Wellness

While modern Western medicine primarily evolved as reactive treatment—interventions that happen in response to an ailment—other health traditions prescribe proactive engagement with the body, seeking to instill well-being by taking preventative measures before disease takes hold.

Historians trace the roots of preventative health as far back as 3000 BCE, with the practice of Ayurveda—a practice related to Hinduism that argues for individual approaches to nutrition, exercise, hygiene, and social health based on each person’s needs. Ayurveda holds that balancing these four factors prevents illness. Likewise, traditional Chinese medicine endorses a holistic approach to health (“History of Wellness.” Global Wellness Institute).

In the US, Dr. Halbert L. Dunn, coined the term “wellness” in the late 1950s. Dunn envisioned a shift away from treating poor health and instead actively taking steps to promote good health. He proposed consciously striving to better physical, emotional, and mental health daily (Blei, Daniela. “The False Promises of Wellness Culture.” JSTOR Daily, 2017). Dunn gave a series of 29 lectures on the subject, which were collected in his book High Level Wellness (1977). As Dunn’s ideas were increasingly promoted by physicians in the late 1970s, the first national Wellness Center and Wellness Conference were established, as was the first university campus wellness center at the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point (“History of Wellness”).

At first, wellness was the domain of a subculture considered niche and unusual by the mainstream. Adopters turned to Eastern philosophy and practices such as meditation and yoga, seeing themselves as countercultural resisters of consumerism and capitalism. However, as the 20th century drew to a close, “workplace wellness programs, the fitness and spa industries, and celebrity wellness and self-help experts [took] off—bringing wellness into the mainstream” (“History of Wellness”).

In the 21st century, the pursuit of wellness has exploded in popularity. By 2013, half of all US companies offered Workplace Wellness programs for employees (Mattke, Soren, et al. “Workplace Wellness Programs Study.” RAND Corporation, 2013). An industry of classes, foods, health products and other tools has skyrocketed, thanks in part to celebrity endorsement and promotion on social media. By 2015, wellness was a $3.7 trillion worldwide industry (Blei).

However, backlash has followed this dramatic rise. Critics of the wellness industry frequently point to it as cynically profit-centered. Studies of supposedly beneficial treatments offer mixed results, with equal evidence for and against the health claims the industry touts. In keeping with such skepticism, Hill’s novel satirizes this movement by exploring whether proactive wellness can be attained by placebo. Wellness calls into question the way the wellness industry promotes constant dissatisfaction with the status quo in its overlap with materialist consumerism. Hill argues that the industry’s insistence on the achievability of hyperbolic promises spurs the unhelpful delusion that humans can control more aspects of their lives than is truly possible.