How ‘Wellness’ Became an Epidemic | Hacker News Reader

How ‘Wellness’ Became an Epidemic

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47 pointsprostoalex32 comments

I can't manage to read this entire thing, not just because it is long, but because it is so sneering. Study after study after study indicates that diet, exercise and lifestyle have measurable impacts on morbidity and a long list of serious, often deadly, conditions. But if you actually try to advocate that people attend to their health first and foremost by eating right, exercising and making good lifestyle choices, you are some crazy weirdo?

I don't think it is any mystery at all that it is happening alongside so many people not having access to proper insurance, doctors, etc. If you can't afford to go to a doctor, then reading something for free on the internet and tweaking your diet in hopes of not needing a doctor makes all kinds of sense.

While true, almost everything peddled on Goop is snake oil and pseudoscience. It deserves to be sneered at.

The writing is a bit sneering and sarcastic, but I think it's pretty clear this is entirely about the new-agey-too-expensive-shady-pseudo-science kind of wellness and not about eating right and excercising. And this is not at all about people who can't afford insurance - the tagline is "Why are so many privileged people feeling so sick? Luckily, there’s no shortage of cures.".

I was responding in part to this:

There’s something grotesque about this industry’s emerging at the moment when the most basic health care is still being denied to so many in America and is at risk of being snatched away from millions more.

If you think only rich people are going to read Goop and buy crap off of it, I think you are mistaken. And that quote (above) is basically where I stopped reading.

The title on HN now has Wellness in quotes. But it is not actually in quotes on the article itself. I think it is important to make a clearer distinction between actual wellness programs that do genuine good and the stuff that tries to market itself that way and is more questionable.

For personal reasons, I have a lot of mixed feelings about this. But I think this is an important distinction to make.

>If you think only rich people are going to read Goop and buy crap off of it, I think you are mistaken. And that quote (above) is basically where I stopped reading.

Do people think that telling others they "stopped reading" an article before it was over makes their opinion on its contents more valid than having actually read it all AND calmly?

>If you think only rich people are going to read Goop and buy crap off of it, I think you are mistaken.

Maybe not "only", but mostly rich people will. Including middle/upper middle class people who can afford all they need, even if not technically rich.

For certain, very few single black mothers working their arses off in minimal wage to make ends meet will go to check the Good catalogue...

For certain, very few single black mothers working their arses off in minimal wage to make ends meet will go to check the Good catalogue...

Do you have some kind of data or evidence on that? Or is that just racist, classist assumption?

  But if you actually try to advocate that people attend to 
  their health first and foremost by eating right, 
  exercising and making good lifestyle choices, you are some
  crazy weirdo?

I don't think that's what the article was sneering at.

It was sneering at the idea of fearmongering about what people eat, but then trying to sell them on a whole bunch of unregulated supplements and quack remedies.

There is an awful lot of "something free on the internet" that is just complete bullshit designed to sell you something.

When nobody (aka the privileged class described here) has real problems or responsibilities anymore (no kids until late 30s, if then, no shortage of money for healthy food and housing) you focus on the trivial problems that earlier generations would have laughed at.

Earlier generations would have laughed at that because they had mostly figured it out --- though not via studies, just over the millenia. Early to rise, tend to the ranch or the herd, a little bit of this repair a little bit of that repaint, flowers for the bees, good amounts of siesta, good amounts of fiesta, spring/rain/well water and fresh local nourishing food from better soils with no processed concoctions engineered for hyper-palatibilty..

(And to be sure: not all of them all of the time, sure there were all kinds of health issues rampant throughout the centuries but chiefly for those who couldn't follow such a tranquil pastoral life, the warriors the slaves the city-folks etc, sure --- just enough in the numerous lucky fertile peaceful not-overpopulated-or-overfarmed pockets of all continents)

Most of this above ends up echoing again and again throughout all the various seemingly-diverse "healthy living" fads and manifestos. Yeah it's a bit silly we need to label the fairly old-school natural and all-out mundane aspects of a conducive-to-human-health regimen "organic" or "fresh & regional" or "paleo/primal" or "intermittent fasting" (or take some obscure berry or seed from some remote forest tribe and blow it up as the next "super food"), but that's just how human memetics have always worked, since well before the days of the "yellow press", so .. so what =)

> Earlier generations would have laughed at that because they had mostly figured it out --- though not via studies, just over the millenia. Early to rise, tend to the ranch or the herd, a little bit of this repair a little bit of that repaint, flowers for the bees, good amounts of siesta, good amounts of fiesta, spring/rain/well water and fresh local nourishing food from better soils with no processed concoctions engineered for hyper-palatibilty..

Uh, yeah.

Get up for third shift at the mill or mine (sleep disruption increasing accidents). Breathe toxic fumes the entire time you're there. Lay on your back the entire shift while they roll boxcars over you for you to weld. Quitting time--shower and then stop in to local bar and drink until your back/side/whatever quits hurting so much. Head home, crash into bed, and maybe help with the gardening or livestock you are raising in order to not starve. Get terribly sick in your mid-fifties and die from something horrible before you reach 65.

