Spa Business issue 2 2012 - Leisure Opportunities

editor’s letter
Th e wellness challenge
In mid-April, I went to
the excellent TEDMED
conference in Washington
DC and had a thought
provoking week hearing about the
future of health and medicine.
Although the majority of speakers
took the conventional view of disease
as something to be ‘cured’ with drugs
and surgery, there were also a number
of speakers who challenged this.
Mark Hyman from the Institute for
Functional Medicine argued that we should make a clear
distinction between conditions which can be prevented
or resolved by lifestyle change – such as obesity and
heart disease – and medical situations such as accidents
which require surgery and drug therapy.
He said we’ve reached a tipping point where there are
more obese people in the world than people who are
starving and that this problem can be most cheaply and
eff ectively dealt with through lifestyle change.
I’d always naïvely assumed the spa and wellness
industries and the medical sector share broadly the
same goal of a healthier world, however, I came away
with a diff erent impression. For drug companies and
some parts of the medical profession, it appears that
the optimal outcome is large numbers of people who
are well enough to stay alive for long periods of time,
but sick enough to need constant medication, so they’re
eff ectively being farmed for profi t.
And creating combinations of drugs can be even more
lucrative – one speaker explained there are diabetes
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Drug companies need large
numbers of people who
are well enough to stay
alive for long periods of
time, but sick enough to
need constant medication
drugs that cause heart problems and heart drugs that
cause diabetes – he referred to this as ‘pharmageddon’.
I’d always thought it was a lack of pharma development
which led to this happening, but the more sinister
explanation is that once you have a contraindication,
you’ve created a market for another product.
I came away with the view that wellness and
conventional medicine are in competition.
So what’s the answer? Firstly, to fi nd allies within the
medical world and to collaborate with them to build a
body of knowledge which proves that lifestyle change
works. Secondly, to work with the corporate health sector
because they have the same objectives. Th irdly, to work
with government health providers who are focused on
reducing costs and fourthly, and most importantly, to
educate consumers, so they understand they have the
power to remain healthy and to cure disease through
great lifestyle choices.
Liz Terry, editor twitter: @elizterry
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