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Allow me to make myself sound very dainty and attractive: Last year, I was diagnosed with inflammatory bowel disease. This was an unfortunate development, I decided, and so not in line with “brat summer.” I handled the news like any journalist might—with compulsive research and fact-checking. My fear directed me to Reddit threads and scientific studies, to new diet plans and workout regimens and supplement orders, until my unremitting quest for answers landed me in the Zoom office of a functional-medicine doctor, a woman who charged me a couple of hundred bucks to tell me that I should eat more boiled plantains.
My search for wellness had gone too far. I was spending money I didn’t have to try to fix an illness with origins I’d never understand, much less control. Yet I trust that I’m far from alone in this desire to feel good. Every year, the average American spends more than $6,000 on “wellness,” an imprecise category that includes both fads and legitimate endeavors, with offerings as varied as diagnostic technologies and protein popcorn. Across the world, wellness is a $6.3 trillion business—outpacing even the pharmaceutical industry—and Americans are by far the biggest spenders. Although some health issues require interventions or specialists (which can be exorbitantly expensive), the wellness industry tells Americans that no matter their condition—or lack thereof—there’s always some treatment they should be buying. There’s always more Googling and optimizing to be done.
Take the journalist Amy Larocca’s book, How to Be Well, which details her wellness-industry misadventures, including “gravity” colonic cleanses, $200-a-month prescription herbs, and $1,000 Goop events. In a recent Atlantic review of the book, the writer Sheila McClear observed how widespread the “wellness craze” has become, noting that “in a nation known for its relatively poor health, nearly everybody seems to be thinking about how to be healthy.”
Yet, like the human body’s frailty, America’s obsession with wellness is far from new. In our archives, I found a letter addressed to someone else facing an unsexy stomach ailment: “A Letter to a Dyspeptic,” published in 1859, includes some remarkably sassy advice from an anonymous writer to a 19th-century gentleman with indigestion. This writer is all tough love, unafraid to call the gentleman an “unfortunate individual,” a man of “ripe old age, possibly a little over-ripe, at thirty-five,” and, due to the fellow’s unique bathing habits, an “insane merman.”
The dyspeptic man had spent the past years suffering, quitting his business and doling out cash to questionable doctors and therapies, to little avail. “You are haunting water-cures, experimenting on life-pills, holding private conferences with medical electricians, and thinking of a trip to the Bermudas,” the author writes. But this search for a cure came at a high cost: “O mistaken economist! can you afford the cessation of labor and the ceaseless drugging and douching of your last few years?”
Any hyperfixation on wellness can be draining and futile; an endless search for answers to one’s ailments might be alluring, but “to seek health as you are now seeking it, regarding every new physician as if he were Pandora,” the writer warns, “is really rather unpromising.”
In lieu of expensive treatments, the writer advises that the dyspeptic man do three things: bathe, breathe, and exercise. (Another suggestion is to purchase “a year’s subscription to the ‘Atlantic Monthly,’” one of the “necessaries of life” for happiness—it seems we writers have never been above the shameless plug.) Notably, all of these (except the Atlantic subscription, starting at $79.99) are more or less free.
Written almost two centuries later, Larocca’s book ends on a similar note, championing the kind of health advice that doesn’t hurt your wallet. After her tiresome and expensive foray into the world of wellness, she “doesn’t recommend a single product, practice, or service, although she does name one tip that helped her,” McClear notes. “It’s a simple breathing exercise. And it’s free.”
America’s wellness methods have changed over time—sometimes evolving for the better. (The 1859 letter, for instance, details how some philosophers believed in being as sedentary as possible because “trees lived longer than men because they never stirred from their places.”) Even so, as skyrocketing costs and medical mistrust plague American health care, the wellness industry churns out a carousel of treatments, touting sweeping benefits that are often dubious at best. Compared with the many big promises that “gravity” colonics and supplement companies might make, most health tips that have stood the test of time are far more quotidian: sleep, exercise, breathe. Their simplicity can be both healing and accessible. The body has “power and beauty,” the anonymous writer noted more than a century ago, “when we consent to give it a fair chance.”
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