Yeah, the previous generation had it soooooo figured out.

Uhh I covered that sort of stuff in the parenthesized disclaimer..

There were like 2-3 generations where that was the majority lifestyle. Most humans in all of history had an existence that more closely resembled the one you quoted.

Roughly 1850-1970 is 3 generations even if I classify a generation as 40 years instead of 20. It's roughly 6 generations if I classify them as 20.

And, I suspect most people wouldn't want to live in the world much prior to 1850. There was a fairly nice article where husband and wife historians attempted to live a colonial/pastoral lifestyle. The wife had a nervous breakdown because all she basically did was cook and clean, and the husband came home completely exhausted day in/day out.

Being "healthy" doesn't matter much if it takes all your energy to survive.

There was a reason why colonial America consumed so much alcohol ...

"Earlier generations would have laughed at that because they had mostly figured it out --- though not via studies, just over the millenia. Early to rise, tend to the ranch or the herd, a little bit of this repair a little bit of that repaint, flowers for the bees, good amounts of siesta, good amounts of fiesta, spring/rain/well water and fresh local nourishing food from better soils with no processed concoctions engineered for hyper-palatibilty.."

Yeah... or you know, be pregnant once every year or two and have lots of children, all ending with a real chance of death. Grind your own flour and hope you have enough food in the root cellar to last the winter. Slave away in the kitchen most days, and laundry takes all day - when you do it. Lose some of your children to polio or smallpox, cholera is more of a threat, and an infected cut can lead to death. All while also taking care of your mother-in-law. Oh, and I almost forgot - don't own property or have control of your own wages.

And it can be even worse if you are a minority, servant, or slave.

A 90's Aerosmith song goes, "There's something wrong with the world today, I don't know what it is..." I don't know either, but I've a few observations...

With regard to the "wellness" industry. Mostly it's a sham, but so too are many medical treatments. Women are particularly vulnerable to medical profiteering - I posted about this yesterday [1]...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14708472

  There’s something grotesque about this 
  industry’s emerging at the moment when the most 
  basic health care is still being denied to so 
  many in America and is at risk of being 
  snatched away from millions more.

People are focused on Wellness because they're not getting it from their doctors. Sometimes a conventional medical practitioner's diagnosis is helpful, but usually they miss the big picture.

I took lots of people to & from their doctor appointments. Sometimes all a person really needed was to feel safe, but their doctors couldn't prescribe that. So they'd go from doctor to doctor to doctor looking for answers, but never finding them.

  But what’s perhaps most striking about 
  wellness’s ascendancy is that it’s happening  
  because, in our increasingly bifurcated world, 
  even those who do have access to pretty good 
  (and sometimes quite excellent, if quite 
  expensive) traditional health care are left 
  feeling, nonetheless, incredibly unwell.

This section reminds me of one passenger in particular... She wanted help, and had a few resources, but her doctors only made her condition worse. Sometimes doctors do good work, sometimes they don't know when to stop. "Wellness" is for those who've given up on conventional medicine.

"Wellness" is for those who've given up on conventional medicine.

You mean, given up on medicine.

All this other stuff? It's not medicine. It's snake oil. Chicanery. Placebo wrapped up in meaningless ritual to make it "feel" real. It's the new iteration of numerology, tarot, psychic reading.

The only thing that it, in some cases, brings to the mix is empathy, something frequently missing in our overburdened medical system. And in that respect it has value.

But medicine? That it is not, unless you define "medicine" as anything that makes you feel better, in which case you've basically robbed the term of its meaning.

You must have missed this ProPublica piece:

When Evidence Says No, but Doctors Say Yes - https://www.propublica.org/article/when-evidence-says-no-but...

There's a slander against "alternative medicine" that goes something like, "What do you call alternative medicine that works? Medicine. " The inference is that Medicine adopts what's useful. If a herb is actually useful, the pharmaceutical industry will figure out what the active ingredient is and figure out how to synthesize it, etc.

My corollary to the slander is the truism: "What do you call medicine that doesn't work? Medicine. " The ProPublica story linked above says that heart stents [are now known to not be] helpful for anyone that's not actively experiencing a heart attack, but thousands get inserted every year anyways.

[edit - clarification [] above]

Why do you care about what doesn't work? If the things that work are in the set "Medicine", that's the only set we need to be concerned with.

Sure, it's worthwhile to try and figure out which medicine doesn't work, but we know for sure that anything non-medicine does, by definition, not work.

Except the range of possibilities isn't ['works', 'doesn't work']. Rather, it's ['works', 'no effect', 'harmful', 'works and is harmful at the same time'].

A banal example: proton pump inhibitor drugs used to treat acid reflux will, over very long timeframes, cause nutrient malabsorption resulting in more brittle bones. They also have what's called a rebound effect, where dropping them cold turkey leads to a huge jump in stomach acid production and worsening of symptoms. So while effective to reduce stomach acidity, they also have long-term negative effects and a sort of withdrawal that makes the original problem worse. It's a weird and complicated situation, and certainly not the most intense example.

