alternative solutions.

She's right: Influencers and wellness brands make money — lots of money — by exploiting the rising fear and distrust people feel towards medical institutions. But here's my hot take: A huge part of why they're able to exploit that distrust is because that distrust is already well-established.

So many of the people who distrust medical institutions don't do so because wellness influencers convinced them to. They distrust medical institutions because they've felt failed by them. They've experienced medical gaslighting. They've been taken advantage of by a broken system. They've been ignored, dismissed, and more...and so they turn to the places where guidance doesn't come with a co-pay or a long wait or a healthcare provider who rushes through an appointment. They turn to the internet.

And on the internet, information — or, more often, misinformation — is everywhere. The thing is, even for someone with a solid base of knowledge, it can be impossible to untangle the two. A wellness influencer may rave about a product that worked for them, and you may ask a qualified professional about the validity of said product...and that professional may tell you there's no evidence to support the effectiveness. and while that's true, a lack of current evidence doesn't mean it won't or can't work.

This gap — the space between or need for solutions and answers and the availability of those answers and our own access to information — that's where wellness BS thrives. And clearly, it's a gap large enough to fit an entire industry worth billions.

So what are we supposed to do? It's complicated.

I think we need to start by understanding that health and wellness are different things. We need to remember that even when medical experts feel inaccessible, they still hold more knowledge than a wellness influencer. We ought to always keep in mind that if a provider is making us feel unheard, gaslit, or dismissed, it doesn't mean every other professional will do the same. We can always find a new doctor.

And we can apply a level of discernment to the things we see online. Sure, there may be no evidence to support the effectiveness of something that works really well for us on a lifestyle level (like this little guy? a gamechanger for my migraines). Ultimately, though, we're better off seeking out credible answers and solutions rather than believing everything we see online.