Okay, sure, but again, the things that have "no effect" are not worth even mentioning at all. That is what the debate is about, not whether medicine that works is also harmful.

They are worth mentioning, because they are often expensive and take a lot of time. They are often uncomfortable or painful. It is not neutral.

> we know for sure that anything non-medicine does, by definition, not work.

We don't actually know that. That something is proven to work to the satisfaction of the FDA and the doctor's lobbies is too high a bar to say that anything failing to meet it does not work.

Many treatments that "work" either can't adequately be double-blind tested or have a status such that the current US regulatory climate makes it too hard to get them approved as treatments. For instance, treatments that are "medicine" in other countries (China, Japan, Russia...) but not yet accepted here. Treatments that can't be patented so it doesn't make economic sense to get them approved here. Treatments that probably work but are legally or ethically problematic for other reasons (eg, ketamine for depression, alcohol for social anxiety, or cigarettes for weight loss).

That doesn't change my point.

If new evidence comes to light that now says a treatment is ineffective, and doctors are still applying that treatment, that isn't medicine either. At best it's, again, placebo. At worst it's fraud and/or profiteering.

I am surprised a comment this correct to be down voted down on hn. I thought this place tried to be evidence based...

> Placebo wrapped up in meaningless ritual to make it "feel" real.

Hey, don't rain on placebos, the remarkable quality of the "placebo effect" is how well it's known and been shown to actually work =)

My theory is that it's because simply operating in the social hierarchy is sickening. There are many things that you want that are totally not under your control but under the control of other people often for no good reason. So it's best never ever to interact with the social hierarchy unless you absolutely have to and specifically for money. And even then force your own rules to get the money. Dave Chapelle is an excellent example of how to deal with the entertainment industry.

This article is a good example of how participating in the social hierarchy and letting them tell you what your needs are and how to behave is ludicrous. It's mostly just bullshit sold by leaders because of their esteemed status in the hierarchy.

In the past leaders sometimes deformed their skulls from childhood to differentiate themselves from the masses, this is an example of that same sort of behavior.

I think you have an interesting point, but I have no idea what you're saying. What would "deforming their own skulls" correspond to in modern society?

The high social classes to visualize the fact that they were different from the people they ruled deformed their own skulls. Or certain tribes deformed their own skulls to differentiate themselves from other tribes. It seems to be just some stupid arbitrary thing that they do to differentiate themselves. Sort of like wearing a bunch of rings around your neck to elongate it because it's beautiful.

That......in no way answered the question.

How does deforming your skulls correspond to modern society. In modern society we do the same thing that our leaders do, my point was humans have been doing this forever. It's stupid and arbitrary.

Snake oil has always been popular and profitable. All you need is a good story, some people to say it helped them when nothing else did, and a supply of anything at all to sell to cure what may or may not even ail you.

My little shitty theory for all those lupuses, celiacs and what not (auto-immunue system fuckups) is simple - it's just neural black box trained throughout evolution to keep the meat that we call "myself" together and avoiding disintegration in general. It works fine as long as it gets flow of input that it knows (was trained on) - from womb (that's pretty stable because there are berries that weird, new stuff doesn't pass through and you're getting broken down, simple form nutritions), then birth is probably more important event, oxytocin during labour triggers stuff that kicks off couple of things in your (baby) body (that's the first things we're messing with - scheduled cesarians (80% in brazil!) means this step is skipped together with vagina's bacterial flora that you're not covered with etc), then our immune system expects sucking on mother tits to get lots of feedback (when to sleep, first foreign bacterias travel from our mouth to moms nipples, mother's immune system responds with antibodies that we suck back and learn how to deal with - that's another thing that we're loosing a bit, after fashionable epidural shot to make birth less painful babies don't want to drink milk, mothers don't produce enough - we're on bottle/formula - step skipped). After that for couple of years our immune system was trained to live in filth on today standards - from licking everything (little rocks, dirty feet, sucking fingers covered with soil dirt - this is invaluable info for immune system, gets it's thresholds, what's bad and what just goes out 100% with shit and what not) - we're loosing this as well by living in hermetic, antibacterial wiped flats - immune system gets confused, there supposed to be things to fight against but it's all sterile, then first weird thing comes in, the immune system is like "oh shit, those are relatively huge foreign invaders, red alert!" and we get first allergies; immune system has memory of how to fight stuff, so it'll remember to have this allergic reaction next time as well; things that it could learn before from mother's immune system via breast/licking dirt around. Then we've got another change which is food that our parents (recursive) never ate (from aspartame to prozac), we're chronically feeding ourselves with mono diets (sugars via juices and others) that overload our organs (pancreas, type 2 diabetes; or gluten messing up gut walls) - those things are not bad in moderation when mixed with dozen of other things but if you feed your body with just that all the time for years, it gets fucked up... so, when in doubt, think "what my ancestors were doing". this applies to mental health and other things in life, just like taking naps at work are being rediscovered, funnily enough it's just what babies do at creche; too stressed or burnout? go to fucking nature and do nothing for few days. too tired? maybe move your ass a bit instead of sitting for 10 hours etc.